I just came across this old TV commercial. About five seconds into it, I felt my brain starting fizzing over how many things in it were just … wrong. Be afraid.
25 Feb
Christian Teens and Gay Teens: It’s in the Cards
Yesterday I received an email from Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a fellow blogger on the Christian website Crosswalk.com. Last year Dr. Throckmorton founded an initiative called “The Golden Rule Pledge.”
This April 16th, students in middle schools through colleges across the country will be participating in the 14th annual Day of Silence, wherein they will not only stop talking for the day, but will also be handing out cards reading: Continue reading
24 Feb
How To Be Happily Unemployed
- This guy’s starting to get the hang of it
Have you recently lost your job? Fear not: It happens to everyone. You might recall that Albert Einstein, for instance, was once fired from his job as a patent clerk because he kept changing the time on all the clocks in the office. And look how he turned out! Today, Einstein’s brain is pickled in a jar, so that future scientists might one day figure out what they’re supposed to do with a pickled brain in a jar. Continue reading
23 Feb
Once Upon Atone
By way of explaining the atonement I yesterday posted Christ and Your Guilt. To that micro-treatment of the Atonement I would now like to add this macro-look at it.
The Christian doctrine of atonement amounts to this dynamic: People sin. They can’t help it. They always have; they always will. It’s simply in people’s nature to sin. (For more, see my “Born Into Sin” Just Means Born, Period.)
Having it be the nature of every human being to not only sin, but to in fact be defined by their sinful nature, ends up creating for each and every one of us, and definitely for the human race as a whole, a great, big, vast amount of Bad Karma.
Like … unimaginable amounts of it. Universes of it.
And bad karma is … well, very bad. Continue reading
22 Feb
Christ and Your Guilt
Perhaps due to it being Lent, I’ve recently received a few emails from people asking me to explain what the Atonement of Christ is—what exactly it means, basically. So:
The Atonement (think “at-one-ment,” because it’s about reconciling yourself to God) refers to the act by which Christ, who was God incarnated as a man, absorbed into himself the entirety of the cost—all of the negative karma, if you will—of everything bad that any person ever had or would do—and then destroyed it by allowing the body which held it to be destroyed.
God did that because he loves us, and so above all desires our happiness. And what most often keeps us from being happy? What’s the number one thing that every day, in a million little ways, interferes with our feeling truly pleased with who we are and how we live? Continue reading
20 Feb
My (Unpublished!) Interview with Writer’s Digest
About three months after my book Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang, came out, Writer’s Digest magazine contacted me for an interview. By way of planning for a special “Spirituality” issue of the magazine, they had asked their readers to recommend a book on the topic. A lot of people apparently named Penguins, and that’s why they contacted me. Continue reading
19 Feb
Can the Christian and Muslim Both Be Right?
In yesterday’s Religious Tolerance: Lack of Conviction, or World’s Only Hope? I asserted that ultimately the only hope for mankind is if everyone who fervently believes in their religion “adheres to their belief the idea that just because something is right for them doesn’t mean it must be right for everyone else.”
This idea—that the Christian must admit that the Muslim is every bit as happy and spiritually fulfilled in his faith as he is in his (and visa-versa)—is typically anathema to both the Christian and the Muslim. Continue reading
18 Feb
Religious Tolerance: Lack of Conviction, or World’s Only Hope?
In the course of the (really interesting) reader responses to yesterday’s Does God REALLY Answer My Questions? came this comment, from self-proclaimed “model agnostic” Brian Shields (whose website is here, and whose splendid photographs of my old stomping grounds, San Francisco, are here):
“While God talking to John Shore seems benign to me (or even hilarious in [John's book] “Penguins, Pain …”) there are some people who KNOW God is talking to them and telling them to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. It seems to me the world would be a better, safer, and dare I say it, more godly place if fewer people KNEW God was talking to them and more were unsure about the source of the message and the necessity to act upon it.” Continue reading
17 Feb
Does God REALLY Answer My Questions?
By way of commenting on yesterday’s I Don’t Let Go; I Don’t Let God, a reader named Claudia wrote in to ask: “What I really want to know is: If you do ask Him something, does He answer? I’m not talking big-special-effects-budget, voice-from-the-sky type of answer. Someone once described it as ‘a still small voice’ (and yes, I do know that comes out of the Bible). Really? Is God really there, and does He really answer, even if only in your own heart/mind? The possibility is astounding to me.” Continue reading
16 Feb
I Don’t Let Go; I Don’t Let God
Most of we Christians understand “Let go and let God” as our #1 goal in life. We believe that the quality of our lives will be determined by the degree to which we are able to substitute God’s will for our own.
And it sounds so easy! “Let go and let God” makes it seem like substituting God’s will for our own is as easy as changing from our work clothes into our bathrobe. Continue reading
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