The UmBlog

Bad religion asks parents to sacrifice their children. Bad religion is cultural. Bad religion looks for scapegoats. Bad religion always find scapegoats in those with less power. Bad religion kills kids. Abraham's story in Genesis 22 is a story of good religion prevailing over bad. image source    Abraham lives in a culture which not only approves of child sacrifice, but even encourages it for assistance from the deities. Abraham believes his deity wants him to also perform this act of devotion. But after he ties his son up, he has an encounter with God unlike any previous one. It appears God changed his mind.  More likely, Abraham changed his mind about God. Evangelical and fundamentalist christians also live in cultures where they think their deity asks them to bind their children, to not let them live in truth their sexual identity. Hence, these children who normally benefit from the protective effects of religion on suicidal thoughts and tendencies actually experience ...

Here is the quick summary. This book is a 5 star thesis with a 2 star execution. Great ideas benefit from great editors. I really hope Ronald Goetz 's book, The Galilee Episode , gets picked up by a real publisher with an editorial team to cut this rough gem into a thing of beauty it deserves. Goetz's spiritual journey started at a young age, resulting in Bible college and 15 years in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination then in the United Methodists for the past 30 years or so. At some point he saw this passage in Luke 17 with new eyes. 34 I tell you, on that night two men will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. 35 Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left. I have to say I never thought of these passages in their plain reading before myself, but in the fundamentalist goggles I inherited. Why are two guys sharing a bed at night? Maybe because they are gay partners. And did you know "grinding" is not...

 I've written a couple other posts on this topic before, here and here . Jesus and his followers, in the footsteps of the Jewish prophets before them, chose which writings to elevate and which writings to minimize. Jesus did this to Moses when he said an eye for an eye was not God's way in his sermon on the mount. But Jesus also does this in his temptation. His accuser shows up and says, "yo, you can get a lot of followers by doing this miracle based on the Psalms by jumping off this high place, because the Psalmist prophecies God won't let you foot dash against a rock. Maybe you'll levitate or something." And Jesus, who must have stubbed his toe multiple times in his life is like, "you is a fool, why you gotta take poetry literally like that, also the book says don't test God like that, Fool." Jesus pointed out to my younger fundamentalist self that some things in the scriptures are more important than others. If you use the lenses of love is G...

I used to have an abundance of pro-life blog posts on here. I took them down because I no longer think my male opinion carries even the weight of electrons on this blog. I do consider myself pro-life, not just pro-birth, and believe the church and the government should support not only pregnant mothers but post-natal mothers and children. Please see my post from last year. " policy proposal: pay pregnant women and at home parents ". If you are an evangelical woman who has had or is considering an abortion and if wracked with guilt, I'd like to offer a minority report on the biblical exemption for abortion. We start with Exodus 21 . The first eleven verses fall into the category I've written about many times here under the label, "not everything biblical is Christian", meaning these slave laws are awful and not Christ-like at all. Starting at verse 12 though we get to the capital crimes. Again, I'm pro-life so I don't think a Christ follower should be...

source Luke 16 The Message (MSG) The Story of the Crooked Manager  1-2 Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a manager. He got reports that the manager had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses. So he called him in and said, ‘What’s this I hear about you? You’re fired. And I want a complete audit of your books.’  3-4 “The manager said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I’ve lost my job as manager. I’m not strong enough for a laboring job, and I’m too proud to beg. . . . Ah, I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll do . . . then when I’m turned out into the street, people will take me into their houses.’  5 “Then he went at it. One after another, he called in the people who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ 6 “He replied, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ “The manager said, ‘Here, take your bill, sit down here—quick now—write fifty.’ 7 “To the next he said, ‘And...

Matthew Fleischer did a great job surprising me with his previous book, The Old Testament Case for Non-violence . He follows the same methodology of considering New Testament texts of violent nature in their context and against the explicit teachings of Jesus in this new book while fairly considering other interpretations and following them to their logical ends. I may have much in common with Fleischer especially being a big fan of Jesus. However, I'm no longer a fan of verse by verse argumentation. I used to do that. Not only am I tired of it but I can no longer ignore the humanity beset by time bound mores and prejudices wrapped up in these texts. Fleischer carries a burden I won't, which is every verse is God-breathed, even the terrible ones, while he tries to defend Jesus' pacifism. I arrive at the same conclusion, but my route is shorter than his. If the reader is of the "biblical christianity" background and persuasion, this is a book to wrestle with. I...

Orbis books I've known about this book for a few years, but I have not been emotionally healthy enough to read it until now. I don't think I ever really began to understand the depths of white supremacy in the evangelical church until the Black Lives Matter movement started. When I used that hashtag and advocated against police lynchings and found myself not only removed from my church's opinion in general, but actively pushed back against. Michael Brown's lynching by a policeman in 2014 was the beginning of my steep slide into depression and out of the evangelical church. Somehow, I was still surprised when 80% of white evangelicals voted for an fascist racist. I was surprised by African-Americans were not. African-Americans like James Cone, who grew up in Jim Crow Arkansas, were all too familiar with white christians who did not see the paradox of going to a lynching Saturday night and a worship service Sunday morning.  The white supremacist christians did not ma...

Amazon link One reaction to a transgender person in my former fundagelical approach to the world is to believe such a person is deceived by the devil if not fully cooperating with Satan. In fact, it is such a demonic act that one should not even participate in using the person's new name. The observational, scientific understanding of sex, gender, genitalia, and brain structure are not yet allowed to disagree with Moses's binary assertion that in the beginning God created them male and female. Compassion is not allowed to overrule bronze age judgments, the very issue Jesus fought against in his interactions with his contemporary Bible-thumpers. Experience forces us to reconsider the primacy of scripture. For Jesus, it was an encounter with a Gentile woman . For Peter it was a dream about eating non-kosher food. For me it was the coming out of a family member. For Jonathan Williams, it was his dad, a successful leader of a large fundagelical church planting organization, ...

Jesus said. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke 4:18 The United States is known as a Christian nation. The united States has the highest incarceration rate in the world . Both of these statements cannot be true at the same time. Cuba and Russia and China have lower incarceration rates than the US. Post genocide Rwanda has a lower incarceration rate than the US. Racially-divided South Africa has 1/2 the incarceration rate of the US. Post-Christian Europe, the bogeyman of fundamentalist preachers has 1/6 the incarceration rate of the US. Muslim Egypt has 1/6 the incarceration rate of the US. Muslim Indonesia has 1/6 the incarceration rate of the US. Non-religious Japan has 1/10th the incarceration rate of the US. Muslim Pakistan...

Three of the things I'm really grateful for from my experience in the Vineyard churches was the emphasis on the unconditional love of God, the grace of God, and the loving, fatherly heart of God. These principles undid a lot of the spiritual damage I had acquired in my upbringing. However, one of the things I had to hold with cognitive dissonance was the condition placed on God's unconditional love. Here are a few analogies I was told to explain this. It's a free gift, you just need to unwrap it. It's a blank check, you just need to sign it. Will you consent to be loved? I turned to Calvinism for a while to break this log jam in my brain. Today's Calvinists will say something along the lines of, God knew I would unwrap/sign/consent from eternity past so I really had no choice it was all God's work. But Calvinism creates so many more problems than it solves and I eventually dropped it. One of the pushbacks from non-Calvinists is the analogy of divine ...

farewell discourse John 15:9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love . 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love . 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you . 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other . Unique to John's gospel is the upper room discourse. As I prayed t...

DaVinci's Ultima Cena At the last supper, recognized today during the Holy Week before Easter, Jesus ate with a dozen friends. He knew 10 would flee into hiding after his arrest, one would betray him for money, one would deny him for safety, and only one would follow him all the way to the cross, where his women friends would not abandon him. Anticipating all of this, he not only dined with them, he took on the role of a house slave and washed each of their feet, saying this is what leadership looks like in the kingdom of love. The church has an unloving history of table fellowship. It continually tries to keep "bad" people away from the table. Some of the bad people it tries to keep away are those churches who keep adding another leaf and pulling up another chair. If Jesus welcomes to the table two cowards who denied him for profit or for fear, abandoning him to a torture then a lynching, who is worse than Peter or Judas? Are you not-white? Neither were the discip...

The judgment of the sheep and the goats Definition of  worship from Merrian Webster worshipped   also   worshiped ;  worshipping   also   worshiping transitive verb :  to honor or reverence as a divine being or supernatural power 2 :  to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion  a celebrity  worshipped by her fans intransitive verb When one worships, one regards another being with respect, honor and devotion. Now consider this parable of Jesus. Matthew 25:31-33 “When he finally arrives, blazing in beauty and all his angels with him, the Son of Man will take his place on his glorious throne. Then all the nations will be arranged before him and he will sort the people out, much as a shepherd sorts out sheep and goats, putting sheep to his right and goats to his left. 34-36 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Enter, you who are blessed by my Father! Take what’s coming to you i...

Equally Wed Luke 6:22 “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. 26 “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. I am reading Richard Beck's book, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted . As a progressive believer and professor of psychology, Beck reconciles the concept of the devil/Satan/Old Scratch with the evil systems in this world and our own selfish ways. One of the outworkings of his thinking, as I read last night, is the falsehood of separating Jesus' two commands, love God and love your neighbor as yourself as two loves, instead of one. He writes, ...loving human beings is loving God and loving God is loving human beings. Only one love is at work, with n...

Luke 6:21b, 25b "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh....Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep." One of the weirdest things going on in our society today is the refusal of those who will not empathize with the students who have lost friends and classmates to school shooters. This is an extension of the racist refusal to empathize with African American men, women, and children who have been shot in cold blood by American police forces. In the first circumstance, which I saw first with Sandy Hook, and now with Marjory Stonemam Douglas, the accusations of "crisis actors" portraying grief and horror instead of real students and real parents and real teachers and real first responders actually witnessing mass murder and suffering horribly from it. Then I see media figures mocking the appearances of these survivors; adults are actually bullying children from their high profile positions. Instead of mourning in sackcloth and a...

back cover Instead of introducing the book I hope you, my dear reader, will read this image of the back cover to get the gist of this "incendiary" reading. Dr. Peter Rollins has his PhD in Post-structural Thought. I don't know what that means either, but I've heard him many times on multiple podcasts and have always found him intriguing, especially when I heard him promote this book, The Divine Magician . How can I best summarize this? And remember to have mercy on me, because I am not nearly as well read as Dr. Rollins on Freud and the continental approach to psychology. So this is equivalent to a third grader trying to explain to classmates drug metabolism... A magic act has three components, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. The pledge is the rabbit being placed in the top hat. The turn is the turning of the hat to show the rabbit is not there, defying physics. The prestige is the return of a rabbit but in a new, completely irrational or unexpected loc...

source In John ch. 4 we learn a story about Jesus meeting an ostracized woman who was alone at the community well. They have a conversation about water, religion, and her background of having multiple husbands and currently living with the 6th man in her life. There are many beautiful theological nuggets in this story, but there is also theological actions of note as well. He crossed gender norms to speak with her. He crossed religious norms to speak with her. He did not exploit the opportunity to harm her. The last one may come across as slightly odd. Why would we expect Jesus to take the opportunity to exploit a woman while he was alone with her, someone who did not have a reputation to defend her if she were assaulted, having been with six different men over the years. There is another reason to not expect this behavior from Jesus. His own mother faced accusations of her own, while pregnant and unwed. Those accusations are still flung at her, raped by a Roman soldier...

Luke 9:61 Then another said, “I’m ready to follow you, Master, but first excuse me while I get things straightened out at home.”  62 Jesus said, “No procrastination. No backward looks. You can’t put God’s kingdom off till tomorrow. Seize the day.” source: Prose and Poetry blog As I look at all these facets of love I get overwhelmed with how much God's love does. I find myself making mental checklists of all the things I have to do to love like Christ loves. Pondering on this topic can be overwhelming, so much so it crowds out the actual work of loving my neighbor. In this moment, right now, my neighbor is not destitute, but a lab partner who depends on me providing high quality work and keeping the lab clean. Last night it was helping an excessively intoxicated homeless person get a safe and warm place to sleep for the night at the homeless shelter I volunteer at. Sometimes I put myself out there. Sometimes out there comes to me. It means nothing to love humanity and not lov...

1 John 3:17 How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18 Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. The previous two posts on love, Love blesses the poor and Love feeds the hungry come from Jesus' sermon on the plain in Luke 6. I will continue through those beatitudes, but I wanted to pause here and look at John's commentary on love in action. The needs of the poor are so great. I can do a little. My church can do a little more. A mission organization can do a little more. But a government that represents me as a citizen can levy taxes, not plead for donations. With taxes and laws, a citizen can be provided health care at a price they can afford. With taxes, a family can be given some money to help feed them for a month. With taxes, an laid off person can have enough time to find a job before they lose their home. With taxes, a person injured on the job will ...

Luke 6:21 Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied...25 Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. In larger societies, people go hungry because of policy. The world produces enough food to feed every hungry person, but some governments do not care if people starve or actively hope their people starve. In the United States we throw away 40% of our food supply ! I grew up never wasting food. It was my grandparent's experience of the Great Depression that influenced my parents' use of food and leftovers and mine as well to this day. My wife and I always encouraged our kids to be part of the "Clean Plate Club." In my life, satiation was not a given in life, so I need to get it whenever I can. As an older guy, my metabolism can no longer keep up with that philosophy, meaning I need to modulate what I consider satiation. Jesus tells me I am missing out on the blessing of hunger. What is that blessing? I used to practice fasting ...