The Ryno Pen

You’re kind of fortunate, Both My Readers^™, that I piked last night before going into one of my interminable wandering rants.

Having had an entire day to consider my content, I’ve condensed it to a wandering rant of finite length.

^{Clicky For Biggy - the artist’s blog is here.}

Now before I get underway, let’s do the Belief Disclaimer Thing¹. The problem I have is not with the Invisible Friends, but the complete inconsistency of a number of the nominal followers of that nice Mister Christ.

The supposed focus for the whole Christian thing is guilt.

[This section will possibly require some suspension of disbelief]

In brief, Man² stuffs it up (as is Man’s wont) and God³ chooses to disregard the element of entrapment or that his alleged omni-stuff (both -science and -presence) would have allowed him to prevent or circumvent Grand Theft Apple. On goes the Black Cap, and it’s curses on this that and the other, plus Death for the puny hu-mans, including all those as-yet-unborn sproglets of the first scrumpers.

Time passes. If you’re following the thing in your Classics Illustrated bibles, we fast-forward to a change of testaments. The Essene essence of the narrative in the first four books is that God supposedly becomes a puny hu-man, Does Not Stuff It Up, gets deaded and thus cunningly subverts the nasty doomy thing he himself⁵ lumped Mankind with back in Genesis 3.

Now the process (also in the book) involves some notions called forgiveness and repentance, which appear to have interdependencies.

At least, the way I see it⁶, the repentance factor (on which forgiveness is conditional) involves turning the subject’s will away from the behaviour which is the subject of the wrongdoing.

Worse yet, I’ll have to use parables. Argh.

Example 1: Freda tends to spread harmful rumours. Freda does the “Oh God, forgive me” bit, and resolves not to disseminate any more nasty gossip. She fails a little now and then, but puts in an effort to change. Her behaviour is altered.

Result: Forgiven.

Compare this:

Example 2: Alfred has been underpaying his employees for years now. While he usually justifies it to himself that “they wouldn’t have jobs otherwise” or “they’d spend it on booze and so forth, and this way I get to give God ten percent”, occasionally he feels a twinge of guilt. On such occasions, Alfred puts an extra fifty in the collection, tells God that it is good for God to have influential Christian businessmen with money for the Kingdom, and reminds himself to dock Betsy for leaving early on Friday.

A minor jitter has occurred, but Alfred’s course is unaltered.

Result: I have to say “Not Forgiven”.

Where were we?

I had a lot more to say here, but I may well head up to bed. I’m merely sick and tired of types like the guy who went out of his way to nag me about how pr0n was “bad, M’kay” (and then was found out groping underagers), the worship-leaders who come into the whole Hillsong Trance after making some pretty vile racist remarks backstage, the Tellers Of Lies For God, the ones who Just Help God Out A Little…

You’re pretty washed-up in my eyes, and I don’t guess that matters a lot to you. You might, though, like to ponder how forgiven you are in your unaltered state, before coming after my apostate scalp again.

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TFF^™0

⁰ Those Fundamentalist Footnotes^™.

¹ Your choice of Invisible Friends is all yours. Number, shape, name and rules of play are yours to choose: they always have been, and always will be. You can even make them visible if you like, but remember, it’s your game, and if somebody else chooses not to see Harvey, then that’s their game. This kind of stuff is always at arm’s length from hard science: that is why it’s faith.

² This term will be taken to include women and Objectionable Men Who Want To Be Called Loretta.

³ The Father aspect in this case⁴.

⁴ Never minding that the doctrine of the trinity is extrascriptural: see ¹.

⁵ For certain values of “himself”, anyway.

⁶ Your humble blogonaut studied for the ministry. (I got better!) Some tertiary theological study was involved, and I was still passing on exams and assignments when I quit. Those who are going to argue with me can go for their bibles if they wish. Phelps has a bible.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 1:48 am and is filed under charismatic churches, ex-charismatic, ex-church, fundamentalism, groups, hillsong, people stuff, people-watching, rant, religion, sociology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.