Monk

These Christian-fundamentalist yahoo statements be Congressman Paul Broun of Georgia have been buzzing around the Internet:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior ... What I’ve come to learn is that [the Bible is] the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually, how to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all of public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason as your congressman I hold the holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I will continue to do that.

Andrew Sullivan makes an interesting point:

Of course, Broun is not stupid. He has an M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia and a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Georgia at Athens. He's on the House Committee on Science and Technology and chairs of one of its subcommittees on investigations. Fundamentalism is not about being dumb; it is an act of will to over-ride reality with totalist faith, so that nothing is left unresolved and everything can be explained by a single text, or a single religious leader. It is, in some ways, a neurotic response by many educated, intelligent people to live their lives according to something that cannot admit uncertainty or doubt.

It's religion fused with the the totalist claims of modern political ideology.

I marvel that I had not heard of this Broun character before, but we have more than our share of this type. You would have to go to a country such as Afghanistan to find as much religious radicalism as you can find in America. No wonder we are behind the rest of the developed world.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

Ah, another poem on Adam and Eve and the fall, this one titled "The Loneliness of God".

( Read more... )

As the French playwright Jean Anouilh said, 'Beauty is one of the few things in the world that do not lead to doubt about God.' The Church intuits that immediately. When we’re in the presence of something beautiful — an act of forgiveness, a newborn baby, a sunset — beauty wounds us. It has a visceral effect on us that is delightful, that increases our humanity. Beauty also reveals to us that there is something more to the world and something more to beauty than the beautiful thing itself. It leads to contemplation. That contemplation consists of wondering at where the beauty came from.

-- Father Peter Cameron

Of course, beauty also carries with it that exquisite tinge of pain that comes with an appreciation for its transience, its ephemeral nature, which is rather like life itself.

C. S. Lewis believed in the literal Adam and Eve story and did not accept Darwin's idea of natural selection. That surprises me. I presumed he was devout, but I would not have bet that he was such a fundamentalist.

(ChristianPost.com)

It's been a while since we have had some Jesus news, since my last bout of disenchantment with Christianity. But this is a little exciting.


_ _ _

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ”

The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”

The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

[...]

Even with many questions unsettled, the discovery could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and whether he had a female disciple. These debates date to the early centuries of Christianity, scholars say. But they are relevant today, when global Christianity is roiling over the place of women in ministry and the boundaries of marriage.

The discussion is particularly animated in the Roman Catholic Church, where despite calls for change, the Vatican has reiterated the teaching that the priesthood cannot be opened to women and married men because of the model set by Jesus.

-- Laurie Goodstein at The New York Times

"I have a job to do as president, and that does not involve convincing folks that my faith in Jesus is legitimate and real. I do my best to live out my faith, and to stay in the Word, and to make my life look more like His. What I can do is just keep on following Him, and serve others—trying to make folks’ lives a little better using this humbling position that I hold."

-- President Barack H. Obama

It is interesting to see this kind of Christian heat in an advanced nation, isn't it? I cannot help chuckling in the thought that it is a shame he did not close his statement with, "At least I'm not a Mormon."

It's been a while since we got something from Pat Robertson. Sometimes I think he has died, but maybe the media is getting better at ignoring him. For myself, I love the snappy and striking quote and can ill resist him.


_ _ _

During Thursday’s edition of The 700 Club co-host Kristi Watts read a letter from a woman who wanted to know why men stopped dating her when they learned that she had adopted three daughters from three different countries.

“Can I answer?” Watts asked. “I was going to say because they’re dogs. … That’s just wrong on every level.”

“No, it’s not wrong,” Robertson disagreed. “A man doesn’t want to take on the United Nations, and this woman’s got all these various children and blended family. What is it?”

The TV preacher then told a story about his “dear friend” who had adopted a son with brain damage and the boy “grew up weird.”

“You just never know what’s been done to a child before you get that child,” he explained. “What kind of sexual abuse, what kind of cruelty, what kind of food deprivation, etc., etc., etc.”

“So, you’re not a dog because you don’t want to take on that responsibility,” Robertson added. “You don’t have to take on somebody else’s problems.”

“OK, let’s get to the next question. I’m in trouble.”

-- News-LJ

RAMAT GAN, Israel (AP) — For the past 30 years, Israeli Judaic scholar Menachem Cohen has been on a mission of biblical proportions: Correcting all known textual errors in Jewish scripture to produce a truly definitive edition of the Old Testament.

His edits, focusing primarily on grammatical blemishes and an intricate set of biblical symbols, mark the first major overhaul of the Hebrew Bible in nearly 500 years.

[...]

Cohen said unity and accuracy were of particular importance to distinguish the sacred Jewish text from that used by those sects that broke away from Judaism, namely Christians and Samaritans.

-- Aron Heller at The Times of Israel

Personally, I think my Bible-buying days are behind me, but I guess this is good to know.

Before the Jews of Hungary were emancipated in the 19th century, they were not permitted to own land. By the end of the century, they were on their way to owning fully one-fifth of Hungary's large estates and were hugely successful in business and the arts. The Jews of Germany had a similar history. They comprised many if not most of the country's lawyers, doctors, composers, playwrights and scientists, and were so astonishingly successful in business that while they were just 1 percent of the population, they were 31 percent of the richest families. What did it? Was it nature (Jews were smarter) or nurture (Jews had a certain culture)? Here's my answer: I don't know.

-- Roger Cohen of The Washington Post

Here's my answer: probably both. Myself being neither especially smart nor well-cultured, I won't pretend to be able to give a good argument for the position. Just saying. It is a provocative question. In my more Christian moods, I have even thought that their intellectual gifts could be taken as a strong indication that the Jews are indeed the Chosen People of God.