from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor
Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post’s house airhead, wishes that Christianity would stop being so Christian:
“No elephant with 100 arms can do anything for me,” [Franklin] Graham said in a USA Today interview, referring to one of the five main Hindu deities. “None of their 9,000 gods is going to lead me to salvation. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and it’s all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better.”
Parker apparently thinks that God has a Congress.
"Graham isn’t alone in his views. A survey of 1,000 Protestant pastors, conducted by an evangelical polling firm, found that 47 percent agree that Islam is “a very evil and a very wicked religion.” But such opinions may be confined mostly to an older generation. Evangelicals under 30 believe that there are many ways to God, not just through Jesus.
"David Campbell, a professor at Notre Dame and co-author (with Harvard’s Robert Putnam) of “American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives,” conducted surveys showing that nearly two-thirds of evangelicals under 35 believe non-Christians can go to heaven, vs. 39 percent of those over 65."
What an astonishing finding. Anyway, the biology’s the same no matter who or what you pray to.
"Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the award-winning National Public Radio religion reporter, participated in a peyote ceremony in Arizona, meditated while wearing a brain scanner at the University of Wisconsin and donned a “God helmet” in a neuroscientist’s lab in Canada in her quest to discover the secrets of prayer and, possibly, proof of God.
"Her research led to some startling conclusions that have caused no small amount of Sturm und Drang among those who believe theirs is the one true way. She found that whether one is a Sikh, a Catholic nun, a Buddhist monk or a Sufi Muslim, the brain reacts to focused prayer and meditation much in the same way. The same parts light up and the same parts go dark during deep meditation.
"Apparently, we have a “God spot” and “God genes.” And though some are more generously endowed than others, spiritual experience is a human phenomenon, not a religious one. Different routes to the same destination."
I know this question is unanswerable but I have to ask it anyway. Why does the Washington Post, which presumably should know better, give regular column space to someone who is as titanically stupid as it is possible for any human being to be?
Katie bear? Christian spirituality has nothing to do with biology or with feeling good. If warm and fuzzy is the goal, most of us figured out a long time ago that we could stay home and get “spiritual” with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Christianity revolves around something that all other religions either reject outright or do not see a need for. And Christians who turn away from it or call it one way among many to “get to God” all for the sake of getting along with secular society aren’t Christians in any meaningful sense of that word.
The Cross.
No matter what religion we profess, we have, for the most part, learned in this country to treat one another with respect and decency. But if we Christians claim to believe what happened on the Cross, why it happened and what happened three days later, we cannot pray with people who don’t believe it.
Because the moment we do, Christ’s agonizing death for our sins becomes optional. And the moment the Cross becomes optional, we have essentially rejected it. And the moment we reject it, we can pray to anything we want or to nothing at all because it won’t make a bit of difference either way.
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