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Cussing Pastor -- yes really
message 1:
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shellyindallas
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Jan 10, 2009 02:29PM
O_o
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Larry, I think, started this thread then deleted message 1. Odd.
There you go, a cussing preacher's kid. Close enough, I say.Thanks, KD!
I feel I should post a joke about now about a preacher. but I don't have any... sorry :(
OK, this preacher takes his family on their yearly camping trip. He always has a tradition that on the second morning of the trip he gets up earlier than everyone else and goes hiking in the woods alone to clear his senses and be one with nature.About a mile away from the campsite he rounds a corner and sees a very pissed-off grizzly bear standing in the path. The preacher takes off running with the bear giving chase. Adrenalin surging, he shoots straight up a tree and holds on for dear life. The bear just circles the tree snarling.
In his fear, the preacher cries out "Oh Lord! I pray that this is a Christian bear." Just then, the bear raises upright, squats on its hind legs, clasps its paws together, and says "Thank you Lord, for this wonderful meal that you have provided for me."
Yes, tad, what DOES happen when God ends up being on both sides?OK, OK ... here's the original link. Tadpole and I agree that this guy pisses us off big time. Hey ... I can't help it if I'm conflicted.
"Mark Driscoll’s sermons are mostly too racy to post on GodTube, the evangelical Christian “family friendly” video-posting Web site. With titles like “Biblical Oral Sex” and “Pleasuring Your Spouse,” his clips do not stand a chance against the site’s content filters. No matter: YouTube is where Driscoll, the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, would rather be. Unsuspecting sinners who type in popular keywords may suddenly find themselves face to face with a husky-voiced preacher in a black skateboarder’s jacket and skull T-shirt. An “Under 17 Requires Adult Permission” warning flashes before the video cuts to evening services at Mars Hill, where an anonymous audience member has just text-messaged a question to the screen onstage: “Pastor Mark, is masturbation a valid form of birth control?”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/mag...
It appears he's reaching out to exactly the kind of people the church is supposed to reach out to. I don't see the controversy other than the old-school who think their interpretation is the only correct interpretation don't like his new-fangled pants and ability to connect with the common folk.Aah well, I thought - for some reason - this might be a new issue, really it's just the same old tired shit dressed up in hip new clothes.
EDIT: I forgot to add zzzzz...
Since Larry reposted, i'll repost my original comment:Interesting article, thanks Larry!
The following is just my uninformed opinion, so do not think that I automatically disdain anyone in this group who is a believer.
But...
I found this line very disturbing:
New members can keep their taste in music, their retro T-shirts and their intimidating facial hair, but they had better abandon their feminism, premarital sex and any “modern” interpretations of the Bible.
Variations of the word feminism appear again in the article, along with the words "limp-wristed" and "queer" when describing the current state of the church. Ah...OK...it's all so clear now...Jesus and the disciples were really a bunch of frat boys that were popping each others asses with towels when they weren't busy beating up geeks and giving wedgies.
I went to youtube and watched a few videos of this guy in action. It seems to me that this is the same hateful message that these folks have always peddled but repackaged in the "hip" veneer of people that can figure out how to enter a Hollister store at the mall. Aside from the occasional use of phrases like "hand job", this smacks of a more severe form of the same message of intolerance that drove me away from the church and my "raising" in my late teens.
I apologize for the big soapbox rant here, it couldn't be avoided...
I have yet to meet a religion that doesn't degrade women.
Jedi is officially designated a religion in the UK. And as we all know, Jedis are very keen on including women in their ranks.
Considering that most of our major religions were developed among highly patriarchal cultrues, its not surprising that they are inherently masculinist. Very few of them have embraced anything like a feminist revision of their basic texts, especially not any of the fundamentalist variants of Christianity. In fact, one of the things that fundamentalisms have in common (even when they're packaged in Holloster and Gap) is their clearly defined gender roles, with male as leader and female as mother and subservient to man. See Fundamentalism and Gender, for example. I have VERY little respect for any of the Abrahamic monotheisms ('cause really those are the ones that have the largest political impact on women--and all humans--right now) that has not evolved enough to allow women to take the ultimate leadership roles within them. I have very little respect for the monotheisms, anyway, but especially where their attitudes about women are concerned.
Weren't there some early Christians who placed women highly in the hierarchy? Did I read that somewhere, or did I see it on the history channel? Of course, I think they got kicked out...
Mod
or perhaps in The Red Tent?
No, neither of those. I didn't read either. I think it was in one of those books/shows about Gnostic history. Maybe it was the Mary Magdelene one.
Mod
*goes back to coffee*
Da Vinci Code played that angle up -- that Mary M. was the mother Jesus's children and the true leader of Christianity. She was supposedly the real "Holy Grail"
Ah...I'm glad, Sally, because I was secretly insulted by the implication that I had read those.:)
"Look at the big brain on Seriously, excellent post - the "What's your damage?" thread damaged me, I think...
RA: I've never read TDVC either, but the documentary that you speak of sounds very familiar. Do you remember any mention of the book written by the fellows that Dan Brown basically ripped off (despite the fact that they lost the lawsuit)? Something about them being a couple of hoaxers that got most of their theories from the local village nut. Just wondering, I might be thinking of a different doc altogether.
I have a friend who likes to go to the Mars Hill services and pass out Satanist tracts, not with any particular goal in mind but to poke a hornet's nest. He always has great stories to tell about the reactions he gets. Mindy's exactly right in her analysis- this is the same misogynistic message that the Abrahamic faiths have been peddling for millenia but wrapped in a new hip alterna-image that makes it especially odious to me. Driscoll is a complete tool who I would love to see smote (smitten?) by a toilet seat from space. His take on the Ted Haggard gay meth romp is particularly bilious:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2...
Driscoll is a complete tool who I would love to see smote (smitten?) by a toilet seat from space.
Remind me not to piss off Logan...he's a wee bit too imaginative with his revenge.
:)
Toilet seats from space. Yeah! Appropriate.
Mod
Oh, and Tad, let me think about it...I think I can track down the pic/doc...part of it was the Mary Magdalene doc on The History Channel, I think...Maybe it was this one, although this one is about the other Mary...
http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=...
I'd look for some more but my kids are spazzing out all around me...
Ooh. This is smellin' like a fight.gets popcorn
That's a good point, the stickin' up for your mom part...I think most of our reactions to these broadly theoretical conversations have a personal core if we dig deep enough.
Sorry RA, but just like Michael Jackson, i'm a lover not a fighter (uhh...that came out wrong).KD: I see your point, and that was the reason for my disclaimer at the beginning of the rant. I have no issue with people believing whatever gives them comfort in life, as long as they don't try to push it on me or otherwise be all belligerent about it. While it's a little better now, this area of the country used to be very intolerent of anything that was different than what folks were accustomed to, and the church was a driving force in that sentiment. I grew up hearing too many sermons that seemed to be fueled more by hatred of the homosexual community, "uppity" women, kids with mullets that liked to listen to Metallica, etc. I understand the "hate the sin, love the sinner" concept, but I never detected much of that going on in these messages. So I apologize if that came off as a blanket indictment of Christianity, just lashing out at a particular segment that aggravated this mullet/metal kid growing up.:)
Sally: Doh! You're right. I need to watch that movie again...
Edit: Comments 31-33 came through while I was trying to string coherent sentences together. Ha! You're too right KD about who really runs the household. This cussing preacher guy is probably being allowed to think that he is in charge...
He's just another Tilton/Roberts/Falwell dressed up in the trappings of a new generation. He's just as ignorant from a secular perspective as any of them. Seems like we're just rehashing the same arguments over and over.
Those who repeat history are doomed to remember it.
Uh oh Gåry, did you say Robert Tilton???Let's go to the videotape...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU0QNQ...
(Yes this is immature, and no, I will probably never get tired of it.)
The problem I have, after being in a subservient role for over twenty years is when the church says you can't be right with God unless you submit to your husband. You say that there are a lot of women who are content and that's true, but that there are a lot of women who couldn't live that way and that's fine for them. It isn't fine when it's pounded into your head that you have to submit, obey, and do what the husband says as unto the Lord, or you are not right with God and need to repent. It's not like it's optional within the church. Yes, being part of the church is optional, and I left my church, but if you are in that church--and what they are saying is in the Bible, they aren't just making it up, then submitting to your husband is not optional, just for those who want to live that way. I was scared to death of God and going to hell when I started standing up to my husband and made him stop bullying me and when I stopped meeting his unreasonable demands. It was traumatic after all the teaching I had for all those years. I agree with Mindy. These religions are mysoginstic and they have all the ammunition they need inside the book called The Holy Bible.
Good for you, Leslie. Thanks for sharing all of that.
My biggest peeve is when people use one part of scripture to their benefit and ignore the stuff that doesn't benefit them. Yes, the Bible says that a woman should obey her husband. In the next verse, it says that a husband should love his wife and basically treat her like a queen. (Okay, I paraphrased, but that's the gist.) It's a two-way street. I'm still trying to figure out how not to exasperate my children. It seems a parent's very existence exasperates teenagers.
Yes, thank you Leslie. If I may ask, are you still involved with a different church now or have you divorced yourself from it completely? Just curious.What always threw me for a loop was that between the book of Leviticus and Paul's letters there is so much conflicting minutiae that someone can take an obscure passage from one of these and use it as the basis for all sorts of crazy rules of their own design.
Here's a great book about how many scholars believe Paul created Christianity. It makes a lot of sense!http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15...
Thanks for wanting to hear what I said, I appreciate that. I am not in any church, of any kind, haven't been for about four years. Would probably have a panic attack if I even went in one! If I ever do become part of a church or any kind of spiriual tradition, I don't think it will be one based on the Christian bible. There's too much in there that can be used as a weapon against people. And yeah, it does say in the very next verse of one of the passages about submission, for men to love their wives as their own bodies, etc. But there isn't anything in there about what to do if they don't. And God knew that a lot of them wouldn't, that they would go crazy with power and use the Bible to hurt their wives and children. It makes me very, very angry. There is never a plan B, it never says like, ok, submit to you husbands, husbands love your wives as your own bodies, and wives, if your husband doesn't love you like that, and in fact, treats you like crap, then do this instead. Nope, you just keep doing what it says for years and years and years and then one day--that's it. There's so much in there about turn the other cheek and longsuffering and giving yourself away and pretty much nothing about protecting yourself and taking care of your own self. I always thought that meant God was the one who was gonna do it, that one day he would just fix everything if I just remained faithful and kept submitting to my husband. It only stopped when I stopped it. When I went to a therapist who taught me how to stop it and I did all kinds of stuff that was anti Bible--like not answering wrath with a soft voice, answering it with a loud voice. Getting up in his face and saying NO!!! Thats when stuff changed. I know I'm just ranting, but Im 47 years old and in a lot of ways, it's like I'm just starting to live. I took some kind of crazy dirt road so far off the beaten path back when I was 16, that I'm just now getting back to any kind of good life. I feel so happy that it's happening, but I also feel so sad that I didn't really live my own life for so many years of it, I let somebody else live it, instead.
In a culture in which women having a choice about whether or not to play "traditional" gender roles is seen as a good thing (by most of us anyway), women who do "choose" to play those roles must necessarily frame the "choice" as a positive thing. No one wants to believe they are doing something because they've been "brainwashed" into doing it. We all want to believe we are acting from agency. But the truth is that all of our "choices" are influenced by socialization (and by evolution). Gender is especially engrained (with an evolutionary basis, but mostly cultural). And whatever any individual person's experience of her "programmed" gender role is, the socio-historical truth is that all of the Abrahamic religions are patriarchal. That matters in what they teach about gender roles. How could it not? And come on, y'all, if the SUPREME DEITY is a male, how could THAT not matter? If women aren't allowed to be in leadership roles in a religion, how could THAT not matter?
You use quotation marks a lot.:)
Re: Something someone asked earlier about gender equality in early Christianity. It's about the difference in what was the small group of followers that develop around the founder of a religion and what becomes the actual religion. When Jesus (or Muhammad or Buddha) was alive it seems that his personal philosophy was one of gender equality. But the institution that develops after he dies is a different story. See, for example, Max Weber's work on religion, on the role of the charasmatic leader, on how the cult either dies or becomes institutionalized after the death of the leader. Religion is fascinating.
You use quotation marks a lot.Sometimes you gotta.
:)
(What's interesting is what the quotation marks mean in each case.)
Mod
Terminalcoffee
Books mentioned in this topic
A Stolen Life (other topics)Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wétiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism (other topics)
Fundamentalism and Gender (other topics)
