Real Live Preacher wrote a post a couple of weeks ago, titled So you think you want to try Christianity? I would like to invite people that are interested in taking an active part in the little “community” forming around my blog to go and read that post, then come back here and share your thoughts and impressions of it, if you feel you have any interesting thoughts to share. Use an inquisitive, curious mindset. Be nice, don’t be judgemental. Use an “anthropologist’s eye”.

The aim is not to start a debate, the aim is to foster a positive exchange of honest thoughts and ideas, to have a friendly fireside chat with a couple of friends, while we watch the last few flames lick the air, the moon peeking through the clouds, moments before we all crawl into our sleeping bags to listen to the sounds of the night. What do you think?

I might be rather busy and stressed this week — some operator & on-call duties, with a skilled shadow watching my every move. Next weekend, maybe go skiing. I will try to have my next post out within 7 days. Grrr, silly “real life” rears its ugly head again.

I have a number of copies of RealLivePreacher.com available, a book containing a collection of some of the best essays by Gordon Atkins. If you are in South Africa and would like a copy, let me know! It will be only R110. (Previous price did not include import tax. If you placed an order at the previous price, you can get it at that price.) Delivery to Stellenbosch or Cape Town area can be free. We’ll make a plan.

I started with 10. I’m keeping one. My stepfather is reading one, he says he cannot put it down, despite the fact that the odd swear word makes him a little uneasy. I’ve sold another four (two still need to be delivered). If you’ve bought one and done some reading, drop us a comment and tell us what you think?

If you have not yet come across RealLivePreacher, see the RLP tag, or go check out his blog. His most recent essays are Change Begins with a Dream, The Disillusionment Chronicles (1, 2, 3) and On Toilets and Living With Writers.

I ran a post titled Ancient Religious Texts in March last year, containing these clips. If you want a piece of anti-theism mixed in to your reading of the Bible, you can find enough of that elsewhere: there are a number of atheistic blogs running Bible studies. Personally, I’m gatvol of intolerance for intolerance’s sake. I only want to tolerate intolerance of things that (in my opinion) make the world a worse place.

As I now easily have ten times as many readers as I had back then, here is a “rerun” of the clips, in case anyone is interested in watching them. There are nine clips, most are just over six minutes, though the last two are between 11 and 15 minutes. Here is his intro clip, titled “So You Want to Read the Bible”:

And here is a full list of links to the posts on Gordon’s site:

• So You Want to Read the Bible
• How To Read The Bible #1
• How To Read The Bible #2 – starts a discussion of translations
• How To Read The Bible #3 – discusses various translations
• How To Read The Bible #4 – talks about the importance of context
• How To Read The Bible #5 – suggests “study tools” to help understand the Bible (and it’s context), discusses “Study Bibles”
• Reading the Bible – Demons – talks about “reading the Bible with an awareness of ancient worldviews”.
• Reading the Bible #6 – continues discussion of “study tools”, next step up from “Study Bibles”, 14 mins
• Reading the Bible #7 – intro to the content, and a suggested reading list, 12 mins

Let me know if you’ve got something interesting to discuss after watching these. I’d love discussions with literalists, but yet again, I bet the atheists are more likely to respond, which will again end up discouraging comments from the literalists reading this blog. *sigh*. It’s surprisingly hard to get a nice discussion going in this place. Don’t let that discourage you though, I’d love to hear some feedback from atheists as well, if you’re interested in spending the time and leaving thoughtful replies. Thanks.

I will soon be placing an order for my copy of RealLivePreacher.com, a book containing a collection of some of the best essays by Gordon Atkins. If you are in South Africa and would like a copy, let me know! It will be only R95. If I get enough orders, I can drop that to R90. (Shipping to Stellenbosch or Cape Town area is included. We’ll make a plan if you’re not in this area.)

I will place the order this month if there is enough interest, otherwise I might wait until the end of November (hoping to get more interest).

If you have not yet come across RealLivePreacher, you owe it to yourself to at least take a look at Some RLP Highlights, RLP on Indoctrination or his video series on How to Read the Bible.

Satire… if you want, you can keep in mind that Stephen Colbert is a practising Roman Catholic, and a Sunday school teacher.

I suppose some people would be offended by this video. Might I ask why? I really don’t think it makes any sense to be offended… (But tell me now, let’s sort it out… because there’s likely a rather more offensive clip on it’s way! <grin> – Another one of my favourite pieces of satire.)

If you haven’t read Real Live Preacher’s “A New Abraham and a New Earth” yet, now is as good a time as any. (This might be the third time I link to it.)

God is on a Milk Carton

Thanks to RLP for pointing it out. If you want a little quote, see RLP’s post on it. I don’t feel like quoting any of it, or making any comments. Just read it.

• Your Uncle’s Third Nipple – RLP’s contribution to the “Creationism versus Evolution” absurdity
• A New Abraham and a New Earth – tolerance, “HEY RELIGIOUS GUYS!”… get with the program! Hehe. Remains one of my favourites.
• The Slippery Slope – everyone lives on a slippery slope of some sorts?
• Cold Calling – this one was the first Foy Davis story I read. Stunning… especially all evangelical Christians really should read this one, it should aid understanding, seeing things from another perspective, from the receiving end…

Savage Chickens doesn’t usually seem particularly deep, in my experience. Maybe this wasn’t meant as particularly deep either. Art is like that though: you get to see things in it that weren’t necessarily explicitly meant by the author. Then again, maybe there is always something deep, and it’s purely my experience that is lacking?

I see satire, commenting on a section of the population that subscribes to ancient world-views, where a common diagnosis for some medical condition would be “possession by a demon”, with the cure naturally being an exorcism. Our world-view has moved on, and we now have a different way of looking at the world.

My point? You don’t have to believe in demonic possession to be a Christian. I don’t. (Though some might want to argue I don’t adhere to their definition of Christianity. So what?) Go check out Real Live Preacher‘s clip, Reading the Bible – Demons, part of his series on How to Read the Bible.

RLP responded to an anonymous user that asked…

How do you account for the fact that the demons in these stories spoke? They actually talked back to Jesus. What do you make of that if the demonic is just a matter of “first century worldview”?

Also, would you then discount Satan as a personal being?

…with the following:

First, I don’t discount the possibility of the demonic. What I said was as follows:

1. Everyone in the ancient world believed in demons and attributed all sorts of illnesses to them.

2. We know more about diseases now, and we deal with them in other ways.

Those two facts are not disputable.

I don’t feel that I have to blame everything on the demonic. And I don’t really think very much about the reality of the demonic when I read these stories. I just read the stories as given.

As for the demons speaking, the gospels record PEOPLE speaking in the voices of demons. Who knows what the reality was.

I don’t know about Satan. I tend to discount Satan’s existence as a personal being, yes. But I don’t care enough about Satan to even have a strong opinion on that.

Good response, humble as always. Anyway, I also see Satan as a personification of evil, rather than “a personal being”. And I think demons do not exist in a physical sense. That doesn’t rule out their possible existence in some metaphorical sense, of course. Comments?

Suppose someone decides he or she wants to read the Bible, but has no idea how or where to start? Real Live Preacher has a set of clips that I really recommend, and covers the subject matter quite well, so I will avoid making too many comments of my own in this post. His main target group is people that have never read the Bible before, and are interested in doing so. I do highly recommend it to people that have read or often read the Bible also, though.

There are nine clips, most are just over six minutes, though the last two are between 11 and 15 minutes. Here is his intro clip, titled “So You Want to Read the Bible”:

And here is a full list of links to the posts on Gordon’s site:

• So You Want to Read the Bible
• How To Read The Bible #1
• How To Read The Bible #2 – starts a discussion of translations
• How To Read The Bible #3 – discusses various translations
• How To Read The Bible #4 – talks about the importance of context (also illustrates 2D aliasing, an artifact of sampling, something we digital signal processing people know all about <grin>)
• How To Read The Bible #5 – suggests “study tools” to help understand the Bible (and it’s context), discusses “Study Bibles”
• Reading the Bible – Demons – talks about “reading the Bible with an awareness of ancient worldviews”.
• Reading the Bible #6 – continues discussion of “study tools”, next step up from “Study Bibles”, 14 mins (also illustrates reverb )
• Reading the Bible #7 – intro to the content, and a suggested reading list, 12 mins (also illustrates noise, and some unfortunate glitches in the audio)

I am, as always, keen for comments from all perspectives. I think I should encourage shorter comments (many shorter comments are better than a few long monologues?), especially since I want to try to get a diversity of opinions. (<holds thumbs>) And I really strongly suggest you watch the clips, at least a couple of them, before leaving comments. (There are a large number of gems amongst the comments on his site, if you are interested – of interest mostly to Christians, I think.)

To people geographically near me, I can also provide CDs with all the clips on them. I will try to bring a CD, maybe two, with me to Stellenbosch on Monday.

Most Americans oppose violence spurred by religious fundamentalism, but few agree on how to address it. In books like The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, author Sam Harris contends that religion itself–not its more extreme forms–is to blame. This week, Harris debates blogger and Conservative Soul author Andrew Sullivan in a no-holds-barred “blogalogue.” Return here to see Harris’ next post–and check Andrew Sullivan’s blog for his responses.

This is from ‘God Is Not a Moderate’, on RichardDawkins.net. The debate can be found elsewhere as well, but that source is to me the most readable.

OK, that intro seemed to help me get over my writers’ block. My apologies: this probably means I’m going to ramble on randomly for the rest of this post.

For some time now I’ve been labelling myself a “moderate”, hoping the term is broad enough not to lead to too much confusion. (Why label things? Well, to try to aid understanding. Try pointing out a “tree” species without making use of the label “tree”.) I have for a couple of years recognized the problems and dangers inherent in fundamentalism, and generally agree that the world would be a better place without it. And then I also ponder John Lennon’s “Imagine no religion”…

While just ignoring such issues completely, and getting on with my life with some unresolved vagueness sounds like a wonderful option, I have quite some trouble opting for it. Suppose one does opt for leaving unresolved vagueness, what does one tell one’s children, for example? I hear the main “problem” in mixed-religion marriages is “what to teach the kids”. I also wonder about the advantages and disadvantages of telling your children “Don’t worry, grandma is in heaven” versus “I choose to believe grandma is in heaven, and suggest you do too”. The latter is definitely more honest? Sam Harris suggests: “Rather than teach our children to grieve, we teach them to lie to themselves.” (Now is maybe not the time to go into abstract ideas of “heaven”. I have some potentially interesting ideas I will share someday.)

Then again, why need I worry about my children, if I remain an eternal bachelor, which is the route I seem to be currently walking? It does not exactly help that the general consensus in one of my circle of friends is that the most important thing in finding a potential spouse is their being a “good Christian”. My views are unconventional enough, or just unconservative enough, that I often do not feel I meet their definition of “good Christian”. (I do remain conservative enough that I will never have children to raise if I’m not in a marriage. <grin>) Maybe I’m forcing that circle of friends into a box in which they don’t really belong. I wouldn’t really know. I am hoping to start conversations like these that would help me learn more about the true views of my friends, it’s not the kind of thing easily discussed at the typical party. And yes, that was a great and terrible generalization.

Anyway, if I make this post long enough, I need not worry about sweeping generalizations – few enough people will read it that it doesn’t matter. So back to the article, and why its chain of thoughts is interesting to me. I am on a journey. (All Christians should be on a journey, not at a destination.) This particular section of my journey seems primarily concerned with what exactly it is that I believe, and what that really means to me.

Take a look at an old post by Real Live Preacher, The Beginning and the End of Wisdom, a most amazing essay that somehow expresses what I’m thinking incredibly well. If you were to read only one of the two links I provide in this post, I suggest you read this one. Besides, it’s much shorter than the debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan.

Well, that’s enough for now. I will further lament peer pressure and fundamentalism at a later date, as well as illustrate and explain my views bit by bit. For now I want to encourage everyone to comment. You can also do so anonymously (you do have to provide an email address, but only I will ever see it, and I respect your privacy).

Oh, and who wants to watch “Saved!” with me? You can find trailers at the movie’s official site. I’m curious as to what my reaction to that movie will be.