Evangelical Realism

Pope in Paris condemns love of money, power.

It’s like a scene from an old B-grade black-and white horror flick: Jesus is walking down some dank alleyway in Jerusalem and carelessly bumps into an old gypsy woman, knocking her in the mud and muck, and then thoughtlessly laughing at her misfortune. Her deepset eyes blaze, and she scowls at him. “A curse upon you,” she mutters. “From now on, your followers and supporters will be unable to accuse their critics of any fault or fallacy without being guilty of the same thing themselves.” He, like all B-grade movie heroes, doesn’t take her seriously until her curse starts coming true. Only then does he realize, to his horror, that the curse is inexorable, inescapable, and infallible.

I’m not the only person to see this curse in action. PZ Myers has a post about a reporter, in Salon no less, who falls prey to the old gypsy’s revenge. According to the reporter,

Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers.

Having accused Myers of excoriating straw men and women, he then goes on to attack a bizarre version of Myers’ views which he seems to have defined by taking the opposite of whatever Myers actually said, and calling it “what he really means.”

And in the background, thin and distance, you can almost hear a gleeful cackle.

Obama is not the only guy claiming that America is no longer a Christian nation. According to the World Net Daily, a coalition of Christian organizations is saying the same thing. Unlike Obama, however, the Christian groups have a foolproof plan to change this situation.

A blanket of prayer for America is being proposed for Sept. 11, 2008, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, because it no longer is the Christian nation it once was, according to a coalition of organizations.

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I’ve mentioned JP Holding’s cartoon-style apologetics before, but there’s so much good stuff there I might have to make this a regular feature. As a preview of today’s episode, here’s Holding lecturing “Dumplin’ Dumbash” on how name-calling means you’re a loser.

As a matter of fact, Dumbash, it does settle it, and calling the text and its authors names (”Bronze Age,” “superstitious,” “unbelieving”) just shows how inept you are at providing an actual answer.

I may have to revise my opinion of Holding’s grasp of the art of parody.

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State Representative Darryl Metcalfe, a staunch Republican and proud supporter of the Religious Right, has made a lot of people happy with his ongoing campaign to defend his part of the world from liberals, homosexuals, and immigrants. And at least one church wants to give him a Christian Soldier award for his meritorious service on behalf of their common cause. There’s just one problem: Metcalf doesn’t want it.

State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe issued a statement on Thursday publicly renouncing his nomination for the Christian Soldier award from the Christian Nation-Community of Christ Church.

The Butler County Republican also sent a letter to the group, telling its leaders to stop using his name to publicize a rally planned for August at the Adams Township Community Park.

The problem?

In his statement, Metcalfe said the organization sent him letters claiming it was affiliated with the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

“As an Army veteran who had the privilege and honor of serving the United States alongside extremely dedicated men and women of all races, religions and national ancestries, I will not allow my office or my name to be compromised,” Metcalfe wrote in his letter to the Church.

He undoubtedly has served alongside gays and immigrants too, though this doesn’t stop him from promoting laws designed to discriminate against both groups. So it’s not that his goals are really so dissimilar from the Christian Nation’s. It’s just that those darn white supremacists are an embarrassment to the Christian supremacists. “Keep your mouth shut, guys, you’re gonna blow my cover.” And send those campaign contributions anonymously, please.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, JP Holding, of Tekton Apologetics Ministries, posted an attempted parody of my blog here. Apparently, he’s not too clear on what real parody looks like, and I did give some thought to making a parody site of my own, by way of illustration. I decided not to, however. In the first place, it’s too easy. (I mean, come on, I’m being mocked by a site that sounds and acts like “ticked-eunuchs.com”? Word.) But secondly, I think it would be both more useful and more enjoyable to confront his theological arguments directly.

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Check this out. The Tekton Apologetics Ministries guy has finally decided to “address” some of the comments I’ve made about stuff on his web site.

Not long ago I discovered yet another site by a pissant Skeptic with zero credentials and no inclination to use any sort of Biblical scholarship. In fact, it seems that his most advanced source is stuff like Strobel. Not that there’s anything wrong with Strobel: As I always say, his stuff is good “gateway” material. But as is typical, our man here — who I’ll call Dumplin’ Dumbash — seems to think that making a few cutie-pie comments is enough to do the job.

What is it with Christians and this compulsion to commit the same “sins” they accuse me of, in the very act of accusing me of them? Cutie-pie comments indeed!

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As the saying goes, I’ve got good news and bad news. It doesn’t matter which you want first because it’s the same news either way: The Tribulation has already begun.

All the signs of the start of the period called The Tribulation — predicted in the Bible as a seven-year period before the return of Jesus the Christ — have already occurred. This is only part of the research that I’ve uncovered recently while working on a new book…

The original working title was Are We Already in the End Times?, but I recently changed the title from a question to a statement. The new title is Tribulation: 2008.

The writer is Tom Kovach, columnist at renewamerica.us. The bad news is that, according to Kovach, we’ve all been Left Behind, including the True Believers (who, as it turns out, have sadly misinterpreted certain Bible verses about the order of End Time events). The “good news,” of course, is that this means Jesus will return in the year 2015, and we’ll have a thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity. Right?

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BBC News is reporting that gang violence is about to drop precipitously. Or, well, at least, that’s what we can look forward to. The report states that the Brits have gotten so sick of the gangs that they’ve finally done something about it. They’ve asked God to stop it.

More than 6,000 Christians have met for an evening of prayer focusing on gang crime in Greater Manchester.

Police chiefs, community leaders and politicians attended the event at Manchester Velodrome, organised by church group City Links.

They were asked to pray for police forces and the reduction of gang crime.

…Chief Superintendent Neil Wain [said] “…By working and praying together to reduce crime and disorder we not only change the physical circumstances that affect people’s everyday lives but we change the spiritual circumstances.

“As a police officer and a Christian I know that this work can and will impact on our communities.”

Just keep watching those crime rate charts: the gang violence rate is going to plunge dramatically any minute now.

…

Aaaaannnnnny minute now….

…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnny minute….

…

So I’m driving in to work this morning, and I pass by this church, and on the sign out front it says “God is like Alka-Seltzer: try Him, you’ll like Him.” And my first thought is, “Wait, that’s not right. ‘Try it, you’ll like it’ isn’t the Alka-Seltzer slogan.” But then I remember The Commercial. It was pretty popular a few years back (ok, maybe a few decades back), and it went something like this:

…So he says to me, “Try it, you’ll like it.” I says, “No thank you, I don’t wanna try it.”

So he says to me, “Try it, you’ll like it!” I says, “No thank you, I don’t wanna try it.”

So he says to me, “TRY it, you’ll LIKE it!” So I tried it.

I didn’t like it. It gave me acid indigestion and heartburn.

Yep, that’s God all right.