Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Slavery or Slavery, Which Would You Prefer?

I have The Christian Post in my reader, so every day I have 15-30 articles waiting for me. I doubt The Christian Post really intended for anyone to read the following articles back to back, but I did and it made me lol*.

The truth is, to be a Christian is to be a slave of Christ, according to an evangelical author.

That may not sit well with a lot of people, especially in America where the image of slavery is undoubtedly ugly and regrettable. But John MacArthur suggests in his new book Slave that it's the most accurate way of truly understanding what it means to be a Christ follower.

First of all, is there a country where slavery is or was not ugly and regrettable? I'm a little disturbed by that statement. Anyway, what immediately followed that was this:

When we ignore God's rules and live any way we want to, however, we end up only hurting ourselves. Some of the Bible's most sobering words are found in the Old Testament book of Proverbs: "There is a way that seems right to a man (or woman), but in the end it leads to death" (Proverbs 16:25).

You may think you're free right now, but in reality you have become a slave -- a slave to your own desires and appetites.

So, I can be a slave to your god or a slave to my desires, but there's not freedom here. Slavery is good! Slavery is bad! Free yourself! Enslave yourself! Happiness is slavery! All the black is really white, if only you believe!

I can't imagine how these people keep up with their own beliefs . . . oh, wait, that actually explains a lot.







*Right now, there's a wavy red line under "lol" so it looks like a little guy drowning. And that's what's going on inside my head 95% of the time.




5 comments:

  1. This isn't actually stupid and self-defeating in RTC thought. The whole idea is that you're an unwilling slave to your evil desires. So the only way to get free is to enslave yourself to god through Jeebus. It's basically supposed to be a religion of Uncle Toms saying, "Isn't it so nice I don't have to do all that hard work in the fields without Master to tell me what do do in case I screw it all up?"

    It's still a horrible, illogical attitude from the outside, but these two concepts of slavery are often juxtaposed in RTC thought and one is painted as a slavery that makes you free.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Slavery that makes you free" is enough cognitive dissonance to melt my monitor.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, I just got a serious wave of static through my brain. Although that may not be completely the fault of "slavery that makes you free".

    I've got a guy telling me that becoming a Christian will provide me with a "solid foundation for my logic" while at the same time insisting that I can't actually not believe in God - facts be damned, I must know that He exists, even if I won't admit it. If that's a solid foundation for my logic, I'd hate to see what he thinks is shaky.

    ReplyDelete
  4. A sermon about this was one of the things that first got me thinking about Christianity. As a High Schooler I was told that we either let Jesus drive our car of life or Satan and we never had control. All the kids in the room were just nodding their head in agreement. I was shocked and didn't like the implications, which meant you were never really responsible for your actions and you could never do anything you really wanted to and basically were a robot for Jesus or Satan.

    ReplyDelete
  5. yeah. i'm pretty sure i fixed this, and this BS doesn't exist in LizLand ["A Happy Place, With Balloons. and the Lizbian Army!"]



    how do you KNOW which is Jesus and which is Satan/Lucifer/Baalzebub/Scratch/whatever name he's using this week, he's worse than PRINCE, and that's truly EVIL.

    i mean - in RTC thought, so far as i can tell, adoption is BAD [because "sins of the fathers" bullshit] and so the "christian" reaction is to let children languish in orphanages and foster care. they believe that women are this admixture that DOESN'T WORK [a woman's highest calling is breeding, yes? EVERY person is here because some woman breed, yes? that means that women have THE MOST IMPORTANT TASK IN THE WORLD for humanity, because there wouldn't BE a "humanity" if women didn't breed. and yet women are second class citizens BECAUSE they're the ones who carry pregnancy and give birth. that just doesn't make SENSE!]. they believe all sex that is not procreative and is outside of marriage is "sin" - but only WOMEN are punished for it.
    they insist that a few laws from Leviticus be followed, while the other *600* don't really matter - and some of the laws they throw out are JUST as important [in context] as those they decided to "keep"


    i just don't understand Christian thought. i CAN see "giving" oneself to God/des[es] but... it's not like THIS. there's still FREE WILL - a thing that it seems the Fundies don't even know exists?

    ReplyDelete

Comments are for you guys, not for me. Say what you will. Don't feel compelled to stay on topic, I enjoy it when comments enter Tangentville or veer off into Non Sequitur Town. Just keep it polite, okay?

I am attempting to use blogger's new comment spam feature. If you don't immediately see your comment, it is being held in spam, I will get it out next time I check the filter. Unless you are Dennis Markuze, in which case you're never seeing your comment.

Creative Commons License
Forever in Hell by Personal Failure is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at foreverinhell.blogspot.com.