Category: Religion

  • Of God and the Psychopath

    Of God and the Psychopath

    The Columbine Diaries: Old Wounds … New Passions:

    I’m usually not one to force my religious beliefs on others, but I don’t hide the fact that I’m a Christian. And by Christian, I mean one who tries to follow in the teachings of Christ and believes that Christ is the son of God. Not, “bible-beating zealot who thinks you’re going to hell because you don’t believe in the same things I do”. Now having said that, let me share this article with you about a youth pastor from Littleton, Colorado…

    I was a youth pastor in Littleton with a youth group made up primarily of Columbine students. In fact, for a time the Bernall family attended our church and Cassie attended some of our meetings. I had made an appointment to meet a student on the Columbine campus for lunch on April 20th, but that morning I woke up feeling very sick and decided to stay home. At 11:30 I got a phone call from one of my interns who was sobbing and urging me to turn on the television.

    At first the images struck me as a fire at the school, but within seconds the cold hard reality of what was really going on sunk in to my conscious mind.

    The unthinkable was happening. If you were old enough to remember that day, you know what I’m talking about. A quiet suburban neighborhood was transformed into a war zone, except instead of soldiers being shot, there were innocent teens going through hell on earth.

    Over the next several months I met with each of my students who were there to let them pour out their anger and grief, and somehow try to answer the unanswerable question of why God would allow this to happen.

    Now seven years later the old wounds are reopened with the release of over 900 pages of documents from the killers. Inside you’ll find what you probably expected…angst, hate, vitriolic diatribes, and even a glimpse into the thinking patterns of a psychopath and a depressive.

    I’ll be honest, I wasn’t excited about the release of these diaries, I don’t enjoy reliving the feelings of that day. Yet as I have processed things the past few days, I was given an insight that hadn’t occurred to me before.

    Perhaps sometimes when old wounds are opened, new passion is born. And that is the case with me today. I work with a ministry that is trying to reach every teen in America with the life changing message of the gospel, and we believe with all our hearts that the message of Christ is the answer to violence in the schools.

    One of saddest entries in these diaries is from one of the killers who hoped to find peace in the afterlife. The tragedy of that is that the peace he sought was available to him in this life, and perhaps if he would have found it, 15 families would still have their loved ones. Our hope and prayer is that God will take the calamity and heartbreak of Columbine and use it to reach thousands, even millions of anger ridden students who may simply be looking for peace.

    Say what you will about religion, but maybe if Harris and Klebold had a little more “Thou shalt not kill” in their lives, we wouldn’t even be discussing this.

  • 06/06/06

    06/06/06

    6.6.6: Tuesday is June 6, 2006:

    I normally don’t inflict my religious views on people, but since “666” has been in the news lately I’d thought I’d share this article with you. This is especially for people who think that the Book of Revelation was written by the Apostle John and that it foretells the Apocalypse…

    Most modern scholars attribute the writing of the book of Revelation to John of Patmos. He is said to have received visions on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, most likely around 90 A.D., that make up the book’s contents.

    The Roman emperor Nero, who ruled from 54 to his suicide in 68 A.D., persecuted Christians in horrific ways that were likely to be remembered only a couple of generations later when John may have been writing Revelation. It was under Nero that both St. Peter and St. Paul are traditionally thought to have been martyred in Rome.

    Domitian, the emperor from 81-96 A.D., during John’s time in Patmos, “was the first one to take emperor worship seriously,” said the Rev. Dan Doriani, pastor at Central Presbyterian Church in Clayton and former chair of the New Testament department at Covenant Seminary. “Since Christians were not worshipping him, they were liable for persecution.”

    “Said Frank Flinn, an adjunct professor of religious studies at Washington University, “Nero conducted the first systematic persecution of both Jews and Christians and is clearly identified with the real beast of Revelation.”

    “Back then there were no separate symbols for numerical values,” said the Rev. Louis A. Brighton, a professor of New Testament interpretation at Concordia Seminary. So letters did double-duty as numbers. The Hebrew consonants that spelled out “Nero Caesar,” in the Greek form of the name, add up to 666. (Transliterated into the Latin form of Nero Caesar, the numbers add up to 616.)

    John was a Christian prophet of Jewish origin who was possibly living in self-imposed exile in a cave in Patmos. He wrote his vision in letters to a group of seven Christian churches in western Asia Minor, now Turkey – communities he clearly knew well.

    In the first verse, John introduces his book as an apokalypsis, or revelation, a term that has come to define the literary genre – a narrative, told in the first person, that includes visions of the future. The book of Revelation is sometimes called “The Revelation to John” or “The Apocalypse of John.”

    Brown said apocalypses are most often addressed to people living in times of suffering and persecution – times so desperate they are seen as the embodiment of supreme evil.

    He said the modern misuse of Revelation “is based on the misunderstanding that the message is primarily addressed to Christians of our time if they can decode the author’s symbols. Rather, the meaning of the symbolism must be judged from the viewpoint of the 1st-century (churches)” which received John’s letters.

    Revelation is so full of symbolism that nearly anything can be read from it. At one time or another, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Rasputin, Torquemada and Osama bin Laden have all been considered the antichrist.

    But here, Tuesday is likely to be just another day – especially since the Gregorian calendar was not adopted by most of Christendom until 1500 years after Revelation was written.

    So lighten up, folks. It’s history, not Armageddon.

  • Halloween Sunday

    Halloween Sunday

    Halloween on Sunday troubles some Southerners:

    Before I get to the heart of the article, I just wanted to point out one thing. The headline says “southerners” yet at the very end of the article, they quote a police lieutenant from Michigan. I guess they mean south of Canada.

    Anyway, back to the matter at hand.

    Ah, yes. It’s that time of year. The leaves are changing colors. There’s a chill in the air. And all the religious nuts have their holy underwear in a bunch over Halloween. Let’s read some quotes…

    “It’s a day for the good Lord, not for the devil,” said Barbara Braswell, who plans to send her 4-year-old granddaughter Maliyah out trick-or-treating in a princess costume on Saturday instead.

    “You just don’t do it on Sunday,” said Sandra Hulsey of Greenville, Georgia. “That’s Christ’s day. You go to church on Sunday, you don’t go out and celebrate the devil. That’ll confuse a child.”

    Come on people. Get over yourselves already. It’s not “the devil’s day”. If there were any evil connotations to Halloween, it’s long been forgotten. It’s a time for kids to get candy. That’s it.

    Anyone who uses Halloween as an evil holiday is usually a bunch of mutants who think they’re badass or something. Don’t rob your kids of a childhood just because you’re an overzealous wingnut. I’m sure the stories will get more interesting as we get closer to Halloween.

  • Get A Grip

    Get A Grip

    Ok, people. We as a nation need to seriously calm down. I heard a report on NPR that hate crimes against Muslims living in America are up 40% since the attack on the WTC.

    Get a grip, people.

    I decided to do some research on Islam to see what its teachings were, and I came across this great website, which can be found here. http://www.pakistanlink.com/religion.html And you know what the two were words I found the most were. Peace and Love. And I found something else interesting there. In a question asked about blood transfusions and was it ok to give or accept blood from non-Muslims, this answer was given by a Muslim scholar.

    “Islam teaches us to feed the hungry, to take care of the sick and to save human life. In these matters, Islam emphasizes taking care of all human life without any distinction of religion, race, gender, color or nationality. All human life should be respected and protected. “

    Sounds like to me that true Muslims have respect for all life. The men who committed the attack on the WTC were zealots. Much along the lines of Christians who kill people by bombing abortion clinics, only on a much larger scale.

    Now I’m no tree – hugging politically correct weenie by any sense of the word, but not all Muslims are terrorists, just like all Christians, like myself, do not believe in blowing up abortion clinics, no matter how much we disagree with abortion.

    Don’t get me wrong now. The people who committed this atrocity against the U.S. Must be punished swiftly and severely.