If you have a passion to reach the unsaved with the gospel, you are going to confront Goliath. This is the giant the Bible calls “the spirit of fear” that will come against you and taunt you the moment you decide to reach out to the lost. When it’s a one-to-one encounter or you are preparing to preach open air to a crowd, you will hear his tormenting voice telling you that what you are about to do will result in you being torn limb from limb and fed to the birds. [...]
This sort of fear certainly has “torment,” and the only way to overcome it is to do what David did. He slung Goliath a straight-forward mind-impressing message that he wasn’t going to be deterred, and then he cut of his head. That silenced his big and loud mouth.
I think that the slingstone is the perfect analogy for Comfort’s methods of evangelism. It’s quick, straight-forward, easy to understand and intuitive in its operation. It’s also completely unencumbered by any depth, complexity, strategy or nuance.
If Ray Comfort were a weapon, he’d be a slingstone. If he were a piece of writing, he’d be a Hallmark card. If he were a vehicle, he’d be a unicycle. His goal seems to be to make Christian theology – a profound system of thought that has benefited from the greatest minds of the west for almost 2000 years – and make it fit on a bumper sticker.
So, I made the terrible mistake of following a friend’s link on facebook to this little gem:
At first I thought it was an elaborate joke, but it didn’t take long to discover that it’s actually a still from a new Tea Party sponsored documentary (I use the term loosely) which basically seeks to establish that Krischun ‘Muuurkha = Good, and Left Wing Soshalism = EBUL.
Strap in folks, it’s about to get crazy:
And now it’s going to get even crazier:
The guy in the second video is such an obvious liar that it’s a little bit painful to try to watch all the way through, but do your best.
The religious right accusing everybody else of historical revisionism and promoting an inclusive mind-set… The irony burns.
Pat Robertson and co-host Kristi Watts discuss the atheists, who don’t believe in anything. Watts goes on on a tangent, talking about how Wiccans are “all about the environment,” and that “trees are their God.” [wtf?] She then asks why atheists aren’t saying that we should cut down every tree.
“Just a thought,” she says. I’m afraid that I don’t see any evidence of thinking there, so I’m going to have to disagree.
Atheists aren’t gunning to chop down all the trees us Pagan tree-huggers hug because they predominantly believe in environmental and climate science, and know that cutting down “every tree” would destroy our ecosystem, and life on earth itself (sadly, ski resort Jesus statues don’t absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen).
But maybe Watts has a point. Maybe it’s time to rethink my career path …
(Maybe this is funnier to me, because my wife was an agnostic and a lumberjill when I met her.)
So Pastor Eddie Long – currently under a cloud of scandal for inappropriate actions with four young men – has been crowned king. King of what, I’m not sure, but in this video Rabbi Ralph Messer anoints him and wraps him in a copy of the Torah. This is seriously weird.
There have been a lot of reaction to this. Some of the better ones I’ve found:
13. The notion that there is such a thing as a “king chromosome” is a fiction, as is the claim that it is kohenic, that is priestly; the Israelite and Judean monarchs — there were queens as well — were not priests.
14. The man’s articulation of what “God wants,” is to say the least unsubstantiated outside that particular setting.
15. The man never says how he knows that none of Long’s ancestors or relatives has ever seen a Torah scroll.
16. While there are some traditional reflections on the human body — including DNA and chromosomes — in the mystical Kabbalistic tradition, the speaker is crafting a verbal montage without reference to the classical texts or their theologies.
Anthea Butler at Religion Dispatches has been watching Long for awhile:
I wish I could say I was surprised by Long’s latest antics, but I’m not. Actually, I am surprised he stayed away from the church this long. After declaring in December that he was taking a hiatus to work on the problems in his marriage, Long has returned with a new lacefront and a defiant attitude. Having a fake rabbi declare him “King” of a fading, dying mega-church is a joke, but what is not are the deluded New Birth Members cheering him on.
Clearly they have drunk the “Kool Aid” and I don’t use that term lightly. I’ve believed since my trip to New Birth back in 2010, when Long promised to fight his civil case, that New Birth was a cult-like organization. Long’s hold over his congregation reminds me of Jim Jones. That may sound harsh, but Jim Jones slept with his members too, before leading the People’s Temple into the jungles of Guyana.
Messer is sometimes called a Messianic Rabbi, but he’s part of the “Hebrew Roots” movement, which other Messianic Rabbi do not accept. Apparently, this is all just part of Messer’s shtick. From Bartholomew’s Notes:
This is not the first time Messer and his scroll have come to the rescue of a beleaguered evangelist; in 2007 Tampa Bay Online reported from Randy White’s Without Walls International Church, following White’s split from church co-founder Paula White:
[Randy] White preached for a few minutes before turning over the pulpit to Ralph Messer, a Messianic rabbi from Denver who teaches about the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith.
Messer preached about the Torah and Jewish entrepreneurship and spoke again at the 11 a.m. service, where he led the congregation in a prayer that ended emotionally for White.
The Torah that Messer presented is apparently linked to Rabbi Menachem Youlus. According to the Grey Lady, Youlus has recently confessed to fraud:
For years Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones,” received plaudits from those captivated by his stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust.
But on Thursday, Rabbi Youlus stood inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan and confessed that he had made up those tales of daring.
“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”
Here’s a swarm of quad-rotor robots hovering in formation. They’re a creation of the GRASP labs at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kind of cool. Before you get too impressed, check out the blooper reel at io9 and see all the ways the little four-rotor guys can screw up.
Sure, they’re cute, but what can the little guys do? Here’s an exhibit titled “Flight Assembled Architecture,” created at the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. Several quad-copters are used to pick up polystyrene foam blocks and drop them into place, eventually creating a 6m tower. This is the work of Swiss architect Gramazio & Kohler and Italian robot designer Raffaello D’Andrea.
These little rotor robots are not the only kind of flying bot out there. Markus Fischer and his team at Festo, a German tech company, have created “SmartBird,” a robot that flies in the same manner as a bird. Here he is displaying their creation at the TED Talks:
Finally, the good folks at Neural Robotics, Inc have produced this RC gunship. For all I know, Neural Robotics is a respected company with a sterling reputation. However, it looks like two good ‘ol boys got together and said, “Hey, let’s build us a big RC chopper and strap a shotgun to it!”
Via Remnant of Giants, a bit of Ray Comfort’s blog, Words of Comfort:
