From all the Daddy God blathering to the Heavenly Father crowd, Christians can’t resist comparing their imaginary friend to a real live father. And more than that, in their viewpoint, he’s not just exactly like a real live father–he’s better than any human father could ever be. Today, let me show you why that idea is both nonsensical and insulting to decent fathers everywhere.
It seems fitting, however, to return to this topic of power now as we look at the Christian glurge movie/book The Shack and observe its main teaching: that independence is to be distrusted and rejected.
The Shack, the latest popular Christian glurge to get made into a movie, pretends to be a serious answer for the age-old question plaguing Christians: why does their god, who is supposed to be omni-everything as well as loving and gracious, allow terrible things to happen in his created world?
The Shack, the latest in a long line of Christian glurge movies and books, lives in that weird middle ground where Christians think they’re being progressive and yet turn out to be as locked in systemic racism as any of their peers.
The Shack is one of a very long line of Christian glurge media that recreates reality for believers, giving them the thrill of “seeing” their beliefs mesh at last with the real world. But for everyone else, stories like this one simply make the religion sound worse.
Christians move through a world filled with all sorts of divine interventions by their god–to the point where they openly scoff that no amount of miracles would ever make a skeptic happy. I’ve even read a Christian minister claim that the real problem with skeptics is that we’ve been deluged with so many miracles we’re just plain bored with the silly things by now. To be honest, any amount of miracles would be fine with me. Any amount at all is better than what there is currently, which is “none.”
I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I ever saw a tornado. I was in my late 20s by now. I lived in the smack middle of Kansas in a tiny town notable mostly for being a convenient stop on the highway Read more