An Inconvenient-er truth

(Signal 4.26)

Kudos to Christianity for being easy and convenient. So many other religions require self-sacrifice and travel down a narrow-road, but we have the hook up. According to many contemporary preachers (which means it must be true), Jesus did not actually mean most of the stuff he said. This works out really well for wealthy American Christians. If he actually meant what he said about selling our possessions and giving everything to the poor, that would pretty much kill our learned way-of-life. Wealth and property are where we find our sense of worth and serve as an easy way to keep score in America. If Christians gave everything to the poor we would automatically sink to the bottom of the economic/cool totem pole and submit ourselves to the condescending public eye. People would start associating us with the poor, sick and needy-type folks (the last thing Jesus would have wanted), and then Christianity would seem less fun and appealing to non-believers. Jesus must have known the future importance of marketing Christianity (what would I do without my Testamints and “Jesus is my homeboy” shirt?), so there is no way he could have meant that literally. Seriously, who would want to join a religion that actually required sacrifice from its followers? There are many people who will tell you how much life improved after they got saved which is how a life of discipleship should be. I am pretty sure the twelve disciples died old and wealthy after following Jesus (save for that one noose incident), and this is the life Christians should expect to find today. That whole metaphorical picking-up-your-cross-to-follow-him thing can be interpreted numerous ways. What if my cross just so happens to be gold plated with a hint of bling? That seems like a reasonable interpretation of the passage. The point is that these teachings must be taken in context. Ministering to “the least of these” may have originally meant societal outcasts like the sick and homeless, but apparently this has a different meaning today since most Christians couldn’t even tell you where to find a homeless person. Thankfully most of us have been raised in churches where we learn to find the pathway of convenience and save all that not-so-fun stuff for the hardcore, odd-for-God types. After all, Christians are recognized by reflecting Jesus’ love which implies that their lives should be easy and convenient …at least as convenient as crucifixion can be, I suppose.


Supplemental Material
I am pretty sure Christianity is not supposed to be as easy as we try to make it. No other generation of Christians lived as affluently or as blended-into-society as we do today. We spend so much time and money trying to make Christianity attactive and normal that it loses meaning. If asked, most non-Christians today would describe Christians very differently than Christians should want to be described. Jesus was a radical, not a fundamentalist. He rocked the boat and challenged ideas, but many "Christians" today have been neutered and are so house-broken (aka comfortable in this world) that they are indistinguishable among non-believers. We try so hard to "sell" Christianity to people by making it appealling that the term "Christian" is not a significant characterization of someone because it has such a bland, vague meaning. Maybe if we started taking Jesus' words as literal challenges then Christianity could regain its flavor. Until then we will continue to fade into mediocrity.

Mother Earth suffering from hot flashes

(Signal 4.19)

Kudonts to people for breathing. According to a group of scientists, liberals and liberal scientists, humans are responsible for these so-called “global warmings” that everyone is so huffy about these days. Apparently Mother Nature finds certain necessary aspects of human life like respiration and SUVs a little inconvenient. Well excuse us for breathing. Geez, where is Father Winter when you need him to shut her up? Someone slip her a Midol or something because this has just got to stop. The worst part is that she actually has dedicated listeners like Antarctica and Bill Clinton appeasing her nagging. Antarctica with its liberal agenda, for instance, has been pitching this ridiculous icecap melting business for a while now. Geographic-progressives, such as myself, have been leading the charge to have Antarctica’s designation as a continent revoked for years now on the basis of its lack of contribution to society (sending it to the reject table with Pluto). Fortunately this movement has undermined the red-headed-step-child-of-land-masses’ (not to be confused with Poland) influence on the matter. Clinton, on the other hand, had proven harder to undermine until he visited our campus. In his lecture he claimed that no one disputes the “fact” (political cop-out rhetoric denoting an indefensible claim) that the earth is heating up because of humans, but guess what? I dispute it which makes him wrong. If logic wasn’t inextricably linked to atheism then I would call his argument a fallacy, but since it is, I will just wait for his apology in the mail (see: Modus Lose-your-soul-ens). Even if these global warmings were real, why try to stop it? All that fresh water frozen in the icecaps is just a wasted resource waiting to quench Africa’s thirst. Not to mention the bleeding hearts like Al Gore (who doesn’t really want to resolve the issue because if he did no one would talk about him or buy his book anymore) would sink back into anonymity once climate change has run its course. All I’m saying is that 10,000 years ago when global warmings ended the last ice age it turned out to be a not-so-bad thing, so maybe we should give it another try. We are only 30 years removed from a global coolings scare, after all, so let’s enjoy the warmth and sit back, relax and watch the tide roll in…closer and closer.

Survival of the richest

(Signal 4.12)

Kudos to the new American Dream. While the idea of the American Dream began to spread over a century ago, it has finally evolved into its purest form. At first it focused on hard work as the key to finding wealth, but Americans soon realized that hard work is overrated and unnecessary. Thankfully our leaders have developed new avenues for the allocation of fame and wealth to the most deserving. These include testing skills such as choosing the correct briefcase from Howie Mandel, outsmarting 5th graders, and receiving the most votes from viewers even if you are not the best singer (your day is coming Sanjaya!). Clearly our faith was misplaced, and hard work was only serving to distract us from realizing our true dream: to become wealthy without having to lift a finger. Now that wealth is available apart from pretense of work, Americans can finally reach their full potential and concentrate on things that matter the most like loading inspirational videos to You Tube and looking at pictures on Facebook that they have only seen twice. If evolution wasn’t just a gimmick used by the devil to make us question our faith, I would see this is a clear example of natural selection at work. There could even be some intrinsically American trait that has been selected over time which leads to our prosperity and fitness. I always thought that Darwin guy should have been born American; he would have been a magnificent Republican (a little queer and inadvertently turning more people away from God than Satan himself). Basically, America became a world power because of its vision for success (that, or the atom bomb), and the new trend to find wealth despite a lack of personal merit will continue to propel us to future prosperity lest we actually have to work and earn our income like the suckers in the rest of the world (see: the American Nightmare).