There’s a meme called “When You See It”. You’re given a photo that looks pretty mundane, but once you’ve spotted a particular detail, the picture shifts from mundane to hilarious (or maybe horrifying). You can never go back to seeing the picture the way you first did. In the same way, my feeling is that once you’ve seen the gaping flaws in the Gospel of Matthew’s resurrection account, you’ll never go back to thinking it’s anything but garbage.
In 2003, more than a decade before it legalized gay marriage, the Supreme Court declared all anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional. The United States could no longer punish a same-sex couple for engaging in homosexual acts. And that, combined with Roe v. Wade, is when America ceased to be a Christian nation.
Why do we keep the sacred separate from the profane? So we don’t dirty up the clean things. The clean things won’t make the dirty things any cleaner, but the dirty things sure can mess up the clean things. So we keep them separate. If we don’t, we’re left with nothing but dirty things. And this holds just as true for concepts as it does for objects.
You have a choice whether to participate in the public sin of others. If you join it, you show others that you approve of that sin, and you encourage them to do the same. Which is why Christians must refrain to the best of their ability from participating in gay weddings.
“God has a plan for your life!” Okay. Say God does have a plan for your life. Does that matter when you don’t know what the plan is? God had a plan for Robert Godwin’s life. And the last line of that plan read, “Apr. 16, 2017 – Gets shot in the face at random; dies.”
A significant segment of the population has gotten to the point they feel more kinship with animals than with their fellow human beings. Gorillas are their neighbors; children aren’t. But is this any surprise? In the U.S. we kill nearly a million unborn children a year. How does this happen if not by withholding empathy from them? And you can’t develop the lack of empathy needed to kill the unborn without losing empathy for the born.
Every religion contains some expression of our desire that good be rewarded and evil be punished. Eastern religions generally look to reincarnation; Western religions look forward to a resurrection and final judgment. But both paradigms are built on the recognition of a stark truth: “What goes around comes around” is usually not a given in this world. We live in a world of loose ends.
You might be willing to suffer torture or even give up your own life to keep your enemies from getting what they want. But if your child’s safety or life is on the line, you’ll just fold like a house of cards, won’t you? You’ll do anything to keep him or her in one piece…or will you? What if there’s a fate to be avoided that’s worse than death?
“Lucifer” is a fun show to watch so long as you take it as it is — a work of fiction borrowing heavily from religion — and while it’s troubling to think unsuspecting people might receive their first impression of the devil from it and think, “Hey, the devil isn’t all that bad!” recognize that most of our first impressions of religious figures — angels, Moses, Jesus, God, Muhammad, etc. — don’t come from original sources and have been distorted in some way.
Lucifer has a “super-power”: he can compel people to tell uncomfortable, inappropriate truths about themselves. (Enjoy kitten crush videos? You’ll tell him. You’ll *want* to.) Here we touch on one of the darkest aspects of the Internet: anonymous confession. How much evil has been unleashed in people’s hearts since they’re now able to freely confess evil desires behind a veil of anonymity and, worse, find others who are like-minded?