Here's about ten minutes of everything that's wrong with American Christianity and it comes from Russell Brand in an interview with two members of the Westboro Baptist Church:
Of course these publicity-starved and massively-deficient mutations of monkey flesh revel in the attention but Russell Brand handles it with good humor that I admire as I believe very much that fighting them only gives them what they want whereas ridiculing them shows them for what they are.
The focus of the discussion is homosexuality but that really isn't why I consider it significant as it's a safe bet they hate a great many things. Anyone who can heckle a mother while she buries her kid is the same type of person Hitler could have easily manipulated to start killing people or gleefully support such killing. All the while they speak of their great love.
This type of thinking is rampant in America and you can see that in how little people do to deal with what Westboro Baptist Church does. It's commendable that various silent protests have taken place to prevent them from disrupting funerals but that's really not such a big effort when you consider the population of the United States is about three hundred million and the Westboro Baptists couldn't possibly number more than about a thousand.
What got me on this subject is that Monday is the Greek version of the Pentecost and it's a much bigger deal here than I have seen in America. Cat was amused when I said it was the Greek version but Greek Orthodox has its view of things and there's a Catholic version with another. The difference, it appears to me is that Christianity has not been marginalised by the creation of a blue million competing and conflicting versions as it has in America. Greek Orthodox is the faith of, I believe, about 98% of the Greek people.
What I observe here is the same profound faith I see in my brother and it has nothing to do with converting anyone but rather living what is taught in the Bible and not by hammering on a few isolated phrases that condemn homosexuality or whatever other agenda you like. Instead, as with Brand, the belief is in the greater message of love. Note that Lotho is Baptist so what the Westboro Baptist Church is doing is not symptomatic of that faith.
There's a great deal one could learn from Greece ... or my brother ... but America continues to regard itself as the teacher.
3 comments:
Please do not consider Westboro to be part of American Christianity.
While most organized religon suffers from many ills. And has many issues
Westboro is too Christianity what Bin Laden is to Islam.
Those Greek churches still follow the business model Jesus taught to Peter and Paul.
Start a church. Teach my word in a small group. Once it gets so you dont know everyone by name . Leave and go start another.
Remember Churches take care of the downtrodden not goverments. They fix roads and keep the plumbing flowing.
What I'd like to see with Westboro is to take away their tax exemption. This is dangerous insofar as it permits the government to control the content of a church but that's for people to work out but what they do, as you say, is nothing to do with a church.
It's a bit cynical in that view of a business model as it really is a quite different feeling over here from anything I ever felt in U.S. Where your thinking was quite a rarity, here it is pretty much understood as in, oh, of course that's how people should behave. It may very well be that I haven't seen enough but what I've seen so far shows Greeks as thinking of each other as one huge family, kind of tribal on a national level, and it's quite beautiful to see.
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