The Pharisees and Sadducees are alive and well and living in the USA. As you might recall, these groups were always twisting words and meanings of words (in vain) to get His followers to stop listening to Him. Of course they knew full well what they were doing! I prefer to give today’s version of these groups the benefit of the doubt, though, and hope that they are only misguided and uninformed about Christ’s teachings.
An opinion piece in the newspaper this morning proves my point. I’ll try to tackle each paragraph with my own humble thoughts.
Why Americans are keeping faith but losing religion
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
The Miami Herald
“Today, I quit being a Christian."
With those words last week on Facebook, Anne Rice delivered a wake-up call for organized religion. The question is whether it will be recognized as such.
*I would hope that most Christian Americans see Ms. Rice’s words for what they are and pray for her “re-re-conversion”.
"I remain committed to Christ as always," she wrote, "but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."
*Being a Christian is not like being in a club or an organization. It’s being follower of Christ and His teachings (or as I like to call it—the Truth, as taught to us through Scripture and the Tradition handed down to us by the Apostles He commissioned for this purpose. We’ve all tried. We’ve all failed at some point or another. The real strength in being a Christian is perseverance and hope in His promise of eternal life with the Father. But to be “committed to Christ” is to be committed to the Truth.
You will recall that the author, famed for her vampire novels, (this might be part of the problem!) made a much-publicized return to the Catholicism of her youth after years of calling herself an atheist. Now, years later, she says she hasn't lost her faith, but she's had it up to here with organized religion.
*Christ set up the “organization” when He gave the keys of Heaven to Peter and told him twice (first in Matthew 16. then again in Matthew 18) that, “whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”! Why is it so hard to understand this?
"In the name of Christ," she wrote, "I refuse to be anti-gay.
*So do I! I must, out of love for my neighbor, point out the disorder of the “gay” life-style and pray for his repentance, but I love him nonetheless.
I refuse to be anti-feminist.
*So do I! I believe that all men and women are created in the image and likeness of God. They are equal in dignity, but different in body and physical abilities. I don’t buy into the “there is no difference between men and women” argument.
I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control.
*Does she really have all of the facts regarding the harm that artificial birth control methods do to the women who claim to be “feminist?”
I refuse to be anti-Democrat.
*I don’t know where she gets this. I know of no teachings that require Christians to register as Republican, Democrat, or Tea Party adherents.
I refuse to be anti-secular humanism.
*Usually, this means that one wants to be self-centered, instead of Christ-centered.
I refuse to be anti-science.
*Christianity, and Catholics in particular have always been the pioneers in scientific discovery. I would assume Ms. Rice refers here to embryonic stem-cell research, which has been woefully unproductive—which anyone who has an open mind can find out, with a little bit of on line research.
I refuse to be anti-life."
*Again, Ms. Rice is painfully ignorant if she can’t see that the Catholic Church has led the way for 2000 years in pro-life causes.
If that was not nearly enough for atheist observers, one of whom berated her online for refusing to give up her "superstitious delusions" completely, it was surely plenty for people of faith. But Rice is hardly the only one who feels as she does.
According to a 2008 study by Trinity College, religiosity is trending down sharply in this country. The American Religious Identification Survey, which polled more than 54,000 American adults, found that the percentage who call themselves Christian has fallen by 10 points since 1990 (from 86.2 percent to 76 percent) while the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation has almost doubled (from 8.2 to 15 percent) in the same span.
*I take study results like this with a grain of salt. After all, statistics show that 100% of all statistics can be interpreted to say what they want to prove. Lol.
Small wonder atheist manifestos are doing brisk business at bookstores, and Bill Maher's skeptical "Religulous" finds an appreciative audience in theaters.
*Really? Bill Maher is skeptical of religion? I’m shocked! I stopped paying any attention to anything this hateful “comedian” says long ago. I now just pray for him.
Organized religion, Christianity in particular, is on the decline, and it has no one to blame but itself: It traded moral authority for political power.
*Christianity did not “trade” moral authority for political power. Christians simply realized that they would have to finally get involved in the political process to prevent the secular society from dictating immoral behavior. And now the secularists are angry that they are being reined in!
To put that another way: The Christian Bible contains numerous exhortations to serve those who are wretched and poor, to anger slowly and forgive promptly, to walk through this life in humility and faith. The word "Republican" does not appear in the book. Not once.
*Nor does“Democrat”. Or “Tea Party”. Or “Libertarian”. Or “Bible”.
Yet somehow in the past 30 years, people of faith were hustled and hoodwinked into regarding the GOP platform as a lost gospel.
*This is this writer’s opinion. I prefer to think that for the past 30 years, Christians have fought a valiant battle to stave off the “Babel”-type hubris and self-destructive behavior of the “me” generation.
Somehow, low taxes for the wealthy and deregulation of industry became the very message of Christ.
*I must have missed this chapter and verse in the Bible.
Somehow, hostility to science, gays, Muslims and immigrants became the very meaning of faith. And somehow Christianity became - or at least, came to seem - a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.
*Isn’t it funny how disagreement with the Truth, even when the Truth is conveyed charitably, is translated to “hostility”?
Consider that, after the election of 2004, a church in North Carolina made news for kicking out nine congregants because they committed the un-Christian act of ... voting for Democrat John Kerry.
*The key words here are “made news”. It shouldn’t have. Poor judgment on the part of misguided zealots should not be newsworthy. It only made the news because the media wanted to further their own anti-Christian bias.
Who can blame people for saying: If that's faith, count me out. Has atheism ever had a better salesman than Jerry Falwell blaming the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the ACLU or Pat Robertson laying Haiti's earthquake off on an ancient curse?
*We agree on this—these men are idiots who don’t understand the unsurpassed love and mercy of our Creator.
But what of those who are not atheists? What of those who feel the blessed assurance that there is more to this existence than what we can see or empirically prove? What of those who seek a magnificent faith that commits and compels, and find churches offering only a shriveled faith that marginalizes and demeans?
Its response to those people, those "seekers," will determine the future of organized religion. And it might behoove keepers of the faith to keep in mind the distinction Anne Rice drew in her farewell:
Christ didn't fail her, she said. Christianity did.
*I disagree. It’s her own perception of what she feels Christianity should do for her, rather than what her faith promises her.
This is the greatest error (in my own opinion) that all of us make at some point in our lives—that we shouldn’t have pain and suffering and yes (gasp!) even disappointment in this world. What we don’t want to hear is the message that Christ gave us many times in the Gospel:
Matthew 10:38
Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
Matthew 16:24
Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
Mark 8:34
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."
Luke 9:23
Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."
Luke 14:27
And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
As far as Ms. Rice is concerned, she should really re-familiarize herself with Hebrews: Chapter 11.
No comments:
Post a Comment