“The Shack” as benchmark

It doesn’t matter to me very much whether or not people liked The Shack. Some people like one book; others like another. That’s about as far as I want to go in such things.

It’s the negative overreaction to The Shack that makes my alarm go off. My alarm says, “Get away from these people. Now!!!” People who will write a whole book taking on this one book have a problem of perspective.  Too much, too, too much. Their Richter Scale needs to be adjusted. A 2 or 3 registers as an 8 or 9.

I feel like I am among the Trilateral Commission people at times like these, or the Oswald could not have assassinated Kennedy alone people. Well, maybe. But get a life. It’s not worth this kind of investment, this kind of anger, this kind of rebuttal.

So if I ask you “did you like the Shack?” what I am really asking is whether or not you’re the kind of person I would like to have cup of coffee with. Yeh, I know I am shallow and my methods of discernment need sharpening. But I think this often tells me what I need to know before I begin a “bromance.”

Today’s Quote 4/21/09

Don’t forget. If you make a deal with the devil, you’re the junior partner.

Religion as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

I think this is the kind found in most, even evangelical, churches.  MTD has give characteristics:

According to Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, the five points of MTD are:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This is another version of the “simple religion” theory of the Enlightenment.

Of course, the problem with MTD is that it’s not tough enough. The soul can’t live on the vitamin deficit left by simple religion. You can’t run a marathon eating MTD. But for many it is still attractive. It gets in nobody’s way. It doesn’t take real ethical positions. Everyone gets to do it all their way and still be religious. And it works!! Until you actually need to believe something when everything gets very dark.

See Christianity Today’s article Death by Deism here.

The constant restlessness of everything

“When there is no authority in religion or in politics, men are soon frightened by the limitless independence with which they are faced,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “They are worried and worn out by the constant restlessness of everything. With everything on the move in the realm of the mind, they want the material order at least to be firm and stable, and as they cannot accept their ancient beliefs again, they hand themselves over to a master. For my part, I doubt whether man can support complete religious independence and entire political liberty at the same time. I am led to think that if he has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe.”