I’ve noticed a great many people remarking upon the downfall of alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and I wanted to mention something about why he rose and why he fell, because in it we find a cautionary tale for people who might be in a similar life situation without realizing it.
There’s this charming little moment in the 1983 animated masterpiece-of-nuttery Rock & Rule that really brings home just how far a villain will go to see him- or herself as anything but the bad guy. I found myself thinking of that moment this week when I heard about a recent news story that gave the world yet another reason to distrust and distance ourselves from Christians.
I recently ran across this gobsmackingly self-deluded blog post from fundagelical group The Gospel Coalition (TGC) about why they think Christians don’t read their Bibles enough. It gave me such a fit of the giggles! After I recovered, I thought maybe I’d help them out a little by showing them why they really shouldn’t trust Christian surveys–and what the problem likely actually involves.
Sometimes I see something happening in the real world and compare it to how things work in religion. That happened this week as I watched a drama unfold around a gaming company’s big new update to their flagship game.
When Cody Herrera–who is accused of the rape of a 14-year-old girl–came before Judge Randy Stoker, he certainly got lucky. He was getting a paragon of Christian morality who knew exactly–EXACTLY–how to handle this situation.
In Christians’ prophecies, we can see the shape of the future Christians want–and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, will never ever get. (Come for the fisking, stay for the Firefly memes. I was feeling super-snarky today.)
Today we’re going to take a brief segue before we plunge into the murky world of Christian prognostication to check out a story that features all the aspects of fundagelicalism that we’ve come to know around here: blatant hypocrisy, illicit sex, and a denouement that is by turns horrifying and baffling. But there’s more going on here than just standard-issue Christian hypocrisy. This story is part of the overarching narrative about exactly why Christianity is failing.
There’s always a reason, in religion, for the stuff we see religious people doing. It might not be a great reason, no, but there’s always one there somewhere. Sometimes there are even several. Nowhere is that rule more in evidence than when we consider how terrible Christians are at selling their religion to others.
Last time we met up, we were talking about the differences between ambassadors and salespeople–and making the point that Christians may think of themselves as ambassadors, but they actually behave and react a lot more like salespeople. But they keep acting like they are totally ambassadors for Jesus. There’s a reason for it–and I’ll show you why today.
I’m a child of the 80s, which means that I’ve pretty much memorized Top Gun. There’s this quote in it that’s always stuck with me–and which illustrates a serious shortcoming in the Christian religion’s followers.