Category Archives: Humor
Pope: No Contradiction Between Faith and Works
In another nod to Protestant theology, Pope Benedict XVI has declared that there is no conflict between faith and works. He says that good works, performed in love, are a natural outgrowth of the faith we profess in Christ. Provided that faith in Christ is genuine, good works will manifest in the person who professes that faith.
In a previous nod to Protestant theology, the Pope acknowleged that we are saved by grace through faith plus NOTHING. That works are not necessary for salvation was a Protestant idea, condmened by Catholicism. Catholic lay apologists scoff at the idea, one referring to it as “Luther’s convienent doctrine.”
We have now seen the Pope tip his mitre to two formerly Protestant ideas. It will be interesting to see the spin that Catholic lay apologists put on this. These are two ideas that the lay apologists have previously scoffed at and ridiculed as heresy. I expect either silence from their end, or else they will try to claim that Protestants stole the idea from “Sacred Tradition.”
Dutch Christians Attend a Naked Mass
My church has a very relaxed dress code. It would be unusual to see our pastor in anything more fancy than a button-down shirt and khaki pants. Most people in the congregation wear jeans. You can always spot the newcomers to our church by the suits and skirts that they wear. As relaxed as our dress code is, at least one church has taken it a step further.
In the Netherlands, a group of naked (yes, you read that right: naked) celebrants held a church service in a nudist park. They had to cancel the second planned service and temporarily take down their website after threatening phone calls and other unfortunate backlash from other Christians.
I’m used to relaxed dress codes, but this… well, is this as ridiculous as some people make it out to be? I’m not so sure.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. It surely isn’t for me–I know I would never attend a nude service–but for nudists, this is the perfect way to meet. The Bible exhorts us to worship God in everything that we do. So, if people like to go around naked, why not turn that into an act of worship as well?
People get all bent out of shape over the silliest things. If you don’t like it, don’t go. It’s as simple as that.
It turns out that that is very biblical advice:
Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. (Rom 14:1-9)
If someone considers nudity a sacred act of worship, who are we to condemn that person? For if he is naked, he is naked to the Lord, if he is dressed, he is dressed to the Lord. None of us lives or dies for our own selves, we live and die to the Lord. Again, if you don’t think that a nude church service is for you (I know it isn’t for me), then don’t go. It’s as simple as that.
My prayers are with the nudists; I pray that they can worship in peace without other Christians passing judgment.
That brings up another point. As a group, Christians are awfully judgmental. We all serve God, whether we realize it or not (take heed, atheists: even you serve the Lord). And the Bible clearly teaches that we are not to judge another master’s servant. So why then do Christians get so darn judgmental over silly things like this?
That, I suppose, is the subject for another post.
EXPOSED: Bryan Adams is a Cannibal!
**WARNING: Irony ahead!**
Using the same standards that skeptics apply to the Bible, I have concluded that Canadian singer Bryan Adams is a cannibal. There is no other plausible answer to the dilemma skeptics’ standards.
This shocking truth dawned on me today when I was at work, and I heard the song “Have You Ever Loved a Woman.” Here is a snippet from the foul, disgusting lyrics:
To really love a woman,
Let her hold you,
Till you know how she needs to be touched.
You’ve got to breathe her, really taste her,
Till you can feel her in your blood.
And when you see your unborn children in her eyes …
You know you really love a woman.
Notice the boldfaced portions–ignore the rest of the context. The only way to truly understand something is to isolate it from its context and read it hyper-literally with no regard to accepted literary devices. Doing that, there is only one way to understand “tast[ing] her” and “feeling her in blood”–Mr. Adams must be referring to eating her.
Since this line appears in a romantic love song, one can only conclude that Mr. Adams finds this practice loving and romantic. Therefore, the only way that a man can show love to a woman–in Mr. Adams’s sick and twisted world–is to eat her.
Some people will argue that Mr. Adams is speaking metaphorically. But I see no reason to conclude that. And even if he is, he is still hinting at cannibalism, which is disgusting any way you slice it.
Some may further object that I’ve used circular reasoning. First, I ignore context, then I place the snippet into its broad context. But that doesn’t matter much, either. This is the same way that skeptics read the Bible, so it must be correct. Just look at the disgusting John 6–this verse also talks about the same wretched practice of cannibalism.
It is only fair. If you apply one standard to the Bible, you should be able to apply it to everything. So the conclusion is absolutely inescapable: Bryan Adams is a cannibal. We must organize a boycott of his music immediately until he renounces this horrid practice.
FSM Getting More Credit Than He Deserves ** UPDATED**
Religious scholars are meeting this weekend to discuss the pseudo-deity known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. According to Wikipedia, FSM was created in 2005 by physics major Bobby Henderson in order to protest the teaching of intelligent design in Kansas classrooms. Since its wide media exposure, the FSM is used by atheists and agnostics alike to discredit the existence of God.
The American Academy of Religion has a few talks on its plate (no pun intended) about the Noodly Master. The graduate students giving the talks, Samuel Snyder, Alyssa Beall, and Gavin Van Horn, insist that this carbohydrate creator raises serious questions about the origin and practice of religion.
In other words, are religions based on theology or on practices? Most atheists would argue that religion is only a method to control behavior. They point to made-up religions like pastafarianism as a way to make this point. Richard Dawkins refers to it in The God Delusion, and frequently in debates.
So what are the grad students’ conclusions? I guess we’ll have to wait for the papers to be published. I just think that this lends far too much credence to a phenomenon that already has too much attention.
Dr. William Lane Craig agrees with that:
I think you can see that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is vastly overrated, both as a parody and as a being. As a parody, he fails to show that an inference to an intelligent designer of the universe is either illegitimate or unwarranted. What the parody shows is that we are not justified in attributing to our explanatory postulates arbitrary properties that are not justified by the evidence. Natural theologians have always known this. That’s why, for example, Thomas Aquinas, after his five brief paragraphs in his Summa theologiae proving the existence of a being “to which everyone gives the name ‘God’,” goes on to discuss in the next nine questions God’s simplicity, perfection, goodness, limitlessness, omnipresence, immutability, eternity, and unity.
As a being, the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes up drastically deficient as an explanation of those phenomena, some of which you list, which lie at the basis of the arguments for God’s existence. Those arguments, if all sound, as I think they are, require cumulatively a being which is the metaphysically necessary, self-existent, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal, omnipotent, omniscient Creator and Designer of the universe, who is perfectly good, whose nature is the standard of goodness, and whose commands constitute our moral duties.
The real lesson to be learned from the case of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is that it shows how completely out of touch our popular culture is with the great tradition of natural theology. (source)
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