Civil Commotion

Those great, fun, harmless, safe, nostalgic, exciting, slightly scary and completely un-demonic Halloweens of the past? Gone, gone, gone with the evangelical hot air.

Does it bother me? You bet it does. It bothers me that we fall for such lame, ridiculous manipulators as the crowd that made all of those Halloweens past into satanic events.

It bothers me that any lie, exaggeration or fiction will find thousands of eager believers to pass it along.

It bothers me that the Biblical message about Satan would be co-opted by the fear-mongering and manipulation of the hucksters. (Read The Screwtape Letters for some real Satanism.)

It bothers me that such a wonderful part of my childhood and of American life has been turned into an example of evangelical paranoia and gullibility. We ruined something good, and everyone knows it but us.

Michael Spencer

Well said. Religion is a device for exploitation of the insecure and/or unintelligent by amoral predators, and it soils whatever it touches.

Seriously: Y’all have got to read this to get a good feel of its self-assured wackiness.

It seems that a certain Pastor Chris Gore, of the Sooner State, is distressed by uninformed speculations about the afterlife.

The reality is that when dealing with death and the life to come is there are so many unbiblical views of what the next life will look like, and many of those are not just wrong, they are unhelpful.

Comes now Holy Man Gore, relying upon The Giant Book of Ancient Bullshit Fables, to set the record straight.

We don’t need to make things up about the life-to-come, in fact, we’ll see that what we make up is actually less than what the Bible promises us.

This is good. Pastor Gore isn’t going to just make-up stuff.

“Heaven gained a new angel today.”

As a pastor, this is probably the distortion of eternity that I hear the most, and every time I hear it I want to shout, “No! No! No!” Not because I don’t like angels or I’m some sort of theological grump. It irks me not just because it’s not true, but because it actually is less than what the Bible tells us.

Pastor Gore explains:

First, angels and people are different.

Who knew? It’s easy to understand the confusion, though.

True, we may often see angels taking a human appearance in Scripture, but the Bible is clear that though angels may look like people sometimes, people and angels are very different.

And on, and on, and … on. And this, you will be comforted to learn, is only the first installment.

Keep this in mind: There is no indication anywhere in the text that Pastor Gore is having himself a big time pulling the leg of the gullible; he seems to actually believe he is telling his readers things that they really need to know.

Nobody who is actually sentient has any good reason to be surprised by yet another account of Holy Men raping children, but the stories now emerging from Peru are startling by even jaded contemporary standards.

One of the most repulsive stories is the one of Santiago who was told he was selected by God for something big, to change things and transform the world. He was then chosen by Figari to participate in a selected group who practiced yoga. After years of physical training, Santiago was asked by Figari if he wanted to move forward and learn the Kundalini technique.

Figari convinced Santiago that such technique involves awakening his sacrum bone through which he could obtain supernatural powers and a state of total consciousness. Figari also told Santiago that the best way to activate the sacrum bone was to deposit semen there.

“I’m going to deposit my sperm in your sacrum area” Figari reportedly told the boy. Santiago also claims that Figari asked me “to masturbate while he was penetrating me.”

I am not kidding: Proportionally, there are more screwed-up men standing in the pulpit than there are sitting in the pews, and neither children nor insecure women are safe in church.

It wouldn’t be Fall, and Halloween, if preachers weren’t having fits.

Setting aside a day to celebrate evil, darkness, witchcraft, fear, death and the demonic brings disdain to God. Period. A Christian celebrating Halloween would be like a Satan worshiper putting up a nativity scene at Christmas while singing, “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” The two just don’t go together. Jesus has nothing in common with Satan (2 Cor. 6:14), and neither should we.

[ … ]

Halloween is the one day a year when neighbors come to your door expecting to receive something. So give them JESUS! Our family chose to give God the glory and the devil a black eye by reaching out to our neighbors with the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Sure. Because any kid would rather get a stupid Jack Chick tract than candy corn.

David Platt, the brand new head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Missions Board, has some helpful suggestions for members who want to help the home-team overcome the severe budget shortfall that has them calling missionaries home.

Business is international. Men and women cruise the globe at 35,000 feet, going places missionaries cannot. What could you do?

• Transport sensitive Christian materials that cannot be mailed or sent electronically. Firewalls run by local governments block access to training materials, Bible translations, and other forms of support. This could be as simple as meeting someone for supper and passing the information along.

  In other words, smuggle-in contraband literature.

• Allow your temporary housing to serve as a meeting site for Bible study groups and churches.

• Use your locally-registered business to provide legitimate visas for missionaries who cannot acquire them otherwise.

  In other words, use your business as a front for illegal activities.

• Learn the language through multiple visits and help teach in areas where the IMB has not placed anyone.

But it’s allright because, you know, warriors for the Kingdom aren’t bound by man’s law, only — dum-da-dum-dum — His law. I’ll bet that if you suggested to a roomful of these yahoos that the reason they aren’t welcome might be that they deal underhandedly, you’d draw nothing but blank stares. They really are that self-unaware.

UPDATE:   This post is no longer at the SBC Voices Web site, so the link above goes to Google’s cached version.