The Virtual President on Gay Marriage

Separation of What?

Remember this the next time someone on the left starts screaming about "Separation of Church and State" or "Favoring one religion over another" or about how "we need to do more" or when they try to remove Jewish or Christian religious symbols from public places because "taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing religion."

Outrageous. I'm so sick of these blatant double standards.



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All Things Non-Christian Are Demonic

Demonic? Demonic? Really? People who aren't Christians - and entire other religions - are demonic???? I could see if he just says they're wrong, but DEMONIC????

Holy crap. What a soft-spoken, likable nut job.

Why Is Christian Film So Bad?

From Relevant Magazine:

The term Christian film has become synonymous with substandard production values, stilted dialogue and childish plots.

Even with successes (Bella, Facing the Giants), we are on the outside looking in. You can have the huge budget, skilled and experienced technical crew and a firmly executed marketing plan, but if you film a pedantic script with summer-stock-reject actors, your better-looking product is simply lipstick on a pig. Throw in Christian film’s inherently agenda-driven plots and dialogue and you have lipstick on a preachy pig.

Rather than developing organically, the average Christian film is more pushy and sanctimonious than the global-warming agenda movies. Violence is almost non-existent, salty language never happens, unmarried people never struggle with lust and evil is never very bad, because showing various forms of sin is not allowed. By movie’s end, everyone is converted with no residual issues. Life is reduced to an after-school special with prayer thrown in for good measure.

If a film claims to be Christian, it was supposedly done for the glory of God, but we do not glorify God by making lousy movies.

We need great films.

I've often wondered why "Christian films" have to be so bad. Even successes such as "Left Behind," "Facing the Giants" and "Fireproof" come off as stilted and, well, just not real or relatable.

I maintain, just as in life, that sometimes the best way to deliver a message is not to come out and say it. Let the viewer realize the message on his own. Christian filmmakers simply don't have the self-restraint not to deliver a sermon in the story.

It seems to me that what Christian filmmakers need to do is to make the kind of films that Hollywood made fifty or sixty years ago. They had a message, usually wholesome, and are beloved even by audiences today. I think the people are hungry for more quality entertainment like that.

Church and State and Morons

From the Associated Press:

Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

There's a huge difference. I don't think O'Donnell is advocating that the government establish a religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

First of all, O'Donnell is correct. Nowhere in the Constitution do the words "separation of Church and State" appear. That concept actually came from a letter... actually, no. I'll let Wikipedia explain:

The concept of separation of church and state refers to the distance in the relationship between organized religion on the one hand and the nation state on the other. The term is an off-shoot of the original phrase, "wall of separation between church and state," as written in Thomas Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists Association in 1802. Jefferson was responding to a letter that the Association had written him. In that letter, they expressed their concerns about the Constitution not reaching the State level. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution did not yet exist, thus leaving the States vulnerable to federal legislation. In Jefferson's letter, he was reassuring the Baptists of Danbury that their religious freedom would remain protected - a promise that no possible religious majority would be able to force out a state's official church. The original text reads: "...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State."[1] The phrase was quoted by the United States Supreme Court first in 1878, and then in a series of cases starting in 1947. The phrase appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution

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The "Church and State" phrase and concept has been bastardized by opponents of religion as a way of trying to squelch any religious reference at all in the public arena. The very idea that you shouldn't be able to learn about the different religions of the world - and what they believe - is ludicrous.

What's especially ironic is that the people who scream about "church and state" are the very same people who keep telling us that we have to celebrate our diversity and be tolerant of others opinions and viewpoints. Except that when it comes to religion - check that - Christianity, you'd better shut up or else.

You Can't Be Christian and Do Yoga, Apparently

From Yahoo News:

A Southern Baptist leader who is calling for Christians to avoid yoga and its spiritual attachments is getting plenty of pushback from enthusiasts who defend the ancient practice.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.

Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."

"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.

Mohler said feedback has come through e-mail and comments on blogs and other websites since he wrote an essay to address questions about yoga he has heard for years.

"I'm really surprised by the depth of the commitment to yoga found on the part of many who identify as Christians," Mohler said.

Yoga fans say their numbers have been growing in the U.S. A 2008 study by the Yoga Journal put the number at 15.8 million, or nearly 7 percent of adults. About 6.7 percent of American adults are Southern Baptists, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center Forum on Religion & Public Life.

It's guys like this that give all Christians a bad name. I've taken yoga classes as part of the strengthening and stretching process to heal my back. Now, granted, I've got very limited experience with it and I've only had one yoga teacher, but I've watched some yoga DVDs and have sat in on a couple of other classes when Kristi used to take yoga at the Downtown Houston YMCA. I guess the yoga classes I've ever been to are much more mainstream than the hard-core yoga mysticism that is out there. I was skeptical of yoga, too, for a long time because I thought it was all a bunch of eastern religious hokum. But actually attending yoga classes showed me that it can be about self-control and stretching, strengthening of the body and being a good steward of the amazing gift that God has given us. The yoga teacher here in Brenham even brought a Christian message into it from time to time.

I liked my yoga experience because:
1. I got to pretend I was Batman in training.
2. It helped stretch my body and made me stronger at a time when my body couldn't handle weight training.
3. It had a very calming effect on my mind - at least for the hour during the class.
4. It helped me learn to block out a lot of external stuff and really focus on the moment at hand.
5. It gave me and Kristi a shared activity that we could do together that brought us together even more.
6. It really complimented my weight training and improved my flexibility once I was able to start lifting again.
7. It helped me realize that there is a lot that I thought I couldn't do (or couldn't do anymore) that can be done, with practice.

Man is a spiritual creature, and yoga can be a very spiritual experience in itself. It can help one get inside one's own head and hear God's voice in way that we're often used to tuning out. By turning into one's self, it's not tuning out God, as this guy seems to think. It's a way of being in tune with one's self, which is a natural way of being in communication with God. It's almost like a prayer - a very silent, personal experience that has tremendous meaning and emotional attachment inside one's head. When one is in that place, whether it be in prayer or in the forest or in a yoga class, one can very easily be in communion with God. It's not a pathway to God, but a way of communication. And how can communication with God on a spiritual level not be Christian?

Albert Mohler would do well to take some yoga classes so he could learn to concentrate on how big of a misinformed dick he sounds like.

Which Religion Should I Follow?

Thanks to Matt.