Most Americans no longer have a close familiarity with the Bible and the stories of the Bible. Even many Christians only have a very cursory knowledge of it, basically what they get at Church every Sunday, or whenever they go. My knowledge of The Book is more than cursory, but it had been decades since I read it from cover to cover, and after all that time I’m sure I needed a refreshing on the narrative of God’s progressive revelation.
— and some people aren’t at all happy about it: Australia is to remove the birth of Jesus as a reference point for dates in school history books. Under the new politically correct curriculum, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, yesterday condemned the move as an ‘intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.’ He described the phrase ‘common era’ as ‘meaningless,’ and compared it to using ‘festive season’ instead of Christmas. The changes, introduced by the government, were supposed to be pushed through next year, but have been delayed by the row. The terms CE and BCE have been popularised in academic and scientific publications. One of Australia’s political party leaders, Christopher Pyne, also registered his objections: ‘Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,’ he said. ‘Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people,’
On the CMI website, Russell Grigg tries to set the record straight: Elimination of the Jews in Nazi Germany was not confined to the Holocaust. It also took the form of rewriting the New Testament to ‘dejudaize’ it, i.e., to remove references to Judaism and to recast Jesus as an Aryan, generating what has been called the ‘Nazi Bible’. This has been the subject of some sensational and substantially erroneous claims, including that the project was Hitler’s brainchild. In 1930s Germany, the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen) movement arose. These were theologically liberal Protestant churches and theologians who were enthusiastically pro-Nazi, calling Hitler the ‘Führer Jesus’ and ‘God’s agent in our day’. Politically ambitious and anti-Semitic, they wanted a faith without anything Jewish in the Bible, and without converted Jews in the Church. Their ultimate membership of 600,000 constituted about 30 percent of German Protestants. In opposition to this, the so-called ‘Confessing Church’ (Bekennende Kirche) movement arose, ultimately attracting some 20 percent of Protestant pastors. It included notable opponents of Hitler such as Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, some of its members were inclined to take other liberties with the plain meaning of the biblical text, and some
By Mike Gray “Norway is great because we’re wolves in a world of sheep!” The calendar says it has been nearly a thousand years since the advent of Christ. But for Father Aillil, the priest of a recently converted Viking lord, the news of the “White Christ” is only now penetrating into Norse culture — and it’s meeting considerable resistance. Erling’s Word (1997) Collected in The Year of the Warrior (2000) “I think you’re as fair as a summer morning with the sun rising over Lough Erne. The grass is dewy and fat, so a man could live on it, and the flowers open their mouths and praise God with a song of sweet odor, and the birds raise a hymn they learned from Solomon two thousand years since, and have passed on in secret to their children ever after. And far across the water you can see swans swimming, and the sunrise tints them pink, and the breeze is so mild and gentle it’s like the hand of your mother on your forehead when you’re a child, and sick, and she fears to lose you.” Father Aillil hasn’t always been a priest. He is pretty much minding his own
There is a debate going on in certain (Protestant) Christian circles about Hell, strangely enough. Hell doesn’t get much press nowadays, and not many ministers are fond of preaching about it. It’s so pre-modern. Thus it doesn’t surprise me that this debate was stirred up by a pastor of a mega-church in Michigan, Rob Bell, who soft pedals the idea of Hell in a bestselling book called “Love Wins.” I haven’t read the book, which came out last month, and I don’t plan to, but I guess a lot of people have and feel very strongly about it. According to one reviewer, Bell’s views are a “hopeful universalism,” which shouldn’t be so alarming, while others are calling his book and views about Hell heresy. So which is it? While I’m not particularly interested in sparking a theology debate here, it is interesting to consider what this debate about Hell says about the American culture in the twenty-first century. John Meacham at Time Magazine makes a good (albeit rather obvious) observation. (He appears to have no skin in the game.) He writes: The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell’s arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the
As readers of this fine publication may know, I am a passionate apologist for the Christian faith. It is unfortunate that this seems to bring out so many irrationally smug and arrogant atheists, but what are you going to do. The atheists that I cannot abide think religion, and specifically Christianity, is a cancer, a mental derangement only for the weak who “cannot handle the truth!” The only contribution Christianity brought to history and society according to these types is the pathological. Of course, to any objective observer Christianity has brought an astounding number of positives to the world. This was on my mind as I recently finished watching the first season of the Starz Channel series “Spartacus.” The series is definitely not for the squeamish, or those easily offended by the salacious depiction of Roman debauchery, maybe not even for those not so easily offended. But it is a powerful depiction of the pagan Western world prior to the advent of Christianity, and as impressive as Roman civilization was at the time, it was nightmare for those who were not Roman citizens. If you lived within the empire and you were not a citizen you were pretty much chattel,
Spoiler Alert: If you have heard of and plan to read the best seller, “Unbroken,” and if you don’t want to know details of how the story ends, you will not want to read any further. And it really is a worthwhile read. Literally everyone likes it. So if you want to read it, bookmark this and come back after you’ve finished it. Actually, this would be a fantastic book for atheists to read, because it would challenge some of their cherished assumptions about Christianity. Lauren Hillenbrand’s second best seller (the other being Seabiscuit) is about Louis Zamperini, a world class miler (he was in the 1936 German Olympics) who fought in WWII, was captured by the Japanese and endure several years of hell on earth. As the title implies, he remained unbroken, but to endure the kind of pain and torture he did at the hands of maniacal sadists deeply affects a person, and for a time he was definitely broken. Hillenbrand is a good story teller with a direct, non-flowery style. She brings this man and his world alive, and in a way that’s so much more powerful for her somewhat sparse approach. Zamperini was an incorrigible boy
By Mike D’Virgilio I take everything back! No, not really. I’m sure all the vitriolic God-haters (yes I know, they wouldn’t say they hate God, who they believe doesn’t exist—it’s those lousy religious morons they hate) who took me to task for implying that atheists contribute nothing to Western culture won’t be commenting on what an open-minded person I’ve become. I found nothing persuasive in the knee-jerk, clichéd comments about how stupid religious people are and how logical atheists are. But after reading the book I’ll be talking about, it is clear that many atheists have contributed much good found in our Western heritage. Heck, I’m sure even Freud said a thing or two of value. The book I speak of is called “Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture.” It is the story of a young man, born of a white mother and black father, who struggled to escape thuggish hip-hop culture, and finally did, because he had an erudite father who encouraged and forced him to educate himself. The reason this resonated with me in light of my previous post, is because the father rejected religion. Yet in spite of that, I
Actor-writer John Cleese explains the rock-solid evidence for atheism, in this very funny video: H/t to Bruno Behrend.
Once in a while something special happens in America culture to bring joy to our country’s vast population of Christians, and especially those who take their Christian faith very seriously. We are more used to being the butt jokes and ridicule, or the object of libertarian fears, and more often than not just ignored. Just stay in your closets, or churches, and quit bothering us with your absolute standards and exclusive claims on The Truth. It’s just tough for Christians to be popular in a pluralistic culture permeated by relativism. But even though in many ways Christianity has become an outlier in American culture, the history of the Christian faith’s influence on the development of America cannot be completely ignored, nor can a vibrant sub-culture of conservative Catholic and Protestant Christians. So in some ways this something special I refer to doesn’t surprise me. Despite every effort of our secular cultural elites to ban Christianity to the wasteland, the faith remains in the DNA of America, and out it pops every once in a while. This event happened in of all places a Macy’s in Center City, as they call it, Philadelphia. Someone had the brilliant idea of getting 650
by Mike Gray Polls of any kind should never be regarded as unimpeachable, and telephone polls even more so. Nevertheless, the results of one are now in: Recent survey results released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life suggest that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than evangelicals and Catholics. Pretty, ahem, damning at first blush; however, it’s always necessary to understand the nature of the questions: While this study may suggest that Christians don’t know as much about religion as atheists do, it appears that the questions that were asked pertained to trivial knowledge related to religion rather than to specific doctrines, or—more importantly—the application of doctrinal teachings to practical life. For example, knowing that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist is probably not as helpful to everyday living as, say, being familiar with Jesus’ teaching to pay taxes. Unlike Caesar—or any other governing body, past or present—the Dalai Lama won’t punish people for tax evasion. Read Christine Dao’s ICR article about the survey here.
by Mike Gray Christopher Hitchens—bald from cancer treatments, speaking between doctor’s appointments—has a special disdain for deathbed religious conversions. Appearing before a group of journalists organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life, he criticized the pressures put on Tom Paine to embrace Christianity and the malicious rumors of faith that followed Charles Darwin’s demise. “I’ve already thought about this a great deal, thanks all the same,” he explained. The idea “that you may be terrified” is no reason to “abandon the principles of a lifetime.” — Michael Gerson Gerson offers a snapshot of Hitchens’s outlook on Townhall.com: Of course we can be good without God, but why the hell bother? If there are no moral lines except the ones we draw ourselves, why not draw and redraw them in places most favorable to our interests? Hitchens parries these concerns instead of answering them: Since all moral rules have exceptions and complications, he said, all moral choices are relative. . . . . The dreams of totalitarians are his nightmares—what W. H. Auden described as: “A million eyes, a million boots in line / Without expression, waiting for a sign.” Even Hitchens’ opposition to God seems less of
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