Friday, December 17, 2010

Feel good? Do good? Not in my church, young man!

Via RichardDawkins.net comes a disturbingly credulous article from CNN about a minister/theology professor who published a book called Almost Christian, regarding some supposedly horrible decline in religious passion among youth. Ho hum. One line really struck me, though:

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good...

The article then goes on to have the author/minister/theologian explain why this is a bad thing.

So much for religion being a force to make people happy. You think God simply wants you to feel good and do good? No no no, we can't be having that! Why, thinking that the point of life is to be enriched and to enrich others... that's practically humanism! No no, the real God wants you to be miserable and sexually dysfunctional and afraid of eternal hellfire. I guess you got the wrong impression with this whole "Love one another" business. See, that's just a mistranslation. In the original text, what Jesus actually said was, "I hate fags, I hate women, now give me your damn money." Feel good and do good?!? That's the devil talking!

Yeah so, anyway... message for my son: Feel good. Do good. Be yourself.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, and "Professor" Dean is someone who is likely to be allowed to review my research for "peer-reviewed" publications in journals like the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, and Review of Religious Research. She's only one step removed from other radical right wing christianists like Bradley Wilcox (UVA "sociology") or Christian Smith (Notre Dame--"Jesus"). For them, the purpose of studying society is to make people miserable and sexually dysfunctional for Jesus.

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  2. Ouch. I've seen some of your posts about that whole mess. I don't envy you.

    I've only published one paper (due to the nature of my job in the private sector, any original work I do is more likely to wind up as a patent than as a published paper) but even still, there really isn't any sort of ideology or, god forbid, theology to contend with in my field, anywhere.

    Then again, I did have a patent denied because the attorney let the rather vague phrase "weed out" slip through into the final application, and the patent examiner leaned on the ambiguity in that phrase as hard as possible in order to twist its meaning. This was during the Bush Administration, though, and apparently for whatever reason that administration told the patent office to issue as few patents as they possibly could. Actually, the patent attorney had been a lifelong Republican, until Bush... heh...

    So somehow or other, the conservatives still manage to fuck you over... but my issue was an anomaly, luckily.

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