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crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
Rick Warren continues to compound the error of his ignorance.
According to ThinkProgress:
In recent days, Pastor Rick Warren has come under fire for refusing to condemn an Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda that would make some homosexual acts punishable by death. “[I]t is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations,” said Warren. On his Twitter feed, Warren is now trying to change the subject, claiming that “no one” cared when 146,000 Christians died last year (so why should he now care about gay men and women in Africa?):
Whether or not Warren is padding numbers here is irrelevant. Regardlesss of whether it is 146 people or 146, 000 people, no should be persecuted because of their faith and by that same point, no one should be persecuted because of their orientation. A true man of God would find that commonality.
And worse, Warren's comments make me wonder whether or not he cares about those poor Christians or does he view them as debate points to keep attention away from the dereliction of his pastoral duties.
Why was it so difficult for him to just condemn the bill? Historically, there have been pastors who did not have the influence or the money that Warren has and they still took stances against unjust laws. There have been pastors who knew that death awaited them if they spoke out, but they still took stance against unjust laws.
So what's the deal with Warren?Was he threatened in a highly violent manner or does he just not care?
Playing the awful game of comparison the way he did is something I would expect from a politician, and not a pastor.
But Warren is indicative now of so many so-called pastors and Christians who choose to jump in the public eye. As the spotlight shines on them, we all get blinded by their hypocrisy.
Very few people want to bring this up but there is a serious problem with the mindsets of some Christians in this country.
They go beyond merely defending their values. They are attempting to create a reality where their beliefs are the ones on top of some type of ecclesiastical food chain.
They claim to be under persecution but their definition of being persecuted lies in their inability to deal with the fact that this is a multicultural society, not a Christian one.
We are seeing that now with incidents such as the so-called Manhattan Declaration and with how the Catholic Church is using the services it provides to the poor to threaten the Washington, D.C. city council.
The irony is that Warren is also a member of this same group who are always complaining about the erosion of Christian values in America.
If this is true, all of them, especially Warren, should take a good look in the mirror before pointing fingers.
Related post:
Martin Ssempa and the Family – Why Rick Warren won't speak out against anti-gay Ugandan bill
33 Comments
I Doubt The #because “christians” have been inflating the # of so-called “persecuted christians” in the Nazi holocaust to the point that it makes Jews (the prime target) a side-note of the holocaust victims (such as the homosexuals, gypsies and other victims always have been considered less important victims of the holocaust compared to the Jews).
From what I understand, “christians” had no worries during that time as Hitler USED “christian” rhetoric and often quoted the bible.
Good God,How hard is it to say “Homosexuality is against God’s will and an awful, awful thing, but nobody should be arrested and either sentenced to life in prison or execution for it.”
How hard is it for a Christian pastor, for God’s sake, to point to the story of the woman taken in adultery and say that according to Jesus, we shouldn’t throw any stones until we are perfect?
He doesn’t have to say he approves of gay people, or celebrates our relationships, or that the government should in any way recognize our relationships or even treat us as equal citizens. All he has to do is say that even if it is wrong, we shouldn’t be rounded up and executed.
He’s a tool. And yet more proof that the modern Christianists have made homosexuality the ultimate sin.
He had integrity?Who knew?
As I said on FBLove their gowns. Their hats are divine. But their purses (and pants) are on fire.
Their True Believers™, having found a common victim in the LGBTQ community upon whom to vent their hatred and frustration, will always find a way to rationalize the hypocrisy. Handy, all-purpose thing that Babble; they can beat queers with Leviticus and JO with Ezekiel 23.
Somebody should point out that of those 146,000 christians…X,XXX of them were gay and lesbian. X,XXX provided by someone with statistical knowledge of a proper ratio.
We also need to include the 120 trans people that were murdered last year.
Watch out only for your ownThat’s the only message I can take from Rick Warren’s comments.
Not exactly the message I expect to receive from a man of faith.
Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.
I disagreeI think people SHOULD be persecuted because of their faith.
They ruin the world. I would love to see the major religions of the world in ruins.
About a year ago…(as far as I remember) a Xian org published a list of the top ten (I think) incidents in which they claimed Christians had been “oppressed” over the previous year. One incident was a woman who had caused a ruckus at what had been (until then) a peaceful protest against the Mormon involvement in Prop. 8; the list failed to note that it was the woman who began the incident, and that she had a well-established reputation for causing trouble.
Another incident involved a group of “Christians” who chose to preach hellfire & damnation in the Castro. If they’d tried that on Soho’s Old Compton Street, the coroner would have returned a verdict of “suicide by idiocity”. As it was, they were intimidated by a large group of angry LGBTs – angry with good reason, given that Xians had just successfully got Prop. 8 passed a few days earlier – however they were never actually physically harmed, or even touched, in any way. I believe that it was later discovered that the people who’d been preaching have links to some of the nastiest, most violent far-right “Christian” groups on the planet.
In fact I think the entire list consisted of “Christians” being denied the right to impose their beliefs on other people, or reactions against attempts to do so as described above. In other words, they were clutching at straws to find “proof” that Christians are being oppressed, because in reality it is the exception rather than the rule.
This holds up when you see the official FBI figures for hate crimes for 2007 and 2008. There were 23 violent hate crimes against Protestants & Catholics in 2007, and 14 in 2008, compared to 1021 against LGBs in 2007 and 1150 in 2008. Taking into account population size differences, that means in 2007 there were 835 times more violent hate crimes per capita against LGBs than Protestants & Catholics, and in 2008 that rises to 1544 times more violent hate crimes per capita. Assuming that trend has continued, an LGB person is probably now around two thousand times more likely to be a victim of a violent hate crime than a Catholic or Protestant.
So if Americans aren’t talking about murders of Christians it’s probably because, in the USA, it’s not a serious issue. In fact it’s a non-existent one: according to the FBI data, in 2007 and 2008 not a single Christian was murdered because of their faith, while ten LGBs were murdered because of their sexuality.
You don’t have a calling to all of humanity then Mr Warren?
So why does your church website say this then Mr Warren?
Should that not be now every corner of the world is available to you except Uganda!
Rick Warren is beginning to sound like the Catholic church in Nazi Germany and Rome. Who stayed silent while the Jews where being persecuted and slaughtered. It was not their business also as millions where led to the gas chambers.
I guess Rick Warrens only true calling is to sell his books and count the collection money!
All well and good to see a smattering of posts…on houseblend. But aside from Maddow’s show can anyone tell me where any of this is being reported?
Anyone?
We are allowing ourselves to be marginalized ever more. The ghosts of homos past are ashamed of us. We should be ashamed too.
According to people like WarrenGay people cannot be real Christians, no matter what appearances seem.
Why is it so hard to condemn? The answer should be obviousWarren and others like him have spent decades screeching about how bad gay people are, how we are destroying society, how we are disease-ridden plague-spreaders that pose a dire threat to children, the Church and everything that is holy and sacred. The logical conclusion of this hate is that gay people should be placed under full sanction by law, and those of us who are deemed too dangerous to live should be exterminated for the good of society.
Warren cannot condemn this without shining a very bright spotlight on his complicity, and as much as Talibangelicals hate gay people they hate taking responsibility for their actions even more. Thus, the silence.
I’ll second that–enthusiastically
“error of his ignorance”???Since when is ignorance a liability for a Christian minister? It’s their stock-in-trade.
Really?
Really?
I think that Cardinal Barrigan has pretty much laid waste to the absolutism of that libertarian notion.
The Card is in need of a bit of persecutin’, if for no other reason than to find out how the other 90% live….
in fear.
You notice how…He’s quite happy to admit ignorance when it suits his purposes, but refuses to do so when it might mean rethinking his own bigotry?
He has a pointI know that I never condemn persecuting christians – I’m all for it.
We both see this as a war between christians and gays and we are on opposite sides.
I realize there are lots of “christian gays” that don’t see it this way, but I do – to me the persecution of gays by the churches is just a small part of the oppression that religion visits upon mankind, and if they became gay-friendly overnight christianity would still be a force for evil.
Hypocrisy at its finest.
Purpose Driven HatredThat is what this is about. I hope all of these “Christians” rot in hell when they get turned away at the gate.
I still want to know where he found those numbersI remember seeing a pastor railing in a YouTube video about violence against christians. He cited the number of shootings in churches that year. What he neglected to mention is that every one of those shootings was perpetrated by another christian and in nearly every case it was a member of the parish.
If you’re going to quote numbers, cite your sources.
what do you propose we do?
Get real…If Satan exists, he has bound to have some standards.
These people who, by existing, insult the concept of existence should simply cease to exist. They should go nowhere.
definitions….The number could be correct or low if one includes wars and skirmishes with complex motivation: resources, ethnicity and race, religion. Often, Western journalists identify religion as the simplistic “cause” of a conflict, whereas the causes may be primarily power grabs by members of a particular ethnicity, with the expectations of reaping the spoils of corrupt government (contracts, sinecures, business licenses, access to education, etc) and enacting new laws that in effect make the recently defeated ethnicity second class citizens in legal terms, and help drive them out of the conquered territory for good. Examples include the current conflicts in the Sudan and sporadic conflicts between the Christian (oil-containing) South of Nigeria and the Muslim (resource-poor) North of Nigeria.
The war in Iraq has caused a backlash against Iraqi Christians, most of whom have fled the country. Those people were viewed as potential or actual collaborators with the Western invading / occupying forces.
Some countries do have peacetime discrimination against Christians, often in the form of laws forbidding certain types of religious practice not supervised by the state. China is the major example, and they ban all independent religious practice (severe penalties, and not restricted to Christians – see Falun Gong) and discriminate against individuals who belong to the state-sponsored church. Good educational and job opportunities, and licenses to live in desirable major cities, are not given to members of the Chinese Christian Church on an equal basis, and the church’s open members tend to be old and retired.
and there’s a hypocrisy in that
Precisely. And I don’t remember Warren or the other evangelicals being particularly vocal about that. There was a Christian community in Iraq until, and because of, Operation Iraqi Fiasco. I don’t remember Warren or his ilk even suggesting we take them in as refugees, either.
This dude should meditate long and hard on Matthew 25:31-46.
For many of us…the belief that these cretins will spend eternity burning in the fires of Hell is a source of great comfort and restraint. After all, why should I waste effort on causing harm to come to them if I believe that nothing I could possibly even dream up (and believe me, I have an active imagination) could compare with what is in store for them?
Very Good ResponseI’m a Christian and I respect this response. So many gays to me have a tendency to be angry at Christians, and rightly so because many Christians especially Pastors seem to be angry at gays. Pastors need to learn they can’t force people to adhere to the truths in the Bible.
Everyone knows what the Bible says about homosexuality. If you don’t believe what it says then that’s your decision and I’m not going to be angry towards you. I’m not going to bash you over the head and do and say everything in my power to disenfranchise gays.
Being gay is not the ultimate sin either. Sin is sin no matter what shape or size it comes in. It’s all measured the same. Just don’t get too comfortable living a life of sin no matter what it is. Life on earth is too short to be stuck in a life of sin. Death lasts longer than Life. Find out what the Bible says about life after death and I guarantee you’ll see your personal sins differently. scottrade login
I’m not a Christian…And I certainly said something about it. I also know that “every group for itself” is absolutely antithetical to the teachings of the Christian faith, and that hypocrisy is the second most discussed topic in the Bible.
Because they are the source of evil in the world and should be stopped dead in their tracks.
Oh, also…This is all okay, you see, because he owns Melissa Etheridge records. Right, Melissa? He’s cool.
http://www.queerty.com/melissa…
I’m tempted to also……but I won’t. I’d settle for the word ”faith” to be separated from its soft and gooey, oh so wholesome definition. It is not a good thing. It is a troublesome thing. No matter how swell it may make one feel. It is the persistent and insistent belief that something is true despite no evidence or worse, absolute evidence to the contrary. That should not be celebrated. It should be firmly and kindly discouraged. Could there be a greater hindrance to the progress of the human race than this thing called “faith?”
Rachel Maddow is dealing with Uganda again tonightLast night she called out the three anti gay pukes who spoke to Uganda and precipitated the kill AIDS peope anfd gays.
Tonight’s focus is on those Americans who could go speak at Uganda and calm this insane death policy, and don’t (Warren, the Family from C-Street)
Maddow’s onto The Familyand she’s kept going back to The Family and that author, his name escapes me, for the past few months. I am glad to see her being able to tie them to this absurd and terrifying legislation and the overall political/cultural environment in Uganda.
(As a cradle and still very active Episcopalian, I also expect a lot of silent discomfort and squirming and stammering from the Uganda wing of the traditionalist/Anglican homofundamentalist “bishops” and those parishes and dioceses that have bolted from the Church over LGBT and women’s equality issues most especially.)
The more this insidious Family is known about, and its wealth and political involvement exposed– the more sunshine, the better. Its precepts are really alarming.
so true Davidvery good point.