Words Less Spoken

The promo for Thursday night’s Nightline on ABC caught my attention: “Does Satan Exist?” Face-Off. The debate line up featured Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Deepak Chopra, Bishop Carlton Pearson, and some girl who founded Hookers for Jesus (no, seriously). I’ve been an admirer of Carlton Pearson and have blogged about his departure from evangelicalismbefore. I’ve also made no secret my support of Deepak Chopra in many blog posts. It was sure to be a dust up, so I watched.

The problem is there were only teaser clips from the most heated parts of the debate and neither view was given any length of time to be properly explored. I thought Deepak came across as angry most of the time, but I guess that comes with the territory when you’re on defense in a church full of people who think you are the anti-Christ. The Hookers for Jesuschick really needs some therapy, in my opinion. I thought Carlton Pearson was graceful as always. Mark Driscoll came across as a guy trying to get PR for himself and his church, who happened to host the event and pass out fliers to the attendees as they were leaving.

I think the unedited full length debate is far more informative than the 30 minute commericial-filled show, but overall I think it was a desperate ratings ploy for the dying Late Night news variety show. Just put Jimmy Kimmel on at 11:30pm est already!!!

Oh, as to the question of whether “Does Satan Exist?”, my answer is emphatically, “No!” I gave up on that a few years ago, along with sin, hell, and neurotic religion-induced guilt. I’m free!  I suppose most people would want a little more substantive explanation, but I really don’t have the intellectual energy to spend on the subject at the moment. Here’s my short take on it:

• “Satan” is a means of avoiding personal responsibility for your own issues
• “Satan” is a strained attempt to come to grips with the problem of human suffering
• “Satan” is another means of religion using fear to manipulate people

The oft used excuse was used in the show a couple times that “The best thing Satan could do is to convince people he doesn’t exist” or some equivalent thereof. That’s a fairly weak argument. Deepak said that a belief in Satan was “primitive,” which got a rouse out of Mark Driscoll who accused Chopra of belittling believers. The point is that believing in Satan is literally one of the most “primitive” beliefs in human history, and its equivalent can be found in the oldest of all religions in ancient history. It’s akin to animal sacrifice, superstitions, etc.

The other argument made in the show was that you cannot believe Satan does not exist and believe that God DOES exist, that you cannot have one without the other. Therein is a slippery slope upon which few will dare to tread. It is my belief that the fundamentalist dogmatic view of God is dead as well as Satan, but that’s a whole other blog post or two or three or a hundred.

Tim Russert busted Hillary for ‘lifting’ from the speeches of Bill Clinton and John Edwards. 

Meet the Press, February 24, 2008

My wife observed that I’ve been watching MSBNC and CNN more than Fox News lately. I used to only watch Fox. I told her Fox doesn’t even try to hide their bias anymore. I can’t take it. Apparently, my religious views aren’t the only thing that’s changed in the last few years. I have always been a Republican and have only voted for Democrats in local and state races where personal integrity was more important to me than political branding. For the record President Bush has been an enormous disappointment to me, although I believe he has been much better than the alternative of Al Gore or John Kerry. Aside from the early Bush tax cuts and the pastoral duties he pulled after 9/11, the rest of his administration has been a joke to me. It pisses me off that we could have a Ivy League graduate for president that can’t speak the English language. What? Did he cliff note his way through college? In hindsight we got more of the conservative agenda passed with Bill Clinton as president than we have with George W. Bush.

Having said that the field of Republican candidates has been a joke. Is this the best they can come up with? Early on I liked Thompson until he came out, if you will. Talk about a ‘thud.’ You have to wish someone would stick a live 110 volt wire up his ass just to see if he would jump while at the podium. Totally lifeless. Taking all the right positions in an campaign means nothing anymore. It’s just spin. G.W. did the same and look where it got us. He’s effectively destroyed the Republican party.

So, I liked Huckabee when I heard him. He’s smart and witty. He seems to make sense and be saying what a lot of normal people I know think. The whole pastoral thing didn’t bother me much because I followed him a little bit as Governor of Arkansas. I was really pulling for him until I saw him stumping from pulpits. Then he started saying wierd stuff about the ‘Word of God’ being more important than the Constitution and how the Constitution should be changed to line up with the ‘Word of God’ and not the other way around. Stop the presses! That’s a whole lot of fundamentalism coming from a supposedly populist/moderate candidate. Even if he’s just placating to the evangelical base, it still scares me. I’ve had more than enough of G.W.’s Christianity being espoused from the White House. He’s done as much damage to the image of Christ followers in the world as he has to Republicans. So, I think I’m done with Huckabee.

I never liked Guiliani despite his 9/11 rant and lead in national polls all of last year. He effectively imploded. You can blame his Florida-only strategy all you want. It was him that was the problem. Something just bugged me about him as a person, and no, it wasn’t his multiple marriages or social positions. Romney? I’ve got to be honest. I cannot get past the fact that he’s a Mormon. Most people in the South can’t either. I know it’s religious bigotry or something, but as hard as it has been for me to take evangelicals seriously since I’ve deconverted, it is impossible for me to take Mormons seriously in their magic underwear. On top of all the Jude0-Christian spin we’re supposed to take literally, Mormons believe Jesus showed up in America in the 1800’s, and golden plates descended from heaven to Joseph Smith with the book of Mormon on them? Can’t go there. I have a general knee-jerk reaction to anyone who wears their religion on their shirt sleeve. G.W. may have used the Texas Air National Guard to get out of Vietnam, but Romney was a Mormon missionary during that time! I’ve had enough of religious nuts in the White House. Sorry. Not to mention Romney looks as fake as a daytime soap star. He has changed his positions depending on whether he was trying to get elected the Governor of Massachusetts or POTUS. It’s just more spin.

Everyone wants to pay homage to McCain’s POW years and that’s respectable. I even gave money to him the first time he ran against G.W. in 2000, but this is not the same McCain. He’s waffled on so many things. He’s sold out the party on more than one occasion and now expects the party to fall in line behind him. He’s been playing to ‘his friends’ in the Senate for the last 8 years. Let them put him in the White House if they want to. I don’t like his temper. I agree with him on pork spending, but he wants to keep us in Iraq indefinately. What the hell? Time to pack up and hit the road.

I think the best thing for the Republican party is to lose. They can have a gut check and get with the program if they want to win again. Once they got power they did the same things the Democrats did. Spend, spend, spend, and increase the size and power of the federal government.

There is nothing in me that will allow me to pull a lever for Hillary. If Bill were running right now, I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat, but not her. Her claim to fame is that she is his wife. She’s been in the Senate for a term and a half. That’s it. No other elected office. I don’t like her personally or politically. Now, Obama. I really like him. It may be a generational thing, but he resonates with me. I can find plenty to pick apart with him on policies, but I think the country has swung way too far to the right. It’s past time for a correction. V for Vendetta illustrates well the extremes of the far right if left unchecked. It’s not really all fiction. Obama has tapped into the pulse of the country. I can’t really pick anything he’s said that I whole heartedly disagree with. Give driver’s licenses to illegals! I really don’t care. They’re driving anyway aren’t they? If people would just build a damn fence from Texas to California and deport any that commit crimes, I could care less if the rest of them stay here or not. Can you imagine the humanitarian crisis of a massive forced expulsion of millions of people? Could we possible retain our humanity and heard millions like cattle? I digress. I’ll be blogging more about Obama and the race later. Suffice it to say for now, that I have to pull the lever Saturday for a Republican because we have a closed primary system in Louisiana, so I’ll probably pull it for Huckabee because he’s not Romney and won’t win anyway. In the general election I’ll pull for Obama. If he’s not on the ballot, I’ll be ticked. If Hillary’s the nominee, I may have to pull for McCain and live with it. What a sad day it will be if we miss the opportunity to put Obama in the White House. I think John Mayer’s song “Waitin’ on the World to Change” embodies the sentiment of so many. Obama said that ‘we are the change that we’ve been waiting for.’ I believe that, and I hope he is too.

Shari Rhodes deserves an academy award for casting Even Money. How she got these people to sign up for this one, I’ll never know. Consider the A-list here: Kim Basinger, Nick Cannon, Danny DeVito, Kelsey Grammer, Ray Liotta, Jay Mohr, Tim Roth, & Forest Whitaker. The beginning was good, as in the first 15 minutes. I liked the layered intro of the characters, but after that it went down hill quickly. It was terribly written and ridiculously predictable. It starts getting worse, but you keep hoping that something’s going to turn it around soon. It doesn’t happen. About half way through Basinger has an argument with her husband Liotta when this corny background music starts playing. Right then my wife looks up and says, “This sounds like a Lifetime movie.” I could not have described it any better. It would be a perfect Lifetime Original were it not for the all-star cast. Oh, Kelsey Grammar was good though, if only they didn’t bury his face in prosthetics and makeup, as to disguise the fact that it’s Kelsey Grammar.Don’t waste your money or your time on this one. You’ll have better luck with the nickel slots!

Set your DVR’s now. “To Hell and Back”will re-air on MSNBC this Saturday, Sept. 29, @ 6:00pm and Sunday, Sept. 30, @ 2:00am. This is “Must See TV.” Originally aired as a Dateline segment this summer, a one hour expanded special dubbed “To Hell and Back” tells the story of Bishop Carlton Pearson’s rise as a pentecostal mega-star and protege of Oral Roberts and fall from grace when his epiphany led him to embrace a “gospel of inclusion.” Here are just a few quotes that resonated with me:

“It made me question the term that the Bible is ‘innerrant and infallible.’ To say that the Bible is not the Word of God but is the word of man about God, as best as man had perceived God, is troubling, even for me to say it.”

“If you fear God the way we’re taught to fear Him, you’ll serve Him, you’ll believe in Him, you’ll worship Him, but you will probably never really love Him.”

“‘God, I don’t know how you’re going to call yourself a loving God and allow these people to suffer so much and then just suck them into hell… God, I can’t save this whole world.’ That’s when I heard that voice say, ‘Precisely. That’s what we did, and if you’d tell them that they are redeemed, you wouldn’t create those kinds of problems.’”

“If the cross and Christ and all that stuff really happened and is really spiritual, which I believe it is, then if He came to save the world, the world is saved, unless He is a failure.”

“The Bible is like an idol. It’s certainly like an icon, but that’s the Greek word for idol. We swear on it. We keep it in our cars, and we lay it under our pillow when we’re afraid… I respect the Bible. I take it very seriously. I just don’t take it literally.”

“I think Christianity has distorted itself into a very impure cult-following of Jesus. I think Jesus would be appalled at what we’ve become.”

Personally I admire his courage and boldness to be honest about his own struggles with the faith we’ve been asked to embrace, especially while still in the pulpit, because the largest shift in my personal theology came after I left full-time pastoral ministry. So much of what he talks about sounds so familiar to thoughts I’ve had and shared in past posts. I wrote about my disillusion with the concept of hell back in March in this post The Church is Pro-Hell. If you’re unable to catch the encore presentation this weekend, the two shorter Dateline segments are available online: Segment One and Segment Two.

For further info: New Dimensions Worship Center