be right back

Love it, David!

BW, he wouldn’t draw one because it is safe to ridicule Christianity, but not Mohammed. It is very simple. We all ourselves, might think twice about making a Mohammed cartoon, seeing what happens when someone does. — But we all have now direct experiences with people from all places of all religions and walks of life. He may have limited himself diligently to Christianity, all along but that does not make ridicule not ridicule, and does not make it fair either.

I had not realized until hearing a recent NPR story how many ways there are to understand the concept of “free speech”. Yes, it was ignorant of me to not know about this sooner. In some countries, for example, one may be able to speak freely about many topics, for example, but it may not be legal to say anything that is perceived as being critical of the government, or perhaps it is the critiquing of a specific religion that is out of the bounds of what is considered “free speech” by the law of the land.

It is safe to make any commentary on Christianity one would like to, at least safe in terms of the law of the U.S., and certainly this is the faith tradition with which this particular cartoonist has the greatest amount of direct experience.

Individuals may interpret these cartoons in different ways, may have their feelings hurt by them, may disagree with them, may be offended by them, may like them, recognize whatever truth is to be found in them, may chuckle at them. In any case, none of these reactions, fortunately, restricts the cartoonist’s right to free expression (which is also part of his livelihood, in a lot of cases).

My $.02 is that if the religion itself is what we think is holy, we’re missing the mark by a large margin.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/11/26/rex-murphy-what-the-tolerant-must-tolerate/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Excuse me, I’m roasting turkey.

NP, the question whether Mary was a virgin or a slut (see link above) is also a 2000 year old question.

Why the dichotomy of whether Mary was a virgin or a slut? I believe it’s possible to be neither…

Agreed Helen. False dichotomies seem to abound in the worldview of firm exclamation marks.

“The “imminent” return of Christ is only a big question for those who want to lambaste the faith.”

This statement is 100% false Brigitte. I have absolutely NO desire to “lambaste the faith”. This type of generality is utter nonsense.

You claim that “Paul dealt with it” and yet Paul’s own words indicate a man who was convinced that Jesus’ return was going to happen so soon that it was pointless to even marry if one was single. I am very glad I did NOT heed Paul’s advice on the imminence of Christ’s return.

Interesting quote from Paula Frederickson….

“If we take Jesus of Nazareth as the starting point for Christianity, Christianity is apocalyptic in its origin. If we take Paul’s letters as the starting point of the New Testament, then the earliest textual level, the kernel, if you will, of the New Testament collection is apocalyptic. If we take the New Testament canon as beginning with Matthew, but ending with Apocalypse, then the entire New Testament canon is apocalyptic. In other words, apocalypticism is Christianity. That’s what distinguishes it from other forms of Judaism in the first and second centuries. Apocalypticism is normative. … It’s a perpetual possibility within Christianity itself. If you think of the shape of the Christian story, Jesus doesn’t only come once. He was crucified the first time he came. He has to come back a second time to finish what he started. This is the point that Paul makes in First Corinthians 15. That the Kingdom hasn’t been established until Christ comes back. … So if you will, in the Christian idea of history, as opposed to the Jewish idea of history, which is its foundation, the church lives in this charged period between two poles of the First and Second Coming, so this idea of the Second Coming is intrinsic to the idea of Jesus Christ as a universal savior. And in that sense, it’s available constantly. In antiquity in particular, the vivid belief in a Second Coming was traditional Christianity. It seems otherwise to us, because Christianity had another fifteen centuries to develop. When I was being trained for my first communion, way back in the 1950s, I certainly wasn’t taught to stay up late at night waiting for Jesus to come back. … And certainly many of my friends who are professional theologians, they’re not apocalyptic. But once I was giving a lecture on precisely this topic, Christian apocalyptic, to a pastors college. We were together for four days, and I was talking to these churchmen, these are pastors. I was talking to these churchmen about apocalyptic and I did this liberal arts, comparative, secular review of the Book of Daniel, the Book of the Apocalypse, and he was wrong and these people and Montanus, they were wrong, on and on and on and on; four days of listening to these wrong prophecies that described the history of Christian apocalypticism. I should add that I was doing this during Operation Desert Storm. When I took questions, the first one was from a pastor in the back of the room who said, “Yes, Professor Fredriksen, but now that Saddam Hussein is raining nerve gas down on Israel, now that he’s the power from the north raining fire from the sky on God’s elect, isn’t it clear that now is the time of the Second Coming?” Nothing I had said touched his belief. The amazing thing about apocalyptic thought is that a specific prophecy can be disconfirmed, but the idea can never be discredited. You just recalculate. …

Apocalyptic thought is native to Christianity. … Nothing will ever end Christian apocalypticism, especially now, with literacy at the high level it is. Where people who were even brought up on non-apocalyptic Christian traditions, like I was, all you have to do now is pick up a bible and read it. And if you’re not familiar with the elite reinterpretation of those texts, the proclamation of Jesus’ Second Coming is right there, waiting for you. It’s the last line in the New Testament. “Come Lord Jesus.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse/explanation/jesusjohnbaptist.html

Question: What does a de-apocalypticized gospel look like?

“What does a de-apocalypticized gospel look like?”
-Faithless

-It would be good news to this present reality! Not many people would be sitting on their hands, waiting for heaven to come. Instead they would be out building it.