Well done America!

Ex Mormons (2)

Ex Mormons

How many times have you tripped over the "I am a Mormon" ad campaign while surfing the web.  How effective this charm offensive by the LDS church has been is difficult to gauge, but you have to wonder whether its launch in the middle of last year had just a little something to do with the presidential aspirations of Governor Romney.

No good idea should go unchallenged however, and so along comes a parallel campaign - a different type of "testimony" - which probably won't please the church officials in Utah.  Freedom of speech. Brilliant!

Franklin Graham's Gratuitous Advice

"This could be America's last call to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, God's only Son, who is coming again one day very soon to save His own and to judge those who don't know and worship Him."

Franklin Graham in Charisma News

Thus speaketh Franklin, son of Billy.  The "last call" he's referring to is an evangelistic campaign scheduled for next year featuring the old man, who will then be ninety five.  Talk about an inflated sense of his own significance.

Franklin is one of a long line of ne'er do well offspring of evangelists who, after making an energetic and colourful break from the restrictions imposed in their youth, suddenly wise up to the fact that there's money in the religion business, and with a bit of crawling back to dear old dad, they're in line to be the next guy who gets to sign the cheques.  Can we all say nepotism together...

Franklin has always had a problem when it comes to running off at the mouth while the brain is in neutral, and the current US election is no exception.  Father and son have implicitly endorsed their favoured candidate, and then built political rhetoric into their religious message... a nice tax exempt perk.

Of course everyone is entitled to an opinion and a vote to go with it.  But to wrap that up in a cloak of self-righteous sanctity, and entwine it in self important End Times blather; well, that's ratcheting it up to a whole new level.

"My father watches the news every day, and he is deeply concerned about the enormous moral issues facing our country.  That's why your vote on Nov. 6 is so critical."

Big deal.  Since when did watching TV news (let me guess... Fox?) make someone an expert? 

And what does Franklin consider the big moral issues - informed by "biblical values"?  Poverty?  Justice?  Peace?  Not so likely.  These guys would do well to consider the moral issues around Bible thumping in the name of God, and those con artists who extract bucks from wallets and purses by pretending to hold some kind of divine commission.  That kind of moral issue seems never to have disturbed them.  They're usually too busy playing "ain't it awful" by contemplating what's happening below other people's belt lines.

"So pray and then vote on Nov. 6, asking God for His mercy and grace upon our land. There’s still time to turn from our wicked ways so that He might spare us from His wrath against sin."

Billy Graham created his substantial reputation and undeserved credibility by manipulating the fears and insecurities of millions over his long career.  Even as a kid I remember the effect his tawdry little hellfire book World Aflame had on people I knew.  Some would say that he has moved on from his earlier fundamentalism.  Maybe so, but the news doesn't seem to have reached Franklin yet.  Clearly for him, that old World Aflame fear religion is alive and well.

Why is it that we condemn as sectarian this kind of exploitation when it's done by fringe groups, but mutter 'amens' when someone clothed in 'respectability' does the exact same thing.

You're welcome to consider Franklin Graham a saintly soul if you like, but he sounds an awful lot like some of the less glorious religious hucksters in the business.  And somehow that makes this latest round of Bible-clutching, wallet-stroking political posturing even more loathsome.

Halloween horrors

Halloween is the event that some Christians embrace as All Hallows Eve, and yet is demonised (quite literally) by others.  Keith Stump, a former staff writer for The Plain Truth, attempts to dispel the haze over on Gary Leonard's blog in an article called Halloween Hysteria.  While it's aimed at the ex-Church of God demographic, anyone who has wondered whether it's a bad thing to be involved in may find it quite relevant.

Catholic Mass vs. Presbyterian Revisionism

On Sunday I chanced across two church services broadcast by RTE, the Irish equivalent of the BBC (oh the wonders of Internet radio!)  In New Zealand the era of church broadcasts on public radio is but a distant memory, but Ireland apparently moves at its own pace.

First up was a 45 minute Roman Catholic mass.  It was obviously liturgical (though reasonably contemporary) with a brief sermon that stressed positive values.  Putting aside distinctives of dogma (references to the concept of sacrifice in the eucharist for example) it strongly reminded me of the Lutheran services of my youth.  Whatever else might or might not be said, it exuded a sense of worship, with dignity and an aesthetic balance that verged at times on beauty.

Immediately following was a second 45 minute service from a Presbyterian church.  Whereas the mass featured a gospel reading (surely an irreducible core to scripture reading), this service featured a psalm and a section of the story of Samson in Judges - nothing from the New Testament.  The whole thing began with a sultry poetic improvisation on the Samson and Delilah tale, and an awful lot of talking around the obvious was broken up with canned music - modern upbeat rehashes of traditional hymns.

Could it get worse?  Absolutely.  Then cometh the sermon.  While the minister conceded that, on the surface, the Samson narrative is anything but an inspiration to the advancement of peace, justice and apple pie, it nonetheless serves to advance human goodness and progress.  How so?  Well, it was a negative example to ancient Israel.  When the tribal groups gathered around their respective campfires they were led to contemplate not Samson's macho strength and prowess, but his naughtiness in killing a thousand unfortunate Philistines with that jawbone of an ass and tormenting those poor foxes by setting their tails alight.  They doubtless huddled together in horror to hear how he pulled down the temple of Dagon in an act of suicide terrorism.  "My goodness me," quoth they, "we can certainly meditate meaningfully on this at our mid-week Book Club meeting."

Okay, so I'm taking some liberties with the sermon, but that was certainly the gist of it, as I heard it.  And it is all, naturally, complete rubbish.  Samson was a folk hero precisely because he disposed of so many of the enemy.  Around those long ago campfires it stretches credibility to imagine the people holding sober discussions ("what does this passage mean to you Abijah?") while they knitted scarves for Greenpeace and tut-tutted over the abuse of foxes and their God-given animal rights.  Nope, the Samson stories would have been retold with relish just as they appear at surface level.

This kind of revisionism is theological hocus pocus, even if it is the glory of preachers.  It amounts to rewriting the scriptures to suit our modern sensibilities.  Try as you might, no sow's ear will ever a silk purse make.  Fundamentally the attempt is both delusional and, let's not mince words, dishonest.

No doubt about it, for my money the Catholic mass was the superior option that day, winning hands down over the dubious yakkity yak and strained effort at wordy meaningfulness from the so-called Protestant corner.  Too much talk, too much low-quality rationalisation, too much creative but desperate avoidance of the bleedingly obvious.  This isn't so much theology as apologetics in upmarket drag.  Much safer to stick to a liturgy and keep the sermon down to 5 minutes.

Protestants are, of course, a diverse lot.  Most Anglicans and Lutherans would, I suspect, have felt more at home, at least on this one night on RTE, with the tone of the mass rather than the swinging of a Presbyterian jawbone. 

Ain't that the truth !

From a Facebook post by Felix Taylor.