People often pepper conversations with Christian words, but they may not know what they're talking about.....CNN, in an interesting article about how dumb some people are.
Ya think? I didn't realize how big of a problem it can be, until I moved to Kansas. On the East Coast, where I grew up, it was unfashionable and decidedly unintelligent to bring Christianity into any discussion that was NOT about Christianity, and marked the speaker as ignorant. And in most diverse communities that thrive, it is considered boorish and rude to push one religion on the masses. My children grew up with my religion, but were still too young for initiation when I moved to Kansas. They knew about fundamental Christians, but those people were more of an unreal fantasy, in stories from the middle ages about the inquisition or footage from the History Channel about the KKK. They never thought they would go to school and be victimized by people who speak fluent Christian, yet don't understand that Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew and looked more like Bin Laden than any of the methodist church pictures of him suggest. My children also never knew, until I moved to Kansas, how much of a bigot the Christians' Jesus (not to be confused with any real Jewish man by that name, if one existed at the time he is said to have existed) is.
A mistake that is easy to make, if one was not brought up to be a Christian, is to think that these jargon-speaking Christians actually think about what they say, and know and are completely conscious of the inconsistancies between their words, their deeds, and their so-called Messiah. A prime example is the Christian woman who teaches the low-end special ed kids at my kids' school. It is counter productive for this woman to really help her students progress and get ahead, academically, because after all the students have been discharged from her program, the school board would have to reassign her to a school with children enrolled who need her services. She would have to travel, rather than teach in a school located in her town, near her house. While talking about Jesus out of one side of her mouth, she deleberately impedes the progress of her students, withholding instruction to which they are entitled out of the other side of her Christian mouth, taking advantage of a vulnerable segment of the student population at her place of employment. Thus, she is making a profit off of a captive audience, to their detriment. She makes money from keeping her students stupid. Helping them learn is not in her best interest, because success, in her case, would mean she would have to learn to teach a different audience. How come she isn't aquainted enough with the real Jesus to remember what he did in synagogue when animals were being sold for ritual at exorbitiant prices to people who were unable to raise the animals at their homes? Why does her Christian jargon, lingo, doctrine, and practice lack the understanding of a man who would treat her classroom the same way he treated the vendors' booths in synagogue that day? She's doing the same thing!
If I learn to speak Christian, will there be a way for me to communicate my concerns that twenty or thirty children, in any given year, at a school with only about one hundred and fifty kids need this teacher's special ed services? Or will my nonchristian English or Spanish finally be heard?
"When Christians develop their own private language for one another, they forget how Jesus made faith accessible to ordinary people, he (John Blake, of CNN) says.
“Speaking Christian can become a way of suggesting a kind of spiritual status that others don’t have,” he says. “It communicates a kind of spiritual elitism that holds the spiritually ‘unwashed’ at arm’s length."..............John Blake, CNN
Another disturbing reality involved with American Christians and their nonsense jargon is the idea that they can somehow use language to magically "claim" something other than belief. Here is an explanatory excerpt from the same article:
Or say you’ve been invited to a megachurch that proclaims the prosperity theology (God will bless the faithful with wealth and health). You may hear what sounds like a new language.
Prosperity Christians don’t say “I want that new Mercedes.” They say they are going to “believe for a new Mercedes.” They don’t say “I want a promotion.” They say I “name and claim” a promotion.
Ya know...........I really like the way Janis Joplin put it better, when she said, "♫ Oh Lord...won't you buy me.....♪♫♪......a mercedeeees benz ♫............" She, at least, was sincere. I'll bet Jesus would have liked her, too.
Ya think? I didn't realize how big of a problem it can be, until I moved to Kansas. On the East Coast, where I grew up, it was unfashionable and decidedly unintelligent to bring Christianity into any discussion that was NOT about Christianity, and marked the speaker as ignorant. And in most diverse communities that thrive, it is considered boorish and rude to push one religion on the masses. My children grew up with my religion, but were still too young for initiation when I moved to Kansas. They knew about fundamental Christians, but those people were more of an unreal fantasy, in stories from the middle ages about the inquisition or footage from the History Channel about the KKK. They never thought they would go to school and be victimized by people who speak fluent Christian, yet don't understand that Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew and looked more like Bin Laden than any of the methodist church pictures of him suggest. My children also never knew, until I moved to Kansas, how much of a bigot the Christians' Jesus (not to be confused with any real Jewish man by that name, if one existed at the time he is said to have existed) is.
A mistake that is easy to make, if one was not brought up to be a Christian, is to think that these jargon-speaking Christians actually think about what they say, and know and are completely conscious of the inconsistancies between their words, their deeds, and their so-called Messiah. A prime example is the Christian woman who teaches the low-end special ed kids at my kids' school. It is counter productive for this woman to really help her students progress and get ahead, academically, because after all the students have been discharged from her program, the school board would have to reassign her to a school with children enrolled who need her services. She would have to travel, rather than teach in a school located in her town, near her house. While talking about Jesus out of one side of her mouth, she deleberately impedes the progress of her students, withholding instruction to which they are entitled out of the other side of her Christian mouth, taking advantage of a vulnerable segment of the student population at her place of employment. Thus, she is making a profit off of a captive audience, to their detriment. She makes money from keeping her students stupid. Helping them learn is not in her best interest, because success, in her case, would mean she would have to learn to teach a different audience. How come she isn't aquainted enough with the real Jesus to remember what he did in synagogue when animals were being sold for ritual at exorbitiant prices to people who were unable to raise the animals at their homes? Why does her Christian jargon, lingo, doctrine, and practice lack the understanding of a man who would treat her classroom the same way he treated the vendors' booths in synagogue that day? She's doing the same thing!
If I learn to speak Christian, will there be a way for me to communicate my concerns that twenty or thirty children, in any given year, at a school with only about one hundred and fifty kids need this teacher's special ed services? Or will my nonchristian English or Spanish finally be heard?
"When Christians develop their own private language for one another, they forget how Jesus made faith accessible to ordinary people, he (John Blake, of CNN) says.
“Speaking Christian can become a way of suggesting a kind of spiritual status that others don’t have,” he says. “It communicates a kind of spiritual elitism that holds the spiritually ‘unwashed’ at arm’s length."..............John Blake, CNN
Another disturbing reality involved with American Christians and their nonsense jargon is the idea that they can somehow use language to magically "claim" something other than belief. Here is an explanatory excerpt from the same article:
Or say you’ve been invited to a megachurch that proclaims the prosperity theology (God will bless the faithful with wealth and health). You may hear what sounds like a new language.
Prosperity Christians don’t say “I want that new Mercedes.” They say they are going to “believe for a new Mercedes.” They don’t say “I want a promotion.” They say I “name and claim” a promotion.
Ya know...........I really like the way Janis Joplin put it better, when she said, "♫ Oh Lord...won't you buy me.....♪♫♪......a mercedeeees benz ♫............" She, at least, was sincere. I'll bet Jesus would have liked her, too.
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