Friday, December 21, 2007

where are we going? and why are we in this handbasket?

I read author Neil Gaiman's blog pretty regularly. He posts about his life, his travels, and frequently interesting and challenging links. Today he posted a link to this festering thing.

I honestly don't know where to start. With the entire heretical and unbiblical concept that God hates Creation? With the obvious joy the singers have for the music? With the upsidedown Canadian flag they're waving? I'm so shocked, I'm not even angry.

It's just...bizarre.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

How, how, HOW can anyone sing that God hates the world (beyond repentance btw) while smiling? I can only conclude that what they really mean is "everyone is damned except us and those who come follow us", but say it that way because they feel hyperbole will make people listen to them. I was in total tears for the last 30 seconds! That, my friends, is how to create a sociopath - monstrous. Oh and what's the whole thing with eating your children? Is that in Revelation? Say it together now: "poetic hyperbole". Who here sees the irony of advocating fundamentalist literalism with poetic hyperbole? Anyone? Wow.

pastoralice said...

I think the "you'll eat your kids" thing is a Hebrew Scriptures thing. The prophets, near as I can remember, were frequently denouncing either the Israelites or their non-Israelite neighbors for doing so--seems a little up-in-the-air whether they were being literal or figurative.

Anonymous said...

Okay, so the "poetic hyperbole" part only works for the eating your children if it's in some prophetic vision of the future. Still the irony holds, there's no point in worshipping an entity that hates you irrevocably - so they cannot literally mean what they say.

pastoralice said...

I think, Bonnie, that the poetic hyperbole thing still works. So much of the Bible is poetry--from the prophets to wisdom literature to the creation story itself. Jesus spoke in parables--not clearly understandable exposition--his stories are beautiful and truthful. I'm not certain how one can truly be a literalist with all that metaphorical language in there.

Anonymous said...

Oh I totally agree that much of the bible is Poetic Hyperbole and Parable - though now that I don't know where that quote is from, it's hard to use it as an example. Still I find it fascinating that these people, taking their cues from the bible, are using hyperbole (I suspect that they believe God loves them, animals and nature) to attract attention to their cause - a cause which happens to be ignoring poetic hyperbole in the bible and taking it all literally.

Anonymous said...

I was listening to "Speaking of Faith" yesterday and she was interviewing Ed Hussain who was a British Political Islamist who left the movement after violence surfaced. He commented that what we need to confront is not Islamic Terrorism, but - in order to prevent Terrorism - we need to confront all Islamic Fundamentalism: those who feel inherently superior with a need to enforce their ways upon others. It occurred to me that this is precisely what we see here. So I'd expand that to all Fundamentalism. Here it is a group of Christians who feel inherently superior. They're only non-violent because they're apathetic. They do not yet feel the need to change those around them. But if they did, I could see them being quite brutal.

pastoralice said...

Except that there are those who would say their protesting of military and other funerals is inherently violent. Certainly they aren't bombing anyone, but isn't it a similar situation to destroy someone's psyche?

Anonymous said...

While I was deeply disturbed, I wasn't directly hurt by them and no one was forced to watch (like with the funeral). Still, it's a fair point that it's all on a continuum of harm. The deeper point (also from Ed Hussain) is that those who use religion to make others feel superior are doing so for political reasons - in his case, within the Islamic community. They are using those who feel excluded from British society to attack moderate Islam - it's about power within Islam, just not directly stated as such. So when it comes to this group of singers, I can't help but also think that they must have suffered some loss of lifestyle or other isolating factor to make them feel so isolated. Ed did say that by talking about God in public discourse and by encouraging immigrants to participate in our common national culture, the USA has done much (that Britain could learn from) to prevent this isolation. And yet we have this festering thing! Something went horribly wrong in that community... I wonder what it was... and how many generations ago it occurred. Or more importantly, how many generations will it take for them to recover.