I have just come across a blog article on God, fire and brimstone by Jim Finn. It’s a reply to an article by the biblewarroiress, whose blog I follow. The question that is… no, let me start differently: In her article which is headlined with „Terrorizing People to Jesus“ the Warrioress makes a valid point: Asking someone to submit to Jesus Christ out of fear isn’t love offered freely. Threatening them and making them afraid isn’t how God wants us to come to Him....
Yesterday I wrote about people are leaving church because they don’t find God there anymore, but rather some civilized idol, an image of God we made ourselves and civilized, to have in control. Anybody remember the commandments? Wasn’t there one saying we should not make an image of God? Right! But this was rather about statues. The God of the OT is to be invisible. Yet we do still need some image, to think „God“ at least....
I just ran across a blogpost by Dan Wilkinson on why people are leaving the church. There he responds to a quote by some guy named Ken Ham who claimed people would leave church because of the teachings of evolution and because this would tell them the bible could not be trusted. Then Dan writes why young people are really leaving church, well in his opinion. Read it, I think he has a point....
The sad thing is that the cartoon has a point. There are lots of believers who mix up belief and knowledge, faith and facts. But actually faith does NOT mean pretending to know something you are as clueless about as others. Faith in God has rather few to do with hard facts. God can be there if creation or evolution is true, that won’t hinder too much. And God can even be there without any afterlife....
I like God’s Politics Blog a lot, and read their articles from time to time. It gives me insight to what’s going on in American Christianity and more specifically, the American Christianity we don’t hear much about in the media here, because God’s Politics Blog belongs rather to the Christian Left than the Christian Right and the Christian Left is something you wouldn’t know about here unless you sought for the term on google, I guess....