The Real Katrina Story: The Spirit of God at Work

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In the long term, the real story of Katrina isn’t the disaster itself. Nor is it the untold suffering and death it is causing. Neither is it the mistakes that have been made in responding to the catastrophe.

Consider this story in today’s Houston Chronicle (emphasis added):

BILOXI, MISS. – The old bell at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer rang throughout the storm when Hurricane Camille came ashore here in 1969, washing away the church but sparing the steeple that supported the bell.

When they rang their bell Sunday morning it was lying on the ground, just about the only thing left after Hurricane Katrina obliterated the replacement church, the rectory and everything the congregation had worked so hard to rebuild after Camille.

But about 85 members of the congregation picked their way through the rubble to celebrate Mass on the old beachfront site. They wept, prayed and thanked God for their lives as military vehicles roared up and down the beach and cleanup crews banged away at the surrounding rubble. ***

The congregation marveled when one of their own, Gig Tisdale, landed his National Guard helicopter on the nearby beach to offload relief supplies for his church, stayed for most of the service, and then ran back to join his crew. ***

Homeless too, Father Roberts will soon be living in a travel trailer donated by his old military regiment in Canada. "There’s an anger," he said. "I’ve lost everything.

"But thank God I’ve got four cats and a wife."

"In that order?" joked a member of the congregation.

"This church has been through this again," Roberts said. "And we will rise again."

To be sure, much of what we’ve seen and heard about is horrifying: Armed bands of looters. Rapes and murders.

But think about the thousands of people around the
country, and elsewhere, who have stepped up to help with their time,
talent, and treasure as best they can:

Doctors, nurses, and ordinary citizens volunteering in the Astrodome and other temporary shelters;
Citizens collecting food, water, clothing, toys, and money;
Local residents taking in evacuees, whom they’ve never met before, to stay in their homes;
Property owners offering free or discounted apartments and office space;
Journalists and bloggers getting the word out.

Think about the evacuees who aren’t just wallowing in
their misery, but are pitching in with the relief efforts — or are
already out looking for jobs to resume supporting their families, as I
read in the Houston paper today.

Think about the emergency-management officials who are
energetically making notes about what works, versus what needs to be
done differently. No, they won’t learn these lessons perfectly. But
even so, the lessons will pay off next time — and there will be a next time.

None of this is unusual. It happens in every
disaster. Over time, it contributes — at great cost, to be sure, and
often with two steps forward, one step back — to building a better
world.

Or, if you will, to building the Kingdom of God.

At the risk of sounding like a pollyanna,
I think this has to be one of the ways, and possibly even the only way,
that God acts in the world, through people caring about each other and
pulling together.

I can’t say it any better than an evacuee in Houston who was talking to to a Houston volunteer. The volunteer had said she didn’t know what had possessed her to come to help. The evacuee, a grandmother, replied: "The spirit of God is what possessed you, darlin’.”

Comments

35 responses to “The Real Katrina Story: The Spirit of God at Work”

2005-09-05

currahee

Similarly, I remember a brief interview with a homeless black gentleman. Paraphrasing:
Q: Are you depressed?
A: No, I’m not depressed. God does everything for a reason, that His name be glorified.
In acts of selflessness we see the Holy Spirit at work in the world.

Reply
2005-09-06

Anon

“Similarly, I remember a brief interview with a homeless black gentleman. Paraphrasing:
Q: Are you depressed?
A: No, I’m not depressed. God does everything for a reason, that His name be glorified.
In acts of selflessness we see the Holy Spirit at work in the world.”
You have no idea what a preposterous contortion of logic this statement makes from someone not inclined to believe in the invisible sky-daddy.
Frankly, it boggles the mind.
Hey, god showed me his love by giving my kid cancer!

Reply
2005-09-06

Anon

“At the risk of sounding like a pollyanna, I think this has to be one of the ways, and possibly even the only way, that God acts in the world, through people caring about each other and pulling together.
I can’t say it any better than an evacuee in Houston who was talking to to a Houston volunteer. The volunteer had said she didn’t know what had possessed her to come to help. The evacuee, a grandmother, replied: “The spirit of God is what possessed you, darlin’.””
It really may shock you people to hear this, but there are probably a lot of buddhists, Jews, atheists, and agnostics helping out their neighbors too. You don’t need Jebus to want to help your fellow humans. To think so is an offensive piety.
Jess sayin.

Reply
2005-09-06

D. C.

Anon —
1. I’m sorry to hear about your kid’s cancer (assuming you were serious).
2. Christians haven’t done a good job of laying out a plausible hypothesis for how God might intervene in the world. On that point, there’s a spectrum of belief ranging from hard-core deism (God wound up the world at the beginning and is letting it run by itself, without ever intervening) to hard-core theism (nothing happens in this world without God pushing buttons to make it so).
Unfortunately, most believers simply assert their beliefs without supporting evidence — not that there’s much evidence to be had that would withstand critical scrutiny — as if wishing would make it so.
3. I don’t think anybody said anything about Jesus here. I agree with you wholeheartedly that “there are probably a lot of buddhists, Jews, atheists, and agnostics helping out their neighbors too.” I happen to think the collaborative impulse is hardwired into us as a result of evolution: Individuals and groups who are predisposed to collaborate, especially in the face of external danger, are more likely to survive and propagate their genes and memes. See Robert Wright’s book Non-Zero for more on this subject. I think it’s entirely plausible that this is a result of divine intervention somewhere along the line.

Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

I don’t have a son.
Let me ask you a question as a non-believer. You folks seem pretty resasonable. So how do you view Bush? Do you see him a genuine Christian or as a poseur merely out to attract Christain votes?
I see nothing in his behavior as Christian or moral.
The man appears to have total disregard for the bottom 95% of Americans.
The bumpersticker No Billionaire Left Behind sums Bush and his policies up beautifully.
So what do you think of America’s “Christian President”?

Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1563596,00.html

Reply
2005-09-07

GP

Anon,
I think you would do well to read more of the blog before you attack.
This site is a very intelligent look at matters of faith. I understand that a lot of people are angry at the president. I can’t stand the man personally, but that wasn’t what this post was about.
Some people see the spirit of God moving in humanity when it reaches out in the midst of suffering. This is not a matter of justifying the suffering. This is not our job. We can only respond to it in the most human way we know how.
As a sometimes atheist, sometimes agnostic, sometimes Buddhist, sometimes Christ-listening person, I have to say that reaching out is the opportunity that we have been given by—if you don’t believe in something greater—our Higher Selves. Crisis and adversity are opportunities to become a vessel for goodness.
This is the supreme message of Christ in my opinion. As we consider the suffering image of Christ, we are reminded that we participate in this. If we expect the Almighty to recreate the system perfectly, we deny ourselves the opportunity to be participants in compassion.
The expectation for “Daddy” to “fix everything” is just as childish a spiritual stance to take (in my opinion) as is the acceptance of credo on tradition alone.
God isn’t going to fix it. Our rage at the Universal Inustice Doesn’t Change it.
What we can change is the amount of good we put into the world.

Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

http://rejecteddisciple.typepad.com/my_weblog/
You should add this guy to your list of good sites and blogs. He;s totally cool.

Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

“The expectation for “Daddy” to “fix everything” is just as childish a spiritual stance to take (in my opinion) as is the acceptance of credo on tradition alone.
God isn’t going to fix it. Our rage at the Universal Inustice Doesn’t Change it.”
I’m not expecting the sky-daddy to fix anything. I don’t believe in him.
However, if he did exist and refused to do anything to stop suffering than he wouldn’t be worthy of our respect let alone our worship.
What is the point in being a god if you can’t do anything in times like these?
Think about it. There isn’t any. If he can;t help, then he’s just a useless schnorrer like Bush: Who could have foreseen this? Doh!
My point is that we should accept that people are doing good because they want to help others. They understand that it could just as easily have been them lying dying in a foot of water. No one needs to attribute the actions of volunteers to some invisible sky-daddy. In fact, it really is infuriating to hear this kind of talk.
You know the expression “God helps those who help themselves”? Here’s what it means in plain English: If you want it fixed, you had better fix it yourself, because waiting for god to do it means it won’t get done.

Reply
2005-09-07

D. C.

“So how do you view Bush? Do you see him a genuine Christian or as a poseur merely out to attract Christain votes?”
I see President Bush as a genuine Christian and a very smart man — remember that his grades at Yale turned out to have been better than Kerry’s, and Harvard MBAs aren’t exactly handed out with the rations &mdash who isn’t doing badly at running the world’s most demanding single job.
Sure, if the stories we’re reading about FEMA are true, some significant changes need to be made. But don’t forget that pretty much everyone involved is doing the best they know how to handle a blizzard of conflicting demands in difficult and wildly confused circumstances. They all put their pants on one leg at a time just like we do. I doubt many of us could do all that much better. So let’s give them a little credit (actually, a lot of it), instead of screaming about how incompetent or malevolent they supposedly are.

Reply
2005-09-07

D. C.
Anon, I think you may be falling into the fallacy of the false dilemma / false dichotomy. You seem to be saying that it’s an either / or proposition: EITHER (1) God is all-powerful and all-good, and personally pushes the buttons to cause everything that happens in the world, OR (2) there’s no God worthy of the name. Because of Katrina and other “evils” in the world, you conclude that choice 1 isn’t possible, therefore choice 2 must be the case.
I seriously doubt it’s that simple. I think we have to be very cautious in our assertions about God.
For myself, I think there’s strong circumstantial evidence to support the existence of a Creator. To me this evidence is sufficiently compelling that Pascal’s Wager is a good bet.
Moreover, the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches, in vulgar terms, that things left untended gradually turn to s__t. Yet the universe hasn’t dissolved into chaos over the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, but instead seems to be evolving in a direction of increasing orderliness, at least in places. This seems to hint that maybe, just maybe, someone is intervening here and there, touching the universe in some fashion, to keep the wheels turning.
That’s a far cry from categorically declaring that either God is personally responsible for every single thing that happens in the universe, or he doesn’t exist at all. People who make such declarations are intellectual cousins of the modern-day fundamentalists seen in many religions. These folks assume facts not in evidence, then excoriate the rest of us if we don’t change our lives according to their unsupported conclusions. Thanks, but no thanks.
On the general problem of theodicy (the problem of evil in the world), let me reproduce an edited version of something I posted a few days ago:
Perhaps — and I stress that this is pure speculation — God is doing things that we don’t like now, but the reason we don’t like them is that, in our relative ignorance, we don’t see how those “bad” things will pay off in the long run. By analogy, think of —

a mom taking her screaming kid to the doctor for immunization shots, or

a high-school football coach making his protesting players run laps.

Such a speculation, of course, would seem to require that there be an afterlife in which suffering and even death can “pay off.” We don’t know much at all about that possibility, but I’m not willing to dismiss it out of hand. There’s a certain amount of anecdotal evidence about sensible people thinking they’ve seen and/or heard dead friends and relatives (including in my own family). For that matter, without supporting evidence, we should not automatically assume that the tales of Jesus’s post-mortem appearances are utter fabrications; the odds are that something happened back then (otherwise it’s tough to account for the rise of the church), we’re just not entirely sure what that “something” was.
In summary, there is so much we do not know about the hows and the whys of the universe, that it seems pretty shortsighted to go jumping to conclusions about what God supposedly must be doing, or how he has supposedly failed in his “duty.”
But in any case, I’m glad you’re posting here. Please keep posing these tough questions, because they give us a lot to think about.
Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

“I see President Bush as a genuine Christian….”
You have truly dissapointed me. Seriously.
If this arrogant, deceitful, screwup Richie Rich is a genuine Christian, then it’s a sad comment on your religion.
This stumbling fool has to be the worst president in US history.

Reply
2005-09-07

Anon

“Moreover, the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches, in vulgar terms, that things left untended gradually turn to s__t.”
Look at every individual life on this planet from the dawn of time whether it be human, animal, or vegetable. It all ends in deterioration whose ultimate phase is always death.
What’s that? Not on the macro level, you say?
Okay, how about we look at say the looming Peak Oil Crisis which threatens to knock civilization back to the level of the 1850s then. Not only that, but it will knock the human population down substantially as all resources become scarce.
I was a skeptic when I first heard about Peak Oil back in 2002. I dismissed it as the work of modern day Cassandras. But not anymore. There’s just too much evidence emerging in support of Hubbert’s Peak.
If you at all interested in your future, or your kids future, take a look at this introductory material on the subject. Then take a sleeping pill because you’ll need one.
Anyhow, I’m just finishing reading The Long Emergency.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0871138883/ref=pd_sim_b_2/104-9211522-2223103?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance
Excerpt:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/7203633?rnd=1121636006239&has-player=unknown
Two more essays by Kunstler:
http://survivalacres.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=149
I also bought the ebook Life After the Oil Crash.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Two good audio files with interviews:
Matt Savinar of http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/452
Matt Simmons, Oil Industry Executive
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/462
Do a search on “peak oil” for more information on this crises.
Good sites:
http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2004/05/background_for_.html
http://www.postcarbon.org
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Then come back and tell me the world isn’t going to s**t.

Reply
2005-09-08

Anon

While we’re waiting for your reply to the pending Peal Oil crisis which will reduce the human population back to a few hundred million, can someone explain Rapture to me?
Who came up with this idea?
Is it in the bible?
Who believes in it?
If it does happen, can I have your stereo?

Reply
2005-09-08

Barry Fernelius

Hey Anon,
Although the looming Peak Oil Crisis looks as though it could be grim, it appears to be a problem created by man, not God. I think that it’s sort of beside the point.
With respect to the Rapture, do a little Google search. You’ll discover that it’s not really a biblical concept. There are many thinking Christians who don’t put any stock in the Rapture.
Also, there are quite a few thinking Christians who are fed up with George Bush, just as you are.
With all of that said, I don’t expect that you’ll easily change your mind. You seem strongly attached to the idea that there’s no God. Perhaps you’d be happier as a Buddhist. Of course, Buddhism might lead you to let go of attachments, so it might be too dangerous…

Reply
2005-09-08

D. C.

Anon, the peak oil crisis, if it happens, will be just another in a series of crises that humanity has (so far) survived. Survival has often been at a terrible cost, to be sure. But so far, the human race has managed to come through all of them. We’ve not only survived, we’ve continued what seems to be an inexorable march toward increased cooperation, knowledge, mastery of the physical world, and even (if you will) goodness.
Even if humanity didn’t survive Crisis X, it still seems clear that the creative evolution of the universe will continue. Then there are the hints that maybe there might be an afterlife. All that, I submit, is plenty of reason for hope, and indeed joy.

Reply
2005-09-08

Anon

Well, if Rapture is not biblical where did the notion come from and who is pushing it? And who are the people with the bumperstickers warning us that their car will suddenly become unmanned in its event?

Reply
2005-09-08

Anon

“Anon, the peak oil crisis, if it happens, will be just another in a series of crises that humanity has (so far) survived.”
Actually, it’s not just another crisis. This is the BIGGEST MOTHER that we have ever faced. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, we use and consume today is built on the petrochemical foundation. It’s not just a matter of trading your Suburban in for a mountain bike when the time comes.
This crisis will affect even our ability to produce food and avoid freezing to death in winter.
As The Long Emergency points out all the alternatives such as solar, wind, biomass, etc are built upon the petrochemical foundation. Even worse, they can even begin to approach the levels of energy production required to replace oil. At best they may eventually replace 20 to 30% of the energy we currently consume daily.
It’s looking pretty grim.
But nature has a right to be pissed at us. Edward Abbey said back in the seventies “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
That’s what humanity has been on this planet since we discovered the potential of oil about 175 years ago. A cancer. Where as before that point it took thousands of years to double the population, since then we have been doubling it faster and faster. IRC, we have gobe from 3 to 6.5 billion in just the last 20 years.
The planet can’t sustain this number.
I urge you all to read/listen to those Peak Oil links.

Reply
2005-09-08

Anon

“Perhaps you’d be happier as a Buddhist.”
You know, I looked at it about ten years ago. It wasn’t for me either.
I’m basically an existentialist with a dash of spirituality thrown in. By spirituality I simply mean that I can see all life on this planet is interconnected.
I may also be overly sensitive as I can’t bear to see suffering of any kind.
That’s why people like Bush, Cheney, abd Rummie piss me off so much. They are modern day Marie Antoinettes with their attitudes towards the poor.

Reply
2005-09-09

D. C.

Anon, I don’t claim to know much about existentialism. From what little I know, it seems to be a philosophical cousin of nihilism. I’m not entirely sure why either nihilists or existentialists think they have reason to be happy or even hopeful.
Paraphrasing the Rev. John Polkinghorne, FRS, KBE (a distinguished particle physicist turned Anglican priest): Atheists aren’t stupid, but theism explains more of the evidence than atheism, and in a more intellectually-satisfying way.

Reply
2005-09-09

Anon

“I’m not entirely sure why either nihilists or existentialists think they have reason to be happy or even hopeful.”
Well, existentialism is more about having a purpose in life and pursuing it. The purpose is something you identify within yourself. It’s not really about just being inexplicably happy.
However, if you are clear about your purpose and are working towards it, you will most likely find that you are as happy as can reasonably be expected in this life.
One final point here. There’s a telling scene in an episode of The Soprano’s from a few seasons back. Tony is alone with the one-legged Russian immigrant woman. She’s busy working on her computer at her second or third job when Tony makes some comment about pursuing happiness as an end in itself. She quickly straightens him out by explaining that that’s a uniquely American belief. She tells him that only Americans have the naive belief that everything will always work out for the best. It doesn’t despite the fact that we try to tell ourselves that it has.
She concludes by telling him that other nationalities are much more pragmatic and accept that much of life has a less than happy ending.
Not surprisingly, Tony has no reply.

Reply
2005-09-09

Anon

“Atheists aren’t stupid, but theism explains more of the evidence than atheism, and in a more intellectually-satisfying way.”
Really?
This is news to me.
It’s precisely because theism can’t explain anything in an intellectually satisfying way, that I lost my religion and have never been able to regain it despite three attempts to do over the past 30 odd years,

Reply
2005-09-10

Anon

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10nocera.html
We’re halfway through the hydrocarbon era,” my old friend T. Boone Pickens has been saying for the last couple of years….A folksy line like Mr. Pickens’s – it sticks with you. But I hadn’t realized until recently that it also meant Mr. Pickens had taken sides in a surprisingly heated debate.

Reply
2005-09-10

Anon

So why is an unbeliever here, you ask.
Well, I’m looking for something. I’m a seeker too.
However, christianity doesn’t work for me. Here’s why: I can’t believe that a god would make imperfect creatures and then punish them for that very imperfection. Moreover, we are talking infinite punishment for finite crimes!
It makes no sense. And if such a god did exist then he doesn’t deserve our respect let alone our worship.
You can put all sorts of spin on how the imperfection is all Eve’s fault, bla-bla-blah, but it doesn’t hold water. Any god would have foreseen her actions and pre-empted all this suffering.
On a positive note, there is much to be derived from spirituality and a sense of connectedness to all living things as well as a sense of stewardship towards this planet.
The bible is really nothing more than a very crude attempt by ignorant ancients to 1) express their sense of awe and 2) to create a set of moral rules with which to control tribal members.

Reply
2005-09-10

Barry Fernelius

So, Anon, is Troll your first name or last name?

Reply
2005-09-10

D. C.

Anon writes: “I can’t believe that a god would make imperfect creatures and then punish them for that very imperfection. Moreover, we are talking infinite punishment for finite crimes!”
Anon, not all Christians think that way, not by any stretch. Some of us think that creation is an ongoing process, and that, to paraphrase the Rev. Jesse Jackson, God isn’t finished with creating us yet.
(Some of us also think that belief in hell assumes facts not in evidence, or putting it another way, it’s a product of a strange kind of wishful thinking.)
Anon also writes: “The bible is really nothing more than a very crude attempt by ignorant ancients to 1) express their sense of awe and 2) to create a set of moral rules with which to control tribal members.”
Anon, I happen to agree with you about the basic facts, but I reach a different conclusion than you. Your comment 1 applies not only to scriptural authors, but also to Ptolemy, Galen, Newton, Einstein, and every one of us. I certainly don’t mock the ancients for not knowing everything we moderns do. We do far better to view the glass as half full, or perhaps to look at the matter as a movie instead of a snapshot. Instead of being condemned to living in perpetual ignorance, we’ve been blessed with the ability to learn from observation and experience and to pass our learning on to others and to future generations. I see that as a crucial part of the continuing story of creation.
Barry F., I don’t at all regard Anon as a troll. He’s looking for answers, as are the rest of us. He comes across as a bit angry sometimes, but so did I at one time. I really enjoy his questions and appreciate his willingness to engage with the issues.

Reply
2005-09-11

Anon

Thanks, DC.

Reply
2005-09-11

Anon

“Some of us also think that belief in hell assumes facts not in evidence, or putting it another way, it’s a product of a strange kind of wishful thinking.”
Excellent point. I have noticed that a lot of the fundies suffer from extremely low self-esteem. Get them to start talking about their bizarre beliefs, and all that you will hear is how “humanity is s**t” and can only be saved from the fate it so richly deserves (ie, an eternity in hell)through Jesus’s intervention.
Why would a god create such vile creatures?
These people hate humanity and most of all they hate themselves. They see people as only being capable of good if its done out of a fear of God’s punishment. They can’t fathom that some of us simply want to be good people because that makes us feel better about ourselves. God is irrelevant to our decision.
I grew up in a religious environment and all that talk of original sin just never rang through. It’s a deplorable way to look at life and people.

Reply
2005-09-11

D. C.

Anon, the “fundamentalists” (in the modern sense of that word) of all religions can be extremely frustrating. And they can be dangerous when they demand, sometimes forcibly, that the rest of us conform our beliefs and actions to their peculiar worldviews. Sometimes we can just ignore them, but other times we have to resist, perhaps forcibly.
Still, you might want to try not to be so hard on them. Like the rest of us, they’re doing the best they can to cope with a complex and often confusing world. We’re all hampered by the limits of human knowledge and insight.
History suggests that over time, our respective cultural worldviews are likely to gradually converge on something at least modestly resembling the truth (that is, if we can avoid destroying ourselves). The past isn’t always a completely-reliable guide to the future, but IMHO the trend does give us reason for hope.

Reply
2005-09-11

Anon

You’re good people, DC. I’m sure that if we met at a Starbucks the conversation would be first-rate.
Yes, fundies of all ilks bother me. Not just the American version. They are all annoying simpletons. I grew up in a Catholic home. My mother was moderately religious while my father, an verey intelligent man, just changed the topic if it was brought up. I attended catholic schools for the first ten grades but pretty well lost my belief in the first grade.
All that focus on sin and guilt really rubbed me the wrong way. It was like a fetish with them. If a new born baby died before being baptised it was said to go to limbo for an indefinite period because it was too unclean to enter a heaven.
A new born baby!
However, fundies are even worse than the Catholics. Fundies think that catholics are not Christinas and won’t get into heaven.
Yo Cletus! The Catholic Church is “the” Christian Church. While I disagree with much of what the church stands for, at least it has almost 2000 years of theology behind it. The senior executives of the church tend to be intelligent and educated men.
Then Cletus comes along and pronounces that Catholics are wrong about everything and won’t get into heaven.
So you ask Cletus how he knows this. His answer? Well, Pastor Bubba done told him in bible class. Well what are pastor Bubba’s credentials? Oh, he has an associates degree in small engine repair from Mayberry Community College and he says the pope don’t know jack about god!
Back in grade one I lost my faith in part due to being told that all the poor sods who lived and died without hearing about Jesus would burn in hell. I found the idea repellant.
Now the Cletii not only condem Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, etc, to hell, but also other Christians who don’t belong to their particular sect.
Is it possible to be stupider than this? I think not.
I’ll give the catholics credit for one thing. They don’t bring up their religion in the first 5 minutes of meeting you nor do they try to convert you.
This reminds me of a quick story. About 11 years ago I’m interviewing an MBA student for a intern position with my firm. He’s an older student in his early thirties. When he mentions having worked as a missionary, I jump on it and ask him where excitedly.
I have lived all over North America and Europe as well as traveled everywhere but Africa, Australia, and Antartica. So I’m expecting to hear from him tales of working in some exotic land where people still hunt with spears.
His answer?
France!
I was stunned. You could have knocked me over with a feather. He was trying to save those heathen catholics from the eternal hell-fires!
That’s a fundie for you.

Reply
2005-09-11

D. C.

Same back atcha, Anon. I have a feeling you’re one of us (“us” being liberal Christians) much more than you think.
Let me suggest that you read mystery novelist Nevada Barr’s book, Seeking Enlightenment … Hat By Hat: A Skeptic’s Guide to Religion. My wife and I have sent several copies to various seeker friends and relatives. We don’t know what has resulted, but we’re confident we planted some seeds. The Publisher’s Weekly review of the book features a quote that captures the heart of its message (extra paragraphing mine):

“A life ago,” Barr writes, “I was depressed, broke, homeless, unemployed and divorced.” One evening she wandered into an Episcopal church, primarily because it was unlocked.
Desperation, not interest in religion, had brought her there, but warmly accepting parishioners kept her, and soon she wanted to be confirmed.
“I went to the priest and asked him if it would be okay considering I didn’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior, didn’t believe the Bible was divinely inspired and wasn’t entirely sure about the whole God thing.
Fortunately Father Andrew had been tending his flock long enough to recognize a lost lamb when one came bleating into his office and put no obstacles in my way.”

God bless those parishioners and their priest; they did exactly what they should have done — and, if you ask me, exactly what the rabbi from Nazareth whom we claim to follow would have done.
I think I may have already pointed you to a long essay I wrote about my own journey back to faith, but if I haven’t, it’s “Why I Still Call Myself a Christian, and an Episcopalian.”
You might also think about something that frequent commenter BLS says, which is that the way to “get” religion is simply to do it. I apologize if I’m repeating myself, but I’d suggest going to church on Sundays for, say, three months. Just go to the service and then come home; don’t worry about participating except to the extent you feel like it, but do make sure you go every Sunday. If nothing “happens,” remember that there’s no such thing as a failed experiment.
(BLS, where’ve you been lately?)

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2005-09-11

Barry Fernelius

Anon,
Please accept my apologies. It’s clear from your further discussions with DC that you’re not out trolling, and you’re clearly intelligent. My earlier post reflected my bad day, not your interactions on this site.
And I agree with DC. Try a a little thought experiment. If there were REAL followers of Jesus active in the world, how might these people behave? How would they be different from everyone else? What would kinds of things would they do?
Once you have a clear image of what that would look like, suspend your disbelief for three or four months, and do what a real Christian would do. I guarantee that even if this experiment doesn’t change your mind, it will be worth your best effort.

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2005-09-15

Anon

This is brilliant:
The World is made up of liars and cheats, with some good folks thrown in. Look at the scamming mafia government we have, and then you see what sort of role models our kids have. Anything for a buck (or a few billion bucks in the case of the Bush & Cheney and the likes). These people are soulless, Godless, parasitic refuse who know no shame, who don’t care about anyone or anything, except more money. I added Godless because these folks tend to claim they are so much holier than thou, and in fact, if Jesus did come back to see what is done in his name, he’d probably break a leg off of a table and beat these parasites to death. Well, one could only hope.
http://www.interrobang.org/blog/revolve/

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2005-09-15

Anon

Let me ask you a question about what it takes to get into heaven. As a child back in the 1960s I was taught that you had to 1) be a good person and, 2) a Christian.
Now things have been flipped over by the born-agains, or so it seems to me. If I understand them correctly, all you have to do to be “saved” (ie, go to heaven”) is be born again. Once you have done that you can just go back to being a complete jerk (if that’s what you were to begin with) and rest assured that your puffy personal cloud up in heaven has a “reserved” sign on it.
Is this true of the born agains? You never hear from them about doing good. It’s all just about the symbolic act of being born again. I even heard from one that after being BA-ed, you could sin even more and still get into heaven.
I have also heard that good saintly people who are not born again go to hell.
I believe in neither place, but ask out of curiosity.

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2005-09-16

Anon

This article is worth a separate post on your blog. http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html
Let’s read and discuss it.

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