The 1619 Project’s chapter and verse numbers have not yet been assigned, and its books are not so pithily named as “Psalms” or “Proverbs”. But it’s fairly clear from the titles of its first twelve selections that a new body of scripture is taking form right before our eyes.
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.
“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.”
Games are intended to communicate information, values, and behaviors. Board games are especially good at this. There was probably a reason someone made the thimble a “Monopoly” game piece. Perhaps that reason is something worth digging up so we can learn from it.
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.
“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?
“In the beginning, the angel Lucifer was cast out of Heaven and condemned to rule Hell for all eternity. Until he decided to take a vacation….” That’s the show concept of “Lucifer” in a nutshell. Is it biblical? Only slightly. *Was* the angel Lucifer condemned to rule Hell for all eternity? No. That’s not biblical, that’s pop cultural.
Since the recent attack on Planned Parenthood, cries of double standards are coming out of the woodwork: “How can you blame Islam for the murders committed by Islamic terrorists and NOT blame Christianity for the murders committed by Christian terrorists?” Here’s the reason: The New Testament has clear prohibitions against murder. The Quran does not.