12 posts tagged “bible”
When I read the above quote, it reminded me of this experience.
Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.
NEWSWEEK
Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?
Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.
The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.
The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."
To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.
In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)
Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).
The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.
If the bible doesn't give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?
Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.
Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.
Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL, 55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their "head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job. Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards, radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."
Religious wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"? Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997 of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that the society no longer holds."
We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
You were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
More wonderful than that of women.
Here, the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.
In addition to its praise of friendship and its condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The boy needed two human parents, after all.
In the Christian story, the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."
The practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over "holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships," he says.
Still, very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage. Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing" ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains: should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."
More basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.
With Sarah Ball and Anne Underwood
I'm taking a religious studies course (very different from a theology course) over the Gospel of Mark this semester and have thoroughly enjoyed myself thus far. The class isn't too demanding, but there is a ton of reading for each class. And, well, I have to write a 25 page research paper on a topic of my choosing. The only restriction is that the topic has to deal with the Gospel of Mark in some way. I'm not sure what I'm going to write about. Perhaps the Historical Jesus, Jesus and Mysticism, or the Future of Christianity.
The Gospel of Mark is the earliest gospel, dating to around 70 CE. Scholars aren't sure whether this gospel was written right before, during, or after 70 CE. 70 CE is an important date because this is when the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Because of this date, Mark is considered to be the earliest of the synoptic gospels, which comprise of Mark, Matthew and Luke. The majority of scholars think that Matthew and Luke based their gospels on Mark and another source called "Q" (Quelle in German which means source) by scholars. Q is thought to be a gospel similar to the Gospel of Thomas that was used by both Matthew and Luke to create their gospels.
It is important to note that we do not know who the author of Mark was and that we do not have the original copy of Mark. Moreover, we only have copies of copies of copies of copies. As far as textual evidence goes, we only have 8 complete copies of Mark from the first 800 years of Christianity and about 5500 bits and pieces of manuscript dated post-9th century.Furthermore, the complete copies are not all exactly the same--this is due to additions, changes, mistakes and omissions made by scribes over the years.
One of the things scholars know is that the author of Mark seriously thought that the "end times" were near and were going to happen soon. In light of this knowledge, most people who derive meaning from the Gospel of Mark believe that the end times have yet to come and will come. This type of thinking is extremely tetchy, to say the least.
Furthermore, the author of Mark was writing to a specific group during a specific time in a specific environment. It is hard to imagine that the author of Mark thought that his gospel would be used over the course of the next 2,000 years to derive meaning from. His gospel wasn't meant to do this. I read an article for class that talked about reader-response criticism--which argues whatever meaning is and wherever it is found, the reader is ultimately responsible for determining it, thus the intended meaning by the author is irrelevant--and meaning, and wrote this in response:
Throughout my reading of Fowler’s article, I couldn’t help but ask “Should we even derive meaning from the Gospel of Mark?” More specifically, did the author of Mark intend for us to derive meaning from his gospel nearly two thousand years later? These are profound questions that require answers, although I think most people, even some scholars, are hesitant to ask such questions. My reasoning is this: if the author of Mark was writing with a specific purpose and agenda to a specific community in a specific time period and honestly thought that the “end times” were coming, then we shouldn’t be deriving meaning from the gospel solely because it wasn’t written with that intent for us to do so. This isn’t to say that we can’t derive meaning from Mark, because we most definitely can, but perhaps we shouldn’t derive meaning from Mark because the meaning we derive will not be close to what the author was intending.
Meaning is a function of many things: culture, language, interpretation, theology, environment, experience, etc. Thus, the intended meaning of the author of Mark is nearly impossible to recreate because we were not there to experience the environment and culture in which the ancient reader would’ve constructed his or her meaning. Subjective experience in the author’s environment is crucial to understanding the author’s intended meaning, yet we cannot create subjective experiences in the ancient environment. Thus, any meaning we derive from the gospel is tainted by our modern-day culture, language, theology—which has no doubt evolved since the author’s time—environment, and experience.
In conclusion, my biggest problem with reader-response criticism is the lack of objectivity. Contrary to what Soren Kierkegaard believed, objectivity should always influence the subjective. This isn’t to say that the subjective meaning is useless, quite the contrary—subjective meaning is immensely important. If the objective intent of the author cannot be derived, and the purpose of the author wasn’t for us to deriving meaning from his work almost two thousand years later, then perhaps we shouldn’t be deriving meaning from it in the way most of us do.
Sounds quite plausible to me, more so than Christian tradition.Let me conclude by telling you what I really do think about Jesus’ resurrection. The one thing we know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their scriptures to try and make sense of it. They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he couldn’t be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be crucified. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or a great king or a great judge. He was to be a figure of grandeur and power, not somebody who’s squashed by the enemy like a mosquito. How could Jesus, the Messiah, have been killed as a common criminal? Christians turned to their scriptures to try and understand it, and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of God’s suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. Christians came to believe their scriptures that Jesus was the Righteous One and that God must have vindicated him. And so Christians came to think of Jesus as one who, even though he had been crucified, came to be exalted to heaven, much as Elijah and Enoch had in the Hebrew scriptures. How can he be Jesus the Messiah though, if he’s been exalted to heaven? Well, Jesus must be coming back soon to establish the kingdom. He wasn’t an earthly Messiah; he’s a spiritual Messiah. That’s why the early Christians thought the end was coming right away in their own lifetime. That’s why Paul taught that Christ was the first fruit of the resurrection. But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection. It wasn’t three days later they started circulating the story; it might have been a year later, maybe two years. Five years later they didn’t know when the stories had started. Nobody could go to the tomb to check; the body had decomposed. Believers who knew he had been raised from the dead started having visions of him. Others told stories about these visions of him, including Paul. Stories of these visions circulated. Some of them were actual visions like Paul, others of them were stories of visions like the five hundred group of people who saw him. On the basis of these stories, narratives were constructed and circulated and eventually we got the Gospels of the New Testament written 30, 40, 50, 60 years later.
When we investigate what Christians mean by their peculiar use of the word faith, I think we come to the remarkable conclusion that all their accounts of it are either unintelligible or false. Their most famous account is that in Hebrew 11:1 "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." This is obviously unintelligible. In any case, it does not make faith a virtue, since neither a substance nor an evidence can be a virtue. A virtue is a praiseworthy habit of choice, and neither a substance nor an evidence can be a habit of choice, When a Christian gives an intelligible account of faith. I think you will find that it is false. I mean that it is not a true dictionary report of how he and other Christians actually use the word. For example. Augustine asked: "What is faith but believing what you do not see? (Joannis Evang. Tract., c. 40, 8). But Christians do not use the word faith in the sense of believing what you do not see. You do not see thunder; but you cannot say in the Christian sense "have faith that it is thundering," or "I have faith that it has thundered in the past and will again in the future." You do not see mathematical truths; but you cannot say in the Christian sense "have faith that there is no greatest number." If we take Augstine's see to stand here for know, still it is false that Christians use the word faith to mean "believing what you do not know," for they would never call it faith if anyone believed that the sun converts hydrogen into helium, although he did not know it.
A good hit of what Christian really mean by their word faith can be got by considering the proposition: "Tom Paine had faith that there is no god." Is this a possible remark, in the Christian sense of the word faith? No, it is an impossible remark, because it is self-contradictory, because part of what Christians mean by faith is belief that there is a god.
There is more to it than this. Christian faith is not merely believing that there is a god. It is believing that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. "Have faith," in the Christian sense, means "make yourself believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence on the question may be. Christian faith is a habit of flouting reason in forming and maintaining one's answer to the question whether there is a god. Its essence is the determination to believe that there is a god no matter what the evidence may be.-Richard Robinson
What do you think? Is his analysis of "faith" accurate?
I found this article to be quite interesting. ;)
And God Said, "Just Do It"
By David Van Biema
Genesis, chapter 2 verse 24, says a man "shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But how liberally to define cleave? That was the very special Bible query the Rev. Stacy Spencer and his wife Rhonda took up last month with 252 married people at their New Direction Christian Church in Memphis, Tenn. And the Spencers' answer was ... encouraging. Does frequent sex have a place in marriage? Yep. Oral sex? Read the Song of Solomon 2: 3 for assurance. How about role-playing? One participant expressed a yearning to see her husband dressed as a police officer. The Good Book offers no specifics on that, so Stacy Spencer allowed that it was up to the woman, "as long as you're not lusting after a particular officer. Jesus talked about spiritual adultery, and that could be spiritual adultery. But if it's just a generic cop, go for it."
Superior sex can be difficult for some couples to discuss with each other, let alone with their pastor. But having taken on almost every other aspect of their congregants' lives, churches oriented toward young adults and Gen Xers have begun promoting not just better sex, but more of it. Well, not just promoting it but penciling it in. When New Direction launched its "40 Nights of Grrreat Sex" program, the Spencers gave participants daily planners. A typical week is marked "Sun: Worship together"; "Mon: Give your wife a full body massage"; "Tues: Quickie in any room besides the bedroom"; "Wed: Pleasure your partner"; "Thurs: Read 1 Corinthians 7--How can I please you more?"; and so on.
New Direction is not the only church promoting a frequent-sex regimen. In February, Paul Wirth, pastor of the Relevant Church in Tampa, Fla., issued what he called "The 30-Day Sex Challenge." The program featured an extensive questionnaire, a Bible verse a day and the assumption that participants would engage in some kind of sex each night. Wirth says he has received calls from eight pastors asking about his program's guidelines. A megachurch in Texas, the Fellowship of the Woodlands, holds semiannual Sacred Sex Weekends ("Learn how you can experience a fulfilling sex life with God's blessing").
Scheduling time for sex appears to be in vogue, and not just among believers. In June, couples in Colorado and North Carolina published books detailing their postnuptial attempts to have sex 101 and 365 days in a row, respectively. But the issue takes on added urgency among conservative Christians, who have just as high a divorce rate as the country at large but theoretically take the till-death-do-us-part aspect of marriage as a faith obligation. When it comes to sex, Wirth contends, many are thinking, "If this doesn't get better, it's gonna be a really sucky life."
"My own marriage was in trouble 10 years ago," he says, but it was reinvigorated with the help of His Needs, Her Needs by clinical psychologist Willard Harley. Wirth eventually contacted Harley and got permission to use the book for his church program. Meanwhile, at New Direction, Spencer discovered John Gray's Mars and Venus in the Bedroom and Getting the Sex You Want by Tammy Nelson.
Their congregations differ in some ways--New Direction, a Disciples of Christ church, is mostly African--American; Relevant is nondenominational and mostly white--but both flocks fall into the 20-to-40 age group, as do their pastors. Along with their wives, the preachers developed programs involving large-scale, coed seminars and a save-that-month schedule; the Spencers also set up a blog so users can post questions anonymously. Both couples emphasized the spiritual, emotional and, yes, practical aspects of having better sex more often. For instance, a husband can expect smoother sailing at night if he helps his wife clear her "to do" list that evening, Spencer said in a conference call with his wife, who added, "Otherwise he's just another thing on that list."
Protestant history has included periods of enthusiastic talk about sex, as well as chilly silence. A famous 1623 Puritan sermon made the case for "mutual [conjugal] dalliances for pleasure's sake," presumably as a distinction from Roman Catholicism's procreation-only rule. In the 1970s, several conservative Christian leaders responded to the popularity of Alex Comfort's classic how-to The Joy of Sex by reminding their flocks that whoopee for whoopee's sake was not doctrinally prohibited; Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and Left Behind co-author Tim LaHaye each put out manuals for married couples.
Still, these new calendrical sexhortations have their critics. Lauren Sandler, feminist and author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, suspects they are "another way of becoming the best Christian wife--to have tons of orgasms so their husbands can go to church the next day and tell people how they really made Jesus proud in the sack." Todd Friel, host of the syndicated radio show Way of the Master, says sexual intimacy was created as a taste of what it's like to be in a "right relationship" with God. "That's amazing, and it's a little different than 'Come and improve your sex life in a 30-day challenge,'" he says. But some participants find meaning in the programs. "After more than 20 yrs of marriage, this has been 'a shot in the arm,'" one New Direction congregant wrote on the Spencers' blog. "In the past month we have been to Victoria's Secret 4 times (the secret is out!!). Thanks Pastor and 1st Lady for your openness, and obediences to God."
Source: Time.com
CNN) -- School administrators in Ohio voted Friday to begin the process of firing a middle school teacher accused of burning a cross into a student's arm and refusing to keep his religious beliefs out of the classroom.
A middle school student in Ohio says his teacher branded a cross on his arm.
The Mount Vernon School Board passed a resolution to terminate the employment of John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher for the past 21 years.
Freshwater, according to an independent report, used an electrostatic device to mark a cross on the arm of one of his students, causing pain to the student the night of the incident and leaving a mark that lasted for approximately three weeks.
According to the Ohio Department of Education, the student's family has filed a lawsuit.
Freshwater was also reprimanded several times for refusing to move his Bible from his classroom desk and teaching creationism alongside evolution, according to the 15-page independent report. The report also cites evidence that Mr. Freshwater told his students that "science is wrong because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner."
The Board of Education of the Mount Vernon City School District met in special session Friday to address the case.
Freshwater has the option to contest the process by requesting a formal hearing before the Board of Education. Neither Freshwater nor his attorney could be reached by CNN for comment.
Source: cnn.com
I thought this was pretty crazy...
First of all, Happy Father's Day! I hope all you fathers out there had a wonderful day.
For Father's day, my father wanted my brother, sister, and I to go to church with him, so I went to church this morning. The other night I was talking to my mother about this whole predicament: I didn't want to go to church, but it was Father's day, and my father wanted me to go to church with him.
I am an atheist, and well, I don't really enjoy going to church. Why would I go to church? I fundamentally disagree with what most churches preach these days. I really didn't want to go to church. But this is father's day, so shouldn't I do what my father wants me to do on his day?
My father doesn't know I'm an atheist yet, and I can't exactly tell him for numerous reasons. So I talked to my mother about my current situation. She basically said that I was being selfish because I wanted to do what I want (not go to church) on the day in which I should be doing what my father wants. She told me that I am quite capable of going to church, despite being an atheist.
I responded by saying that it doesn't matter that I'm capable of going to church--I just don't want to go to church! I knew it was going to really bother me to sit through a sermon and go to bible study class. I suppose I was being selfish in my response. But, honestly, me go to church? You've got to be kidding me.
I ended up going to church today, but it wasn't fun. I found myself disagreeing with everything the preacher was saying. The bible study class was worse, though. We were reading a part of the Bible that really, really bothered me. I'm actually going to write my refutation of this part of scripture in the next post.
I went to church this time, but I'm not sure I'm going to go to church next Father's day. Would it be okay to just tell my father, "Um, yeah, I know you want me to go to church with you, but I don't want to"?
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever - this is a somewhat new kind of religion.
-Albert Einstein
The religiosity of Albert Einstein has been debated for quite some time. Someone say he believe in God and was a traditional theists. Others say, he wasn't a traditional theist, and some even say he was an atheist. It seems Einstein wasn't an atheist, but he wasn't a traditional theist at all. Einstein was a pantheist. In a recently discovered letter written to a philosopher friend, Einstein states that Bible is "childish." Perhaps this letter with finally show everyone that Einstein wasn't a traditional theist at all.
Einstein letter calls Bible ‘pretty childish’
Famous scientist also dismisses belief in God as product of human weakness
LONDON - Albert Einstein: arch rationalist or scientist with a spiritual core?
A letter being auctioned in London this week adds more fuel to the long-simmering debate about the Nobel Prize-winning physicist's religious views. In the note, written the year before his death, Einstein dismissed the idea of God as the product of human weakness and the Bible as "pretty childish."
The letter, handwritten in German, is being sold by Bloomsbury Auctions on Thursday and is expected to fetch between $12,000 and $16,000.
Einstein, who helped unravel the mysteries of the universe with his theory of relativity, expressed complex and arguably contradictory views on faith, perceiving a universe suffused with spirituality while rejecting organized religion.
The letter up for sale, written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, suggests his views on religion did not mellow with age.
In it, Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."
"For me," he added, "the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."
Addressing the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people, Einstein wrote that "the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Bloomsbury spokesman Richard Caton said the auction house was "100 percent certain" of the letter's authenticity. It is being offered at auction for the first time, by a private vendor.
Quirky beliefs
John Brooke, emeritus professor of science and religion at Oxford University, said the letter lends weight to the notion that "Einstein was not a conventional theist" — although he was not an atheist, either.
"Like many great scientists of the past, he is rather quirky about religion, and not always consistent from one period to another," Brooke said.
Born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1879, Einstein said he went through a devout phase as a child before beginning to question conventional religion at the age of 12.
In later life, he expressed a sense of wonder at the universe and its mysteries — what he called a "cosmic religious feeling" — and famously said: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
But he also said: "I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws."
Brooke said Einstein believed that "there is some kind of intelligence working its way through nature. But it is certainly not a conventional Christian or Judaic religious view."
Einstein's most famous legacy is the special theory of relativity, which makes the point that a large amount of energy could be released from a tiny amount of matter, as expressed in the equation e=mc2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). The theory changed the face of physics, allowing scientists to make predictions about space and paving the way for nuclear power and the atomic bomb.
Einstein's musings on science, war, peace and God helped make him world famous, and his scientific legacy prompted Time magazine to name him its Person of the 20th Century.
I watched the Compassion Forum tonight on CNN. Clinton's responses weren't in any way interesting, but Obama's responses were quite interesting :) Okay, maybe I'm a little biased. I am most definitely an Obama supporter. Nevertheless, I think we can all learn from Obama's position on faith and religion in America. I read Obama's speech on faith (the link is in "My Links" to the left of this post) a couple of months ago and found myself constantly moving my head up and down in agreement with his words. Below are a few thought provoking quotes from his speech.
In fact, because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they're something they're not. They don't need to do that. None of us need to do that.
Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
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