A thought on culture.

SOOOOOO It's summer and the job search continues, even though it could be argued that I have one. With the economy being in such a silly place people are either hiring like mad or they won't hire anyone. That isn't what I wanted to talk about today though.

A few Sundays back the pastor at the church my parents attend gave a few interesting stats on population growth and culture spread. Essentially what he was trying to point out is that in roughly 40 years Europe will be a Muslim continent. This is due to the fact that the ratio between Muslim and non Muslim children born, is 8 to 1.

The pastor wasn't trying to scare the congregation with these stats. He was merely trying to point out that this world will be very different in the next little while and our children with have to live in that world etc...

The way that he described it was specifically in terms of a loss of western culture in our country and Europe. Again it wasn't intended to strike fear but by the reactions of many in the congregation would be what I consider to be fearful ones. This made me think: Is the loss of western culture such a bad thing? I will admit that the portrayal of history in Europe may change which I think is sad that they may loose their heritage but that happens for example: any of the great conqueror races of the past.

Really, do we want to be holding onto this terribly materialistic and anti religious society? Most Muslims are more accepting of Christians than most westerners are. I am talking about the non-extremist ones; most of them share values that are similar to a Christian style of value system. The Muslim culture is suffering the same problem that the Christian culture is, many are in name only. In Turkey the giant mosques that used to be full all the time are nearly empty.

I do not think this spread of culture is necessarily a bad thing. It may in fact open even more avenues for the Christian message to be spread.

Anyways that was just something I have been pondering over a week or two. Here is a link to the stats I was talking about.

Muslim Demographics

I guess instead of saying have a good day it will soon be safety and peace be with you.

Online Religion

This is a blog I was supposed to do while I was sick.

The article of the day is called Online Religion and Finding Faith on the Web: An Examination of Beliefnet.org by Cheryl Anne Casey.

This was about as you can guess, the move of religion into cyberspace. Now I have never really had an opinion on this as I don't know to what extent things are happening. All I know is that with the transition of anything to the internet it can allow for some "dissolving" to happen to content or truth. This can be worrisome of course.

Wikipedia is always a good example of how things can be changed and not many people will notice. What happens when a group of Christian's get together in a video chat room to have 'church' and the person who is being the pastor turns out to be a farce?

The whole idea of religion moving online irks me slightly, not that I think its a terrible idea. I just can see so many things going wrong with it. Though this won't stop emergent groups from jumping online and I say go for it. Just, use caution I guess.

Moving something that has traditionally involved a whole person into a realm that is completely non-physical seems like a huge leap to me. I don't think I could ever get used to it. But I know the move has allowed for some great online material for Christians and so I'm interested to see what will come of it.

MOM! THERE'S A FUNDIMENTALIST STUCK IN OUR FAX MACHINE!

Let us start this entry by looking at some statistics from the wonderful book we have been following. If you would turn with me in your "U.E.M. Bibles" to page 138, chapter 10, Verse 1. "How Americans Use Internet For Religion."

1. The first stat is that 38% of 128 million users send and receive email with spiritual content. "If you don't reply to this email in 10 minutes you will have bad LUCK."
2. 35% send or receive E-cards related to religious holidays. "HAPPY X-MAS, from the Bay! Don't forget to check out our X-MAS SALE! You will find prices up to 10% off."
3. 32% go online for news accounts of religious events and affairs. "Today Islamic fanatics blew up a coffee shop in the Gaza strip."
4. 21% seek info about how to celebrate religious holidays. "Mom! I lost the instructions for our fake tree! Can you look them up on the Internet for me?"

Don't you just love stats?

Schultze sticks to his guns with his whole teaching, persuading, and delighting schema. In the teaching section he writes about how evangelical churches post their sermons on their own personal church website...viewed only by their congregation... or may be some pastor friends. He also mentions book databases full of "Christian" works and password-protected websites. "Wow look at all of these new Christians we are converting with out brand-spanking-new password protected website!"

Next comes delighting, where evangelicals can go online and spew out their "well informed opinions" to who ever happens to be trolling their particular forum. Thus being teamed up with the whole persuasion aspect and we have a great thing going.

Here are some replies to a comment on Catholic acceptance of evolution:
- "Shut up"
- "What's wrong with monkeys?"
- "The problem is that most of the crazy nutball evangelicals that are fighting evolution in our schools don't even see catholics as being real christians."
- "Also christians are mad stupid. That's a problem too."
- "angels and demons was a pretty good book"
- "Oh my. This is disturbing. Come Jesus. Come Lord. Come take your world from the grip of satan."

Comments found on: www.tribalwar.com

Buy my frickin prayer cloth or no healing for you!!

As I was reading through the third article in Schultze's collection I got caught on a sentence about a certain television evangelist. "The late TV preacher Jerry Falwell said that 'there's no need for the church of Jesus Christ to be wasting its time gullibly falling for all of this global warming hocus-pocus.'"

First off I would like to point out that "gullibly" is not a word. Secondly I would like to state that I think that global warming is a natural cycle of the earth due to changes in the planet's orbit and axis. But when did it occur to Christians, that just because we might have some conspiracy theory that the world is going to end soon so we don't have to take care of it. Are we not told to be good stewards of everything we have been given? Even if global warming may be a hoax it does not mean that we shouldn't care about the amount of pollution that is being poured into the atmosphere.

The amount of politics that is in Christian media today frustrates me to no end. Not only does it lead to the conclusion that most Evangelicals are as crazy as other religious extremists, but it just seems to be not very Christ-like. Whether a person votes conservative or for those "crazy hippies" from the NDP, this should not have any say on if a person can stay in their church or get ostracized over it. I was under the impression that we were past the days of killing each other over who should lead the church, let alone our "democratic nation".

In closing I will remind you to go out and vote on the 14th of next month.