December 08, 2010
Know Your Audience
It’s not unusual for someone to want to comment on my blog for the mere purpose of advertising their own blog by asking me to link their site to the Christian Ear. A recent writer was blogging about her “new post-religion faith where there is no hell, no original sin, you are God, and heaven on earth is real…” I think I can rule out committed Christians that would want to blog with the woman, but there’s probably a kindred spirit out there somewhere who will listen to her ‘new post-religion faith’. While in Athens Paul was taken to the Areopagus. “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” (Acts 17:21 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----Your decision not to link this lady’s blog is faithful and good. But I would love to comment on it. I have unending questions for her. “What is going on Peoria today?”, I would ask. And I wouldn’t ask for a general answer. I mean specifically who are driving their cars and why. Where are they going and what are their plans when they get there? What is going on in your next door neighbor’s house at this precise moment? The fact that she could not answer these questions is rather insightful of the fact that she has no basis to know of a supposed non-existence of hell, heaven, or original sin, either. Like all the rest of us, she simply knows hardly anything of everything there is to know.
-----But she is correct on two points. Her belief is based on faith, as a few such questions aptly demonstrate. Also, she is god. God is a supreme position reigning over a definite kingdom. The kingdom of a god is defined by what that god can certainly effect by only its own will. What the will is not able to effect draws the boundaries of the god’s kingdom. So let’s examine the boundaries of her kingdom. Can she will the cold of this season around her into warmth? No. There is a boundary. Can she will her house into a mansion? Maybe, if she works smart and hard, but she can not change it instantly. Another boundary. When she gets the flu can she will immediate recovery? No. Can she will a deceased loved one back to life? No. That is kind of cruel to point out, but it is certainly instructive. In fact, there is nothing about her physical surroundings she can change by simply willing it. She could will my comment to disappear from her blog site, but only by the motions of her fingers upon her keyboard. This evidences that her kingdom includes nothing of her physical surroundings or even of her own physical being. But she can will her own thoughts and feelings, irrelevant of anything else. So her kingdom pretty much consists of nothing more than her own mental and emotional concepts, and she can believe in all her heart that they match the reality of everything else which can not effect other than by the laws of physics. That is her faith, however much it is worth.
-----The heart of religion is communication. Somebody must communicate ideas to somebody else for those ideas to have any existence within anyone else. That is probably why she claims her new faith to be post-religious. She probably desires to escape any ideas which challenge her own heart and mind with even more boundaries. But she has failed to be post-religious, because as the god she is of her diminishing inward kingdom, she is trying to communicate with others. Her pitiful powerlessness is exposed in the fraud of her accepting for herself the right to communicate, yet denying it for God. And He knows what’s going on in Peoria to the last detail. Of course, He isn’t talking. But that is by His own will. And He knows a lot more, too. He knows hell and exactly who goes there. He knows heaven and that it isn‘t on earth. He knows original sin. And He has chosen by His will to communicate a small amount of this knowledge to those who have ears to hear. By engaging in this communication with God, they have religion that is not a fraud.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment