There are two churches on a small stretch of a particular road we travel often. One of them usually has a Christian-oriented (but often humorous) saying on its sign. Recently it had a humorous saying that was somewhat… unexpected:
Forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them more.
Annoying people isn’t supposed to be a Christian attitude (despite what a couple of major sects seem to believe), but hey, it’s the action of forgiving that’s the point, right?
The other church, perhaps realizing that they can’t compete on the witty-saying front, just puts information about its upcoming events on its sign. At the same time as the above example of cognitive dissonance, they had an interesting menu up:
Muffins and Coffee, 9AM A Dysfunctional Family, 9:30
Thanks, but I think some muffins and coffee would suffice for me. I’d be too full to stuff in an entire family after that, dysfunctional or not. 😉
I’d hate to say I agree with them, but in Proverbs it says to treat one’s enemies nicely and when you do it will heap hot coals on their head; so it makes sense actually, though it’s in the “Old Testament.” 😉
Ah. That might make some sense, it’s a Baptist church… they tend to emphasize Old Testament fire-and-brimstone more than other branches of Christianity, in my limited experience.
Time for me to enter into theological discussion again, hopefully I won’t get the physical threats another blogger you mentioned got for his trouble. 😉
I don’t know if that passage qualifies as “fire and brimstone”. It doesn’t deal with that issue at all. If you examine things closely, eternal hellfire is a NT dogma, dealing if one adheres to a certain “mystery” dogma similar to pagan (sorry for terminology) beliefs prevelant amongst the Greco-Roman populace at the time. (The old Jupitur/Zeus pantheon was no longer popular. Mithraism and similar religions were what was the order of the day; with Zoastrian ideas about the afterlife and the fight between god and the devil, and with mystery-religion ideas of sacrements and the belief in a set of dogmas in order to attain salvation.)
We Jews believe in a sort of purgatory (temporal punishment) for the vast majority of people, followed by eternal reward for both Jews and righteous gentiles, commensurate with one’s deeds. Of course, since we don’t believe that one must be a Jew in order to be in G-d’s good graces, only to be a good person, or for a Jew, be a good Jew (which is much harder) it didn’t have the right sales technique in comparison to some other religions to become a large religion in population. (Well, we don’t have any salespeople at all.)
Hopefully no xtians will take offense who read this. Our religions do have certain moral views in common, and some aspects of monotheism which have been culturally beneficial. Nature-worship isn’t too good, in the short term, for technological progress. (Though ignoring nature’s health has dealt a bit of a long-term blow to the environment; which Rav Hirsch in our religion often discussed environmentalism in his writings though, and being in the 19th century, was ahead of his time in that. Arguably the second commandment, after “increase and multiply”, was to “tend to my garden” and there is a midrash (Oral Torah story) that emphasises this in Jewish tradition. Though to be fair there were some currents of that in American society too at the time.) Some historians argue that the rise of xtianity culturally helped form the fudal and later industrial-capitalist (See Weber on the Purtianical work-ethic) that led to Euro-American industrial progress. So I give them credit for that.
If Europe had stayed pagan, we probably wouldn’t have had the rate of progress that we had, and would still be doing the occasional human sacrifice (appropriately enough, the Celts would do that frequently to their kings. A tempting thing to do to today’s rulers when the economy sours) to make the crops grow. 😉 Neo-Paganism of course, is a different matter; except in the minds of certain people who label them “devil worshipers” in accordance with their dualistic beliefs and believe that they too engage in such things.