Photo Friday – Comfort

My entry for this week’s contest “Comfort.” Click the thumbnail for the full size picture.

Dangerous talk

Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors

Matthew 6:11-12

I’m still thinking about the Lord’s Prayer. In particular the short passage I cited above. You see, my many years spent in the Christian church have taught me that I am supposed to live a sin free life. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to pull it off. This reality has taught me to feel guilty all the time and I’m guessing I am not the only one.

What’s interesting is that this prayer seems to teach us something different. More than that, it seems to suggest that sin is almost like eating for us in that we will do it every day. Its like God knows that we desire to live a good life but that we also have this thing in us that makes it impossible for us to not sin. The way to break the cycle is not by castigating ourselves when we mess up but to forgive those who will inevitably sin against us in the same way we would have God forgive our sins.

This is dangerous talk. I can already hear my old pastor talking about licensing sin and cheap grace. I’m not saying we should go out looking for opportunities to sin, all I am saying is that when it happens (and it will) ask for forgiveness, thank God for it, and then remember to extend the same grace to your fellow human beings. I think that is what Jesus really would do.

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Tags: Jesus, Christianity, The Bible

This isn’t really surprising

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s seemingly ridiculous claim that “we don’t have homosexuals, like in your country” masks the cruel reality that his government does far worse than ignore gays, human rights groups charge.

“There are criminal laws on the books in Iran that allows for people to be killed for being homosexual,” said Paula Ettelbrick, executive director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.

Just how many gays may have been killed — some say the figure is more than 400 — is impossible to determine. Routine harassment and systematic torture of gays in Iran is quite common, charge human rights groups.

“The most likely sentence is some jail plus anywhere between 10 and a couple of hundred lashes,” said Scott Long, who follows gay rights issues for Human Rights Watch. “No one who survives them is likely to forget them.”

FOXNews.com – Iran Does Far Worse Than Ignore Gays, Critics Say – International News | News of the World | Middle East News | Europe News

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Tags: MahmoudAhmadinejad, Iran, Homosexuality

Three killed as Myanmar troops battle protests | Reuters.ca

Two monks and a civilian were killed, hospital and monastery sources said, as years of pent-up frustration at 45 years of unbroken military rule in the former Burma produced the largest crowds yet during a month of protests.

Some witnesses estimated 100,000 people took to the streets despite fears of a repeat of the ruthless suppression of Myanmar’s last major uprising, in 1988, when soldiers opened fire, killing an estimated 3,000 people.

Three killed as Myanmar troops battle protests | Reuters.ca

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the government of Myanmar has chosen to respond with violence to the peaceful protests taking place in their country. Hopefully the international community will respond with sanctions and other peaceful measures designed to curtail the violence.

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Tags: Myanmarprotests,

More on praying like Jesus – Part 2

Continued from

The evangelical church we used to go to is not liturgical like the Catholic Church. The services are not supposed to be laid out in stone and the prayers are expected to be off the cuff. Ironically it did have an unofficial liturgy. Every week the same number of songs were sung, the pastor spoke for the same amount of time, and the off the cuff prayers were filled with most of the same words we heard every week.

God, I just want to thank you God. And God, you are just so …… holy God. Thank you for sending your son Jesus yadda, yadda, yadda. And Lord I just want to lift up so and so to you today God. I just pray that you will rain healing (or prosperity, or the peace only you can bring, or… well you get the point). And I pray all these things in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Now, I can’t claim to be guiltless in this little game we play. I have spent my life praying like this too and chances are I probably will do these things again at some point. Doesn’t it really show though, the complete poverty of our collective Christian faith? We are afraid that God isn’t as good as Jesus taught us so we try to use elaborate prayers and fancy words, all the while God already knows what it is we are concerned about. Could it be that the very act of our being concerned about someone and their circumstances is prayer enough in itself?

That is why I am becoming more and more convinced that the Lord’s Prayer truly is the perfect prayer. It covers all the basics that we humans share in common and includes not only ourselves and our friends, but all people. Its simplicity saves us from worrying over each and every problem we encounter but its wording is general enough to cover pretty much anything we encounter. By the way, I am convinced “deliver us from evil” doesn’t just mean evil but also trouble, pain, and everything bad we encounter.

Really, the Lord’s Prayer is a cry of freedom. We needn’t be concerned that if we forget one person they won’t be helped or that if we forget one sin we aren’t forgiven. God knows, God loves, God forgives.

Since we’re so friendly, may I call you Mac?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at Columbia University in New York today. Despite the outcry against it, I think it is great that they gave him the opportunity to speak. Just because someone says things I disagree with doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have the opportunity to speak. The ignorance that leads to hatred grows like a mushroom, in the dark buried in shit. Bringing it out in the open and illuminating it shows everyone how idiotic it truly is.

Not surprisingly the speech had many highlights. One interesting note is that Mr. Ahmadinejad did not call The Holocaust a myth in his speech and even went so far as to call it a reality. This is the first time that he has done this (that I am aware of) but I doubt that it signals any real change of opinion on this subject. My favorite quote though was the following:

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country.

Ahmadinejad has been living in a universe of his own creation for quite some time now. Between his denials of the Holocaust and his draconian leadership style, it is obvious that his grip on reality is tenuous at best. The sad reality is that if he is indeed correct about the lack of homosexuals in his country it is because his government has murdered them.

This speech may have been planned as a bit of a public relations ploy for the Iranian president. I really don’t think it worked. What it did do was give the West an opportunity to hear Ahmadinejad speak on our own terms. The arena and the speaker made it clear that Mr. Ahmadinejad has the rather dubious distinction of being the only world leader who is more scary than George W. Bush.

More on praying like Jesus – Part 1

Since I wrote this post last week I’ve continued to think a lot about prayer. I have been considering the ways we Christians pray and what that says about us and the depth of our faith. However, before I delve into that I want to look at what Jesus had to say about prayer.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him (Matthew 6:5-8 NIV).

Jesus is telling us to not be fearful, God knows what we need and what it is we are praying for before we even utter the prayers. My experience with how I pray and how Christians pray, however, is vastly different than that. In the Catholic Church of my youth we repeated the same prayers over and over again. Sometimes we did so during the celebration of the mass other times it was done as a means of asking forgiveness for the sins we had committed. The belief being that God would hear us and forgive us because of our repetition. This act directly contradicted the teachings of Jesus.

In the evangelical church of my adulthood we would pray together as a congregation as well. Together we would ask for God’s forgiveness and curry God’s blessing on our special projects. In every church I have gone to we would pray for sick people or people who were in need. In the evangelical church it seemed that if we didn’t directly name the person we were praying for God wouldn’t know who it was. I remember it seemed odd to me even then.

This was originally one long post, so in the name of brevity it will be concluded tomorrow.

Soul for sale

Hemant Mehta author of I Sold My Soul on Ebay was interviewed by Beliefnet about what he experienced when visiting churches to compile the information for his book. He has some interesting observations about Christian worship.

There’s a couple of churches that I really liked. I thought Joel Osteen’s was really good. A lot of atheists make fun of me for that.

I know a lot of Christians disagree with me on that because they see him as “Christian lite.” But I thought his message was just one of optimism, even if it is the prosperity gospel.

He makes you feel good. And when I wake up on a Sunday, if I’m with my parents, Joel Osteen is on the TV because my mom likes listening to him. [He] just reaches out to people, whether or not you really believe in God. And he doesn’t reference God or the Bible a lot. I think that’s for good reason.

I’ve been to Willow Creek a few times. I really like that church. I love the sermons that they have. They do reference the Bible a lot more, but you walk out of there thinking about your life and what you can do better. I download their podcast. I download Mars Hill with Rob Bell sometimes. It’s fun to listen to.

But I was listening to an older Willow Creek podcast [by] Bill Hybels about the myths of being gay. One of those myths was that being gay is not a choice. He was saying, “That’s not true,” basically–that it is a choice. I’m listening and thinking, this is one of the problems we have in this country and it’s being propagated by this church.

And that depresses me. They also promote intelligent design–or many of their pastors do, anyway. I don’t think they really seek out good scientific information on that stuff.

So on a lot of those issues, there are things I really disagree with.

There were a couple of smaller churches that I really liked, [such as] a house church in York, Illinois. [The pastor there] was trying to form another community. I have a Web site, friendlyatheist.com. He comments on there a lot and always has something good to say from a Christian perspective, so much so that I actually asked him if he would just kind of do a Q&A, like “Ask a Christian Pastor.” People submitted questions and he responded to every single one of them. Atheists said, “Wow, I didn’t know there were Christians that thought like that.”

And you had other people saying, “Oh, he’s not a true Christian.”

Which churches did you like least and why?

There was a church where they had the big-screen monitors everywhere–[it was] a high school gym, essentially. You don’t need big-screen TVs to watch the pastor when he’s not that far away from you.

The program we were given for the day basically had the outline of what [the pastor] was going to talk about with blanks written down. This is not what was written in there, but this is an example: God is ____. And then, during the sermon, he would say, “God is good. Write that down.” He actually said that.

And you would fill in the blank.

Yes. It was so childish.

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Tags: HemantMehta, Christianity, Atheism

Protesting like Jesus

There is a pretty amazing story coming out of Myanmar about Buddhists monks protesting the military regime they live under.

Buddhist monks marched for a third consecutive day through the streets of Rangoon yesterday, reinforcing their challenge to the repressive military junta that has ruled the country for nearly half a century.

The russet-robed monks, many of whom trudged through heavy rain with their traditional alms bowls turned upside down to symbolise their anger, indicated they would maintain the pressure by marching on Buddhist sabbath days. The next falls on Wednesday.

Monks protest on the streets of Rangoon – Independent Online Edition

Irrawaddy continues

About 1,000 Buddhist monks peacefully marched through Rangoon on Thursday as hundreds of students and young people protected the monks by joining hands as a human chain, witnesses said.

The monks and laypeople marched in the rain.

The protesting monks gathered at the Shwedagon Pagoda and then marched to Sule Pagoda, passing by the former US Embassy and the British Embassy in downtown Rangoon.

According to witnesses, several Western foreigners also followed along with the monks, along with a car believed to be from one of the embassies.

I found the image of the monks peacefully voicing their protest (and the students using themselves as human shields as they did so) to be a very powerful one. There is much that we Western Christians can learn here, from both the students and the protesters. I have the sneaking suspicion that if Jesus were here today this is how He would protest.

Imagine if after the 9/11 attacks President Bush had lead the American people on a peaceful march through the streets of Washington. Simultaneously showing anger at what had happened and also that they as a nation would refuse to reply in kind. What kind of a message would that have sent? Wouldn’t that be a more Christ-like way for a nation based on Christian values to respond?

Granted, the US invasion of Afghanistan made perfect sense after 9/11. Perfect sense, that is, in human terms. What we need now is not human reasoning, that is what has gotten our world into the mess it is in. We need something new, something more Divine. I believe that these Buddhist monks may just have tapped into that.

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Tags: Rangoon, Protest, Buddhist monks, Christianity, Jesus

Photo Friday – Beach





My entry for this week’s contest (see, I don’t just take pictures of cars).