Grab your 20-siders. We're going in.

I heard about this story a while ago, but I wanted to hold off on writing about it till now because it fit in so well with what we’ve been talking about lately regarding failed behavioral models and cultural expectations. A Baptist minister might well be discovering that the beginning of wisdom is not “fear of the Lord,” but rather asking the right questions. And because he’s begun asking the right questions, I thought I’d take a stab at answering him because I’m helpful that way. Maybe someone else is wondering the same thing he is. Today I’ll outline why his question needs to be asked, and next time we’ll talk about the actual answer to that question.

I saw a story recently about a Christian lady who thinks she prayed a tornado away from her home. I couldn’t possibly find a better example of the narcissistic right-wing Christian mentality of “screw all y’all, I’ma get mine” than this story, and today I’ll show you what I mean by that.

Many Christians would rather think their god is a dishonest trickster than be wrong about their conceptualization of him. The other day we got a rather visceral reminder of that fact, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Quite a few Christians have begun to think of their god as a trickster–creating a vision of this god that would be entirely unfamiliar to generations of past Christians.

Many Christians would rather think their god is a dishonest trickster than be wrong about their conceptualization of him. The other day we got a rather visceral reminder of that fact, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Quite a few Christians have begun to think of their god as a trickster–creating a vision of this god that would be entirely unfamiliar to generations of past Christians.

It astonishes me that Christians can say that our finite human lifetimes don’t matter–that they are meaningless, even!–but that eternity matters infinitely. They tell whoever listens that if we are not intended to have eternal life, that nothing we really do on Earth during our lifetimes matters at all, that life is “meaningless” without the promise of Heaven behind it. I touched on this idea a long time ago with one of this blog’s most popular posts, “Captain Cassidy and the Cosmic Purpose”, but at the time I was talking more about how preposterous the idea of a divinely-granted purpose really is. Today I want to delve more deeply into the common Christian concept that a finite lifetime is less meaningful than an eternal one.

It astonishes me that Christians can say that our finite human lifetimes don’t matter–that they are meaningless, even!–but that eternity matters infinitely. They tell whoever listens that if we are not intended to have eternal life, that nothing we really do on Earth during our lifetimes matters at all, that life is “meaningless” without the promise of Heaven behind it. I touched on this idea a long time ago with one of this blog’s most popular posts, “Captain Cassidy and the Cosmic Purpose”, but at the time I was talking more about how preposterous the idea of a divinely-granted purpose really is. Today I want to delve more deeply into the common Christian concept that a finite lifetime is less meaningful than an eternal one.

I recently watched a documentary that said some stuff that really touched a chord in me. Thanks to it, I’m noticing some very uncomfortable parallels between the ideas it’s discussing and what I see happening in society itself: that Christians today are trying to manage other people’s morality the same way they tried to do it in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and failing for the exact same reasons that they failed back then.

Fred’s written an excellent piece at Slacktivist about how Lifeway has discovered that a third of evangelicals are pro-choice, meaning they think abortion should be legal. As you can imagine, evangelical leaders are freaking out about this finding and trying to think up ways to rationalize the results of the survey, with many of them deciding that pro-choice evangelicals aren’t TRUE EVANGELICALS™. They’ve been on a kick lately to define who is in the tribe and who’s out, so their new line in the sand isn’t a big surprise to see. But they’re wrong about their tribe’s monolithic opposition to abortion–just like they’re wrong about all the other ways they’re trying to police the use of Christian terms–like “Christian” itself.