Thursday, November 23, 2006

All together now..

I read this article with a tad bit of disappointment, but at the same time, a bit of excitement: at least they are trying to work together to find the common ground that they have lost. Growing up in a family with both Angelicans and Catholics, it would be nice for me to see the two churches unite. After all, I believe that little more than a name and a few theological differances seperate the two.

For me, I think that in the end, in order for the church to survive and be relevant it will have to be united under one banner anyways. I am glad that they also see that too, and are working towards those goals.

It should be interesting to see how the same-sex marriage, female preists, and other issues get dealt with. It could signify whether the churches choose to become more progressive or not.
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006

So, apparently, we're in the running for best religious blog..

After being nominated, it appears we've made it to the second round, which is pretty cool. As one of the writers here I would like to thank all that voted for us, and hopefully we can take it - for the glory of God, no doubt.

All this makes me believe that intellegent Christianity will prevail over blind faith Christianity. When we started the site, it was part of a discussion that focused on a paper that I had wrote in my teens that I meant to complete. I called it 'The Christian Aethist'. The notion behind it was that Christians could be intellegently motivatived, but spiritually enlightened. Far too common nowadays, is the assumption that in order to be a good Christian you must check your brain at the door. Christ never taught us that, nor ever encouraged that, and I believe as Christians we need to get back to that - or risk becoming irrelevant.

Anyways, I'm getting too damn serious when I'm feeling this good.. so I'll stop there, and wish you all a good one. Thanks again, and I look forward to posting some more blogs for you to read and comment on.

Shawn
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Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The Irrelevancy of Denominations

Denominations are something that has existed with Christianity for a while now.. With the breaking off of the Catholic church by the Lutherans and the Protestant reformation that followed, it seems like the last twenty years has seen a introduction of a new branch of Christianity custom tailored for your viewpoints. But lately, something has beginning to happen, and it was interesting to see it unfold: Angelicans are talking with Catholics, even holding services together sometimes, United is coming together with Methodists and Presprebtrain, and Bapists and Evanglicals are.. well, I'm not sure about that department.. but you get the hint. Part of this harkens ( sorry about that, I just wanted an excuse to use the word harkens ) back to the day, in which we thought that the end times would come with the merging of churches as one (Rev ? Still looking into this) body of Christ.

Personally, as a Christian, I have come to see Denominations much in the same way I see name brands like: Levis, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Roots, etc because it has less to do with Christ's intentions (personally I think he's just happy we're good Christians), and more to do with marketing and branding. When we start to treat our values like commodities on a open market, something is terribly wrong. I think this is why people have been moving towards this interdenominational churches which are little more than some halls with people praying. People want to get back to the value part of Christianity, and away from the political/economical aspect of it. Church shouldn't be some fancy shirt you wear because you're cool.

Another reason why I think interdenominations are catching on is obvious: people really aren't that caught up in the details, and don't care if Joe sitting beside them thinks that no meat other than fish should be eaten on Friday. They're there to pray, to meet other people who believe in God, and find common ground, not to look for what is differant.

Finally, I find most interdenominational churches are informal. Which is a nice change of pace. Sometimes it's nice to have structure, and that's why I will go to an Angelican or a Catholic service. But other times, it's nice just to hear somebody say like they see it. Kinda like Christ did.
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Tuesday, November 14, 2006

The Reverend Reads the Papers

(The reverend is me. My church is here.)

After one more tedious conversation on an evangelical Internet forum about the anti-Christian leftist slant of the mainstream media, I signed off and, as I do several days per week, trudged down to the university cafeteria to eat a sampling of roast beef, fish, or whatever other mass-produced delicacy the administrators of the residence communion choose to bless us with on a daily basis. As usual, I also purchased a newspaper to peruse the salacious scandals and exciting events which happened yesterday before press time. My newspaper today was the Toronto Star, without argument the farthest left of the major Canadian print media (the Globe & Mail defines the centre, and the National Post is somewhere off to the right). I expected to be besieged by the satanic forces of secular humanism upon turning over simply to the second page, so I thought about spending several hours in prayer in advance, and perhaps reviewing my favourite psalm (Psalm 137:9, perhaps, which is another banner verse from the Rev. Dave's Family Friendly Bible, Uncensored Edition®).

I was not to be disappointed. Turning over the front page (which was on the Toronto municipal election results and therefore of no interest to me), I was greeted with a glaring headline: VOICE OF ARAB WORLD GOES GLOBAL. Oh, dear, the secular humanists have weakened our democracy again by letting in the propaganda of... Al Jazeera? Ah, well. At least it's as balanced as Fox News is. And it was odd to hear it was "going global," since Al-Jazeerah was approved to compete for cable licensing in Canada by the CRTC a year or two ago, and presumably was elsewhere as well. Reading on, it turns out that "going global" actually means that it's developing an English-language channel. How typical of the leftist MSM (which is a peppy acronym for "mainstream media," the secular humanists that hound us Christians) to make such an egotistical assumption.

Turning a few more pages, I reach the section devoted to the ongoing disaster we are reconstructing in Afghanistan, and am greeted by the headline "Taliban regime ousted five years ago." Geez. I'd heard that the print media was falling behind their electronic brethren, but I hadn't realized things had got so bad down in the newsrooms.

Then it's on to the editorial pages, where presumably I will be bombarded by the full force of the secular humanist left, since it no longer has to be shrouded in pretentious journalistic objectivity as it does on the so-called "news" pages. You can imagine my horror, therefore, when I notice that the leading column for the day is by two of Toronto's leading Anglicans, condemning both the federal and provincial governments for their senseless cuts to low-cost housing (most of which is the result of a spat between the two levels of government over fund redistribution disputes, for which the lowest of the poor are bearing most of the pain), at a time when hundreds of people die in Toronto alone because the rest of this supposedly grand nation could not bother to give them shelter and a little food.

The cynical part of me observes that when a downtown Anglican preacher condemns the suffering of the poor, he's probably speaking as much to the interests of his core constituency as is the Baptist preacher in the suburbs when he condemns the suffering of his flock at the hands of the encroaching gay invaders. Or perhaps that's not the cynical part: perhaps the latter simply has the wrong constituency and the wrong interests at heart. Perhaps it should matter more to the church that people suffer needlessly in our ridiculously wealthy country than that some homosexuals (most of whom probably aren't members of the church anyways, since we've driven them out by now) who want government recognition of their relationship. Maybe Christians who are obsessed with the "sanctity of the institution of marriage" should be more concerned about the fact that the secular government seems to hold the keys to that "institution" at all, rather than about whom that government grants it to.

Maybe it also means that this supposed leftist mainstream is neither as anti-Christian nor as misguided as some like to think. The fact that the left is convinced the media has a right-wing bias and the right is convinced that the media has a left-wing bias might mean that the media is actually less biased than either side wants to admit.
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Sunday, November 05, 2006

Prophets for Profit

It was a bad week in American Christendom. First, a male prostitute in Colorado claimed that evangelical preacher and head of New Life Church Ted Haggard had paid him for a series of... um... appointments over the past several years. To add some fuel to the fire, it also surfaced - apparently from the same source - that Haggard had also purchased crystal meth. Just a few days later, another prominent evangelical, creationist Kent Hovind, was convicted of tax fraud in Florida after failing to pay about $850 000 in employee taxes at his creationist theme park, where, among other things, he provides evidence that dinosaurs and humans once walked the earth together. (Hovind's entertaining if scientifically dubious theory of creation is that Noah boarded his ark just before an ice meteor crashed into the earth, causing a shower of "super-cold snow" which buried the mammoths, shattered the canopy which protected the earth from the water beneath the crust, and resulted in an ice age lasting several hundred years.)

This isn't Hovind's first legal trouble, though presumably it is the most serious (we haven't heard what the sentences will be yet for either him or his wife, who was also convicted of 44 counts). In 2002, he was charged with assault by his former secretary, but the charges were dropped. The same year, he was charged with several local regulation violations at his Dinosaur Adventure Land (I'm sorry; I have to keep mentioning this park because it's just such an amusing concept). Hovind lost most of these cases and paid moderately small fines (but spent tens of thousands in legal expenses to protect his dinosaur-human propaganda center). In 1996, he tried to file for bankruptcy but was found to have lied about his possessions and income (he claimed that as a minister, everything he had belonged to God and therefore he was not subject to the American tax system). Two years later, he claimed to revoke all signatures he had ever written on government documents on the grounds they had been signed under duress. In 2002 he failed to pay his taxes again, and this time went on the offensive by suing the IRS for harassment. In 2004, they raided his home to confiscate financial records, eventually leading to his current difficulties. Apparently Hovind forgot about the "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" part when he was busy taking his Bible so literally that he convinced himself that mammoths were all buried standing up by a massive wave of cold, hard snow.

Haggard seems to have had a cleaner record, at least up to the present. He denied all of the allegations, and the prostitute subsequently failed a polygraph test he had volunteered for to verify the claims (although the administrator noted that the man was stressed and had not recently eaten or slept). However, Haggard resigned anyways, on the grounds that he would "seek both spiritual advice and guidance" while an "overseer process" could investigate the claims "with integrity." Senior officials from his mega-church promptly told the local TV that he had admitted to some of Jones's claims, and wrote to their parshioners that Haggard "confessed to the overseers that some of the accusations against him are true." The next day, Haggard admitted that he had purchased crystal meth but claimed he had only received a massage from Jones. To paraphrase Clinton, "I did not have sex with that man!" The overseer board concluded shortly afterwards that "our investigation... prove[s] without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conoduct," and they affirmed his removal from his job.

From our perspective outside the fishbowl, it seems almost inevitable that many major Christian leaders will be arrested for some sort of behaviour that they themselves have railed against as deviant. During the 1980s, there was a mass of televangelists exposed as in some way sinful - Swaggart screwed a prostitute, Bakker screwed his secretary, and Roberts, Whittington, and others ended up out of a job for various suspicions of fraud. Peter Popoff, distributor of miracle spring water (i.e. non-Catholic holy water) which apparently comes from Chernobyl (yum... radioactive water), was revealed to perform his miracles via planted audience members and an in-ear radio receiver through which he could hear prompts from his watchers in the crowd... I mean, from the Holy Spirit of God, of course.

I'm not really qualified to judge whether the entire Christian mass preaching industry is riddled with corruption or not, although certainly large sections of it are. I've just acquired an old documentary from the 1970s on the career of Marjoe Gortner, a travelling preacher of the time who spent six months preaching and the next six months smoking pot with his friends in San Francisco (he explained on his tours that he raised money for six months and then spent six months ministering to the youth and drug addicts of the inner city). He eventually decided he could no longer live with this tactic, but rather than just resign or come clean in a public press conference the way most would today, he decided to take a film crew along for his last revival tour. The documentary alternates between scenes of wild Christian merriment in revival tents and charismatic churches, and footage of Gortner back in the hotel explaining to the film crew the various aspects of his scam. (Among other things, Gortner explains how to prophecize, speak in tongues, and administer various other miracles.)

The fact that these individuals turn out to be grossly corrupt and in it for the money isn't really the part that disturbs me. People in the big church business are entrepeneurs, and like people in any other business, they're going where the money is. Issues of personal morality are not particularly relevant to this. Those who are genuinely honest, and there are probably at least a few, doubtless aren't having the same exciting sexual adventures, but because we never hear news like "Billy Graham did not have an affair this week" (for the simple fact that it's a non-event), we probably get a skewed picture of what's going on. Not every Republican congressman is attracted to his teen-aged interns, but occasionally one is, and the rest get tarred for it. (Of course, if they weren't so judgemental in the first place, it wouldn't be such big news that they were guilty of the same things they condemned others for. Perhaps this is one of the reasons the Bible says we should not judge others.) The rush to condemn the particular individuals involved can be a little unseemly too sometimes. The church either rallies around people they think could be innocent, or shoves out someone they realize is guilty, as though they're worried that he'll contaminate them if he's not cast out fast enough. A former pastor of mine used to say that the Christian army was the only one to shoot its own wounded. A few months after I met him, we shot him, too. The pursuit of collective holiness apparently requires that individuals occasionally be sacrificed for the greater good.
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