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Rod’s Top Ten Ways Christians Stopped Being So Religious

10. The presence of the Holy Spirit in a church can now be measured by nose count and cash flow (or so many churches think).
9. Christians started going out to eat on Sunday, and now the Sunday dinner is only a subject for archeological study.
8. Now that men have stopped wearing suits to church, you can no longer tell the ministers apart from the golfers.
7. Christians started recreating, shopping, and movie-going on Sunday, and expected the church to reschedule to Thursday.
6. Sunday School perfect attendance awards have to be explained to our kids, just like black-and-white television and the Soviet Union.
5. Christians stopped showing up on time for Sunday School and church — then stopped showing up at all for Sunday School — then stopped showing up for either one — and then blamed the church.
4. Women abandoned hats and gloves and formal attire in favor of business dress, and then abandoned that as well — and now wear whatever is left over from the clean laundry.
3. Church and golf are now so aligned that the dress is the same for both.
2. Christians gave up Scriptural absolutes in exchange for cable news absolutes, Oprah absolutes and Dr. Phil absolutes, and now quote them to each other like Scripture.
1. Churches which once had pulpits and choir lofts now have stages for live variety shows and the big band era.

Missing Link Found

Received this email from John Carlson on the topic of Intelligent Design. Thanks, John, for your thoughts:

Isn’t it ironic that one of the best arguments against Intelligent Design — at least as far as the concept might be applied to the structure and workings of the individual human brain — is the fact that some otherwise “intelligent” people say that Intelligent Design doesn’t exist? On second thought, perhaps this is more paradoxical than ironic. Maybe it’s just dumb.

It seems to me that even rudimentary observations of reality, combined with a measure of common sense, indicate that some form of Intelligent Design must be operating behind the scenes to result in the centro-complexity of the world in which we exist. It is a created complexity that flies in the face of laws of entropy that seem to apply to the universe in general.

Darwinian evolutionary theory, itself, is riddled with paradoxes and holes so big that the Missing Link could drive a truck through them. You know, the truck that sprang forth from a random explosion at a junkyard caused by lightning hitting an old 55-gallon barrel of amino acids, worn-out alternators and old spark plugs.

BTW: I think I saw the Missing Link driving that truck in traffic the other day. It was talking on a cell phone and had the bass-booster cranked up.

Got Religion?

Came across a good blog this morning: Get Religion. Get Religion is written by former Christianity Today editor Douglas LeBlanc and well-known Scripps-Howard religion columnist Terry Mattingly. Lead story today is on the box office beat: “The lion wrestles the big ape.”

Rod: You may be interested in Get Religion’s take on the Indiana prayer controversy you wrote about last week. Daniel Pulliam, who wrote the post, says:

I am dying to know what [U.S. District] Judge Hamilton thinks he can do to [Indiana Speaker of the House Brian] Bosma or any other member of the Indiana House who use Jesus’s name in a prayer.

Good question!

Get Religion also has an interesting recent piece on whether a Mormon (Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a GOP hopeful) can be elected president.

I’m going to add Get Religion to my daily blog rounds and to our blogroll.

ID: If Not Science, Why Not History?

Ron Mashore has emailed with an interesting comment on the ID debate. Here’s Ron’s comment:

I have developed an idea that I wanted to fly by you. It’s related to the recent court decision prohibiting the teaching of Creationism or Intelligent Design in school science classes. I wonder why we couldn’t teach God creating the World as History in our public schools? There are many historical documents that corroborate the Bible. Also, the occurrence of major and minor events in the Bible are documented elsewhere. When I was in High School, we read the book of Matthew in a Great Books Literature class.

Indiana Court Adopts Uni-prayer

The United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, on November 30, 2005, enjoined the Indiana Legislature from opening its sessions with sectarian prayer. Following the United States Supreme Court decision regarding the Nebraska legislature, the Marsh case, the Indiana federal court ordered the Indiana Legislature to conduct its opening prayer tradition like this:

“In this case, for the reasons set forth above, plaintiffs are entitled to a permanent injunction against the Speaker in his official capacity barring him from permitting sectarian prayer as part of the official proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives. If the Speaker chooses to continue any form of legislative prayer, he shall advise persons offering such a prayer (a) that it must be nonsectarian and must not be used to proselytize or advance any one faith or belief or to disparage any other faith or belief, and (b) that they should refrain from using Christ’s name or title or any other denominational appeal.”

Gene Veith, writing for World Magazine, brought this decision, to my attention at least, in the December 17th issue of World Magazine, in his review of the decision, when he noted that the decision eliminated religious diversity by banning sectarian prayer, but allowed non-sectarian prayer, i.e., uni-prayer [my word not his, but probably not a new term since the invention of the uni-sex concept]. Mr. Veith also noted that Christian prayer is incapable of encompassing meaningful uni-prayer.

The legislative session prayer cases are more worrisome to me than the public school prayer or public school curriculum cases. To avoid that problem, Christians simply have to learn how to tithe and start their own schools. Our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters have been doing so for generations and while not perfect, have set an example for nearly everyone else. But, legislatures cannot be privatized. The Indiana federal court has taken us one more step away from non-sectarian government toward a form of uni-religion and uni-prayer that will one day become the standard of the politically correct.