Last night thousands of Camping’s followers went to bed disappointed and confused. Their pride bubbles deflated rather quickly when 6:01 came. This morning, however, millions of evangelicals woke up not with rapture fever, but with a bad case of pride. We woke up this morning praying, “Lord, I thank you I am not like other men. I don’t follow embarrassing gurus. I have a nice and respectable millennial position. I don’t cause you embarrassment on the national news, giving the devil room to laugh” and of course, the devil laughs, roars in fact, his plan a success.http://rcsprouljunior.blogspot.com/2011/05/humility-in-name-of-love_6237.html
It is not my desire to make light of Camping’s errors. I want neither to mock them nor to minimize them. They are egregious, his views on the church most egregious of all. It is my desire, however, to own my sin, to guard against my own temptation more than to point and laugh at others. It is my desire daily to hope that Jesus would come back, and that He would find me not pointing and laughing at others, not either looking up to heaven in expectation, but looking to the ground in humility, beating my breast and praying, “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.”
These rubes are not the back bone of our country, they are uneducated, racist, xenophobic, sexist, homophobic, theocratic, inbred halfwits who should be disenfranchised and cared for as one would care for a child. They should not be allowed to run their own police forces or their local governments. Those should be handled by people who have some sense. Let the peasants have their Jesus and their meth, but for god's sake stop acting like they have any place in a functioning democracy.Certainly, you can see a difference between these two statements. The former is taking issue with an idea, and doing so in a way that isn't derogatory to anyone. The latter is just ugliness.
For both liberal[-sceptical] cynics and religious fundamentalists, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while sceptical cynics mock them. No wonder that religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science. For them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge. The occurrence of the term 'science' in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge. [...] This is what we can learn from Lacan about the rise of religious fundamentalism: its true danger does not reside in its threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in its threat to authentic belief itself.(My interpolation in the first line of the above quote is for clarification and comes from an earlier point in the longer quotation linked above.)
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;posted by empath at 12:20 PM on May 27, 2011
he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in fulfillment of the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 5:09 PM on May 24, 2011 [2 favorites]