Snarky Sermon on the Blog: Born-Again Atheism

Everyone's yakking about Richard Dawkins' new book this week. And the latest crap-meme, "New Atheism" sounds like "Born-Again Christian"... with a twist, doesn't it?

Dawkins, however, is just the latest in a long line of writers to question the belief systems of the absolute believers (aka the churchiologists)...

Perhaps it would be wise to pass over the theologians in silence. That short-tempered and supercilious crew is unpleasant to deal with. . . . They will proclaim me a heretic. With this thunderbolt they terrify the people they don't like. Their opinion of themselves is so great that they behave as if they were already in heaven; they look down pityingly on other men as so many worms. A wall of imposing definitions, conclusions, corollaries, and explicit and implicit propositions protects them. They are full of big words and newly-invented terms. . . .

. . . Next to the theologians in happiness are those who commonly call themselves the religious and monks. Both are complete misnomers, since most of them stay as far away from religion as possible, and no people are seen more often in public. They are so detested that it is considered bad luck if one crosses your path, and yet they are highly pleased with themselves. They cannot read, and so they consider it the height of piety to have no contact with literature.... Most of them capitalize on their dirt and poverty by whining for food from door to door. . . . These smooth fellows simply explain that by their very filth, ignorance, boorishness, and insolence they enact the lives of the apostles for us. It is amusing to see how they do everything by rule, almost mathematically. Any slip is sacrilege. each shoe string must have so many knots and must be of a certain color. . . . They even condemn each other, these professors of apostolic charity, making an extraordinary stir if a habit is belted incorrectly or if its color is a shade too dark. . . . The monks of certain orders recoil in horror from money, as if it were poison, but not from wine or women. They take extreme pains, not in order to be like Christ, but to be unlike each other. Most of them consider one heaven an inadequate reward for their devotion to ceremony and traditional details. They forget that Christ will condemn all of this and will call for a reckoning of that which He has prescribed, namely, charity.

Erasmus

Of course, Erasmus was not the first to question organized religion. At the first Council of Nicea, Unitarianism lost by one vote, as did the divinty of Jesus' mother.

“The Trinity was carried in a general council by one vote against a quaternity; the Virgin Mary lost an equality with the Father, Son, and Spirit only by a single suffrage.”

John Adams to Benjamin Rush, June 12, 1812

Still not convinced?

The wording of Colossians 1:15 is NOT “the firstborn of all creation” it is “the Firstborn OVER all Creation” (my emphasis). The word Firstborn here is used to imply sovereignty over all Creation. The word is a fairly common Old Testament designation of the Messiah-God. “I will also appoint Him My Firstborn, the most exalted of the kings of the earth” (Ps 89;27). Watch out for little wording plays like that, Jehovah’s Witnesses wrongly add the word “other” six times in this passage in their New World Translation. This, they assert that Christ created all other things after He was created. But the word “other” is not in the Greek.

As for this "New Atheism" meme, don't fungelicals have anyone left to burn at the stake... that they now have to create a new & improved brand of... people to brand as heretics?


Thus endeth today's sermon.

Go forth today and tell the religious door knockers in your neighborhood to get back to you when they can debate the Marcionites v the Ebionites with gusto.

Or, just tell them what Jack Nicholson said in "As Good As It Gets":

Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here.

I mean it, damn it!


Best bar bet in the world: Delilah didn't do it.
Judges 16:19-- And she made him (Samson) sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.