The last three days of Focus On The Family broadcasts have been an panel of apologetics experts (apologeticists?) lamenting how few Evangelicals share their particular correct “biblical worldview.” Since my Friday afternoon was filled with mindless AUTOCAD work I had plenty of time to listen to all three broadcasts for yet more gems from Focus.
So what’s the newest scourge for which we can blame absent/distant fathers?
No, not homosexuality. Oh please, that’s so passé.
Atheism. That’s right, Wednesday’s Focus broadcast (10/19/05) blames distant fathers for causing some of history’s greatest athiests.
Panelist Lee Strobel:
There’s other kinds of barriers that people have, umm… psychological barriers and they may not even be aware of that. Umm… Paul Vitts who’s a psychologist at New York university has done a book in which he studies the famous atheists thru history and he found that every single one of them either had a father who abandoned them when they were young or died when they were young or they had a terrible relationship with their father. So you back to Camus and Sartre and Marx and Freud and you go right down the line you’re up to Madeline Murray O’Hare and you see this pattern and the inability to trust and seek after a heavenly father if your early father has, you’re holding him responsible for abandoning you or you have a terrible relationship. Sometimes it’s something as subtle as that that deters people from seeking the truth about Jesus. (+11:58, audio link)
P.S. Fun new infographic Monday!
Huh? This can’t be serious. Personally, I have a great relationship with my father, always have, but I am both gay and atheist. Darn, you mean Focus’s Pocus theories do not apply to everyone, I’m shocked. Atheism, like religion, is a personal thing. One either believes or they don’t. I don’t, never have. It has absolutely nothing to do with upbringing, education or anything else, it is a life experience in of itself.
How does he account for homes with fathers who are religious…and abuse their wives and children with that typical father/lord/master syndrome that comes from severe religious adherence?
How about the little Paris boy? He had a father.
Muslim countries are loaded with religious teaching and mosque attendance is a national pasttime-the men are accompanied by their own sons (sometimes three generations strong) and the call to prayer is ordered five times a day over a loud speaker.
They don’t even get to choose WHICH god or prophet they want to follow.
Are these same false Christian prophets going to say that the chaos in the Middle East is because there aren’t enough men, fathers or god in the mix?
Personally, us more secular, or more modest faithful are stuck between the more powerfully religious that want EVERYONE to believe the same…or die.
Which is an impossible endeavor and a dangerous one.
But I bet none of these type Christian guys are trying that message on the Muslims in Iraq.
They aren’t THAT brave. They only pull this crap in the one country they know they can.
I really wonder how far their beliefs really go.
Really.
They bitch and moan a lot when they think nobody wants to listen to their representation of god. But go to jail? Get beat up and threatened with execution or assaulted by seriously dangerous anti Christian street violence?
All that’s fine for gay people to endure with their identity…but will a Christian REALLY do that in defense of what they SAY they so really believe?
And this…is a for sure a CHOSEN lifestyle.
Why don’t THEY give up being religious if it’s so TOUGH and they STRUGGLE with being of faith in America?
It’s not the law to be religious here, and never was.
This is where my compassion button gets seriously tested.
We’re a better country BECAUSE of a diversity and freedom to worship as reasonable in a polyglot nation as this.
If we go the religious culture route, we’ll end up as chaotic as those places in the Middle East.
They love saying this stupid stuff because they don’t think much of who listens to it.
But us critical thinkers in here are on to them, that’s why they avoid us or don’t really want to talk to us.
The current SouthernVoice was a lot of fun to read today.
More good news than bad for a change.
But check out the article on the demonstration by high school kids in response to Coming Out Day.
Breath of fresh air.
At the risk of offending, wasn’t Jesus’ father pretty absent/distant? (See the Garden of Gesthemane in the Gospels–if you believe his father was God; or, the absence of Joseph if you don’t…) I am assuming that they are not arguing that Jesus was gay or an atheist….
ck,
actually at the time, Jesus was considered to be a bit of a heretic and blasphemer. Dobson, et al, would not have liked him at all.
Dan,
it’s probably just a matter of time before they claim that all athiests were homosexual and use the “distant father” as proof.
Maybe Melissa Fryrear can say that she’s met hundreds of athiests and every one of them was homosexual.
We’ve seen the likes of a Jesus since, Jesus was Jesus in his own name.
You know…that gentle person, whose soul and eyes turn to fire when there is injustice somewhere.
That skinny little guy, and Indian South African who saw apartheid up close.
You know, that young preacher with the rich voice from Birmingham?
They saw their own people oppressed and say the universal danger of injustice to anyone.
Perhaps you might not be surprised if the new prophet we’ve been waiting for is a gay kid from Memphis…who has a crush on Elvis and himself sings like an angel.
He might have taken trumpet lessons when he was small.
You know…perhaps the Second Coming is a girl named Born in Stars…and she was birthed on a rez off the 187.
The new millenium Pharisees won’t know her…they’ll see her mother as just another single mom that waits on welfare checks.
god speaks everyday in life, love and creation…
if, you are really looking as you walk along, and without knowing why…you fall in love with the little Latino urchin, his mom’s hands dried and leathery from the chemicals she uses cleaning toilets in million dollar homes. But he’s smiling and smiling at you with such friendliness and hope.
You pass by as they wait on a bus…
He…or she…just might be…maybe…could be…
The One?
Never under estimate such a sunbeam of a smile, that shines from a dirty face.
You might not quite know who that is…but they’ll sure know YOU.