Smart people saying smart things

February 8, 2012 By Fred Clark 11 Comments

Jo Hilder: “‘God Gave Christianity a Masculine Feel’ — and Other S*** Christians Say“

Every time we say God is a man, another woman in our church believes God must be a complete bastard.

Every time we say that women cannot lead or preach, another woman in our church is convinced she is evil and has a rebellious spirit rather than a gift and a calling from God.

Every time we stand up and condemn abortion and say it was murder, another woman in our church learns she will always have to hide her past to retain her dignity.

Every time we condemn homosexuality, another woman in our church learns she has to lie to us to protect her family.

Every time we insist God says women must always submit to their husbands, another woman in our church believes if she can just change herself enough, God will step in and stop the abuse. …

Dianna Anderson: “Why Is It So Hard to Be Truthful About Planned Parenthood?“

I have seen many self-identified pro-life Christians espousing blatant falsehoods about Planned Parenthood and abortion, and that is disheartening. Our positions should be strong enough that we need not stoop to falsehoods in order to prove our point. But, here in America, we seem to have a large blind spot when it comes to Planned Parenthood.

… The spreading of falsehoods is unbecoming of a Christian church.

… In a hotly contested issue such as abortion, where there are many personal opinions and stories on both sides, it is the Christian’s responsibility to care for their neighbor. And caring for one’s neighbor, at a very basic level, means not slandering them with lies and deceit. If we have to resort to lies and slander to make our case, we have already lost.

Ian Ebright: “It is Time for the American Christian Church to Surrender the Gay Marriage Fight, Apologize & Share Love“

God did not instruct the church to force the rest of the world to have the appearance of the church.

But that is the inevitable objective of the anti-gay marriage movement.

… The quest to deny gay individuals the right to marry in the broader culture is an example of Christian conquest which is and always has been a perversion of discipleship. The church must illuminate a path for seekers to pursue the light of God, and provide a place of solace where the Lord’s call can find a response of the heart. Instead, we have often crowded the path with protesters and picket signs, and drowned out the sound of God’s knocking with our shouting. The mistake of the anti-gay marriage movement in the Christian church is that it is an attempt at indirect discipleship by way of restricting another’s freedom, and discipleship has never succeeded in that way. Discipleship convicts, comforts, and points the way, but it does so established on a foundation of dignity inherent in every person’s God-given right to respond without coercion.

The church ought to be immersed in the business of transforming lives through teaching, compassion and care, instead of treading in the shallow waters that have us trying to govern lives through legislative force. God extends to all of us freewill and patience and it’s time we truly extend both to the GLBT community. …

J.R. Daniel Kirk: “On Not Harmonizing“

It is your pastoral responsibility to help people recognize that the Bible we actually have, rather than the Bible of our imaginations, is the word of God.

If you don’t give your people a category for this kind of diverse Bible being the word of God, then you will create a false sense of connection between a supposedly uniform, univocal Bible and the Christian faith as such. So what happens when they go off to college and take a Bible class at State University? What happens when they get bored one Saturday and map out (or try, anyway) the last week of Jesus’ life in each of the four Gospels?

Uh-oh.

That’s when they discover that the Bible isn’t what you led them to believe. And if that imagined Bible is necessary for believing what God has to say about Jesus and the Christian faith in general, then the latter are apt to crumble as well.

Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 11 Comments
  • http://gocart-mozart.blogspot.com/ gocart mozart

    On a side note, I think Democrats should pit Jesus against Ayn Rand. I don’t know why they have not been doing this all along especially in the “bible belt”.
    This is my contribution to that cause:

    “Whose side are you on G.O.P.
    Ayn Rand or Jesus Christ?
    You must choose.
    IT CANNOT BE BOTH!”
    http://aynrandhatedjesus.blogspot.com/

  • Michael Pullmann

    I love how the comments to that piece on lies about Planned Parenthood are filled with more lies about Planned Parenthood.

  • Anonymous

    … In a hotly contested issue such as abortion, where there are many
    personal opinions and stories on both sides, it is the Christian’s
    responsibility to care for their neighbor. And caring for one’s
    neighbor, at a very basic level, means not slandering them with lies and
    deceit. If we have to resort to lies and slander to make our case, we
    have already lost.

    That’s a good sign to me. If you have to lie about what Planned Parenthood does in order to get the general public to condemn it, that must mean that Planned Parenthood as it actually exists is fairly acceptable to the general public. Handel, the executive at Susan G Komen who was behind the whole thing, resigned a couple of days ago. Komen unquestionably came off worse in the eyes of the public as a result of its move against Planned Parenthood and to me that indicates that even though PP’s role in abortion remains controversial that’s not enough for most people to demonize the entire organization and ignore its mission.

  • pharoute

    I’d love to troll an anti gay marriage rally one day: “A marriage is a union of a man and woman! (crowd cheers) performed by a Catholic priest!”

  • Anonymous

    Great article from Kirk – the synoptic gospels are a perfect example of how the Bible is not intended to be read as a history or theology textbook, but as a set of narratives which God intended us to have. Like all good literature, it is larger than our particular interpretation.

  • Anonymous

    Ms. Hilder has either forgotten or omited another alternative to her proposition: Every time a woman is subjected to one or any combination of all of the circumstances described, she either leaves and looks for a more woman-friendly church; or she leaves The Church altogether.

    “Why Is It So Hard to Be Truthful About Planned Parenthood?”

    “If you have to resort to fraud to achieve a goal, your goal is wrong.” – Nick Johnson, founder of Morons.org

  • http://stealingcommas.blogspot.com/ chris the cynic


    Our positions should be strong enough that we need not stoop to falsehoods in order to prove our point.

    I’ve been saying this for years about many different subjects and never once said it so well.

  • http://thatbeerguy.blogspot.com Chris Doggett

    The Anderson article on Planned Parenthood is painful, almost heartbreaking because of the author’s naivite.

    “Why is it so hard to be truthful about Planned Parenthood?”
    Because this is a sub-culture that believes in “your truth” versus “my truth”, but everything being trumped by “God’s Truth”. (as dictated by the culture warriors of the tribe)
     
    Consider this simple statement:

    “Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide low- or no-cost women’s health and family planning services, of which abortion is only one.”

    This should be an undisputed truth. There are claims in that statement that can be tested against fact and record. It should be definitively known that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health services at low or no cost.
     
    But the reality is that for 27%+ of the population, that statement is not seen as empirically true, it is viewed as intrinsically false. For a certain segment of the population (whose epistimeology is based on faith, trust, learned and inherited morality, and “truthiness”) Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of abortions in the United States, and that single statement is what defines the organization.
     
    I know it’s a common stereotype that liberals think conservatives are stupid, but rarely are we presented with such golden examples of conservative stupidity. It is entirely possible for an organization to be “the single largest provider of” X, and still have X be a small portion of what their organization does and stands for. How? I’ll give you an example from my days as a low-cost retail wage-slave:
     
    Back in the day, “Borders Books & Music” was the single largest source of sales for Enya music in the United States. However, sales of Enya made up only a small fraction of their total income, and was a small part of their market strategy.

    No one thought of Borders as part of the Big Enya Cartel or viewed Borders as an Enya-factory or Enya-promoters. Most people went to Borders to listen to music, or read magazines in the cafe, or browse books in the comfy chairs. Some people even bought things there, but obviously not many, but they bought books, movies, coffee in the coffee shop, and music, obviously including some Enya.

    The shake-ups this week with Komen have really revealed this inherently false view of Borders. To some people, they’re an “abortion mill”, they’re “Big Abortion”, they make their livelihood on “teh murdered bebbies!” To everyone else, they’re like Borders, but for low-income women’s and family health.

  • FangsFirst

     

    No one thought of Borders as part of the Big Enya Cartel or viewed
    Borders as an Enya-factory or Enya-promoters. Most people went to
    Borders to listen to music, or read magazines in the cafe, or browse
    books in the comfy chairs. Some people even bought things there, but
    obviously not many, but they bought books, movies, coffee in the coffee
    shop, and music, obviously including some Enya.

    +50 for passive aggressive snark at non-paying Borders customers.
    I actually had someone tell me they refused to re-enter Borders (specifically my store) because we didn’t kick people out (so that she could sit there instead). …Not the best impression to give to your daughter’s boyfriend who is relatively happily employed there.

    (Also, thank you for cohesively addressing that stupidity)

  • WingedBeast

    Why is it so hard to be honest about Planned Parenthood?

    Because the truth can’t be true!

    In all my discussions with the right wing, one of the things that comes up most is their opposition to situational morality or relative morality.  It’s a culture proud of its view of morality as being black and white, good and evil, them and others.  It’s also a culture quite opposed to having any nuanced discussion of abortion.  Try it and they often fight you, returning to rote questions or accusing you of “rambling” with regards to any point to which you might attempt to get them to pay the slightest attention.

    I’m put a mind of Vorbis from Small Gods (my first Terry Pratchett novel).  Vorbis told Brutha of the kinds of truth.  There is a deceptive truth, on the surface of things, that said that he, Vorbis, had killed a missionary upon return.  But, the deeper truth is that the people said missionary had been sent to convert had killed said missionary by not being converted.  It’s the deeper truth that had to be true, because it was so much truer than the surface truth.

    So, to pro-life, the truer truth beneath the surface truth is that Planned Parenthood=abortions.  There can be nothing else.  Everything else, such as 97% of what Planned Parenthood does, has to be a deceptive surface truth.  The lies are made so as to be truer than truth.

  • Lori

     ”Why is it so hard to be truthful about Planned Parenthood?” 
    Because this is a sub-culture that believes in “your truth” versus “my truth”, but everything being trumped by “God’s Truth”. (as dictated by the culture warriors of the tribe) 

    If you haven’t been reading Doonesbury this week you should check it out. This current run of strips starts here: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2012/02/06

    There is some lovely, high test snark there.