the unfaithful god of emergent village

In praise of an unfaithful God

This is just pathetic. When you have to go here, you may as well just fall on your own sword (metaphorically, of course).

If Hosea were written today, God should be the harlot, and Hosea the church, with God forever slipping out at night, undressing in the alleys and making holy love in hell to the beggars, infidels and outcasts. God is a street walker, with too heavy mascara and the smell of a thousand lovers on those divine lips, a clandestine whore who returns home at sunrise, sneaking back into bed without a shower but with a lingering wine-soaked kiss on the sleeping bride, their toes touching until morning, unashamed. And God whispers the divine confession, but only while Hosea slumbers.

God the Harlot invites us to be corrupted by love but is content to let the bride sleep, whispering reality only within the realm of deepest dreams. But God waits, hoping all things, for Hosea to be awakened from the myth of God’s monogamous love for the Church, the bride.

It's short, so by reading it yourself, you won't have wasted too much of your valuable time.

One can only imagine what this EV writer would do if he were to re-write the whole Old Testament. I can see him being ok with the whole David and Bathsheba thing, and maybe making her husband ok with it, too. Or maybe re-writing the rules about sex and marriage, making the prostitutes ok and the regular wives the outcasts. In the prophets, he would make all the statements about Israel's harlotries to be paeon of praise, not statements of condemnation and coming judgment. All the statements of God's faithfulness would be removed. Wisdom in Proverbs would be the harlot and not the good woman.

One good thing here, though, is that I get to reference Tim Stoner's book in a good way. That's that one I was a bit critical of a few posts earlier. But it's a good book, and I'm happy to say that he puts paid to his blasphemous emergent tale.

The marriage vow is a promise that ruthlessly puts to death every other rival. It puts a symbol of mutual ownership on the fingers of two people who now have covenanted to belong to each other, categorically, exclusively. Wedded love is a jealous love, and rightfully so, for the beloved's love is not to be shared. The heart of the beloved is to be capivated exclusively by her lover. This, all of us who have been in love, understand. This is how romantic love works.

This is also how the divine love affair works, too.
Timothy Stoner, The God Who Smokes, p 126

slightly disappointed

It's not like I changed all of a sudden and went out to the backyard to burn my draft card (there was no longer a draft, and I was too old anyway), plant an organic garden, or stop eating steak. I didn't even switch political parties. Not that I wasn't tempted on many an occasion. (It's difficult--one side sees beauty in fifty-six baggies of multicolored urine and a mural of Mother Mary with shellacked elephant dung, while the other sees it in burning mosques. While one favors killing the unborn, the other favors doing in the born. I guess, at present, I have to side with the most obviously innocent and defenseless. I know this is all a gross over-simplification, but how else can one make a choice between evils. It's possible Jesus wouldn't vote at all. He advocated paying taxes--that seems to be about the extent of His commandment to good citizenship).
Timothy Stoner, The God Who Smokes, pp 151-152

I picked up this book some time ago, and frankly have been pleasantly surprised by it. It's a collection of essays, so I've kind of skipped around, not reading it through.

By and large, I've rather liked it. Which kind of makes the part above even more of a disappointment.

He is very welcomed to whatever political convictions he wishes, but his statements do make me wonder about a thing or two.

For example, when have Republicans found beauty in burning mosques? It would help if he were to give specific examples of Republicans or Conservatives saying they enjoyed setting mosques on fire. For my part, I can't think of any such rhetoric ever being used, but I may have missed it somewhere along the line.

Also, what does he mean by Republicans favoring killing the born? I can think of only two things he may mean--capital punishment, or military action.

I'm willing to respect someone who cannot support capital punishment. But can we please, please, please stop with the arguments that capital punishment and abortion are equivalent. Capital punishment is punishment for a serious crime, something like murder, and the person being executed should be proven guilty. Abortion is simply the murder of the innocent for whatever reason, and there is no support for it in me.

If he means military, I'm not sure what to say. He can take the pacifist position, if he wishes. I don't know if that is his position, but if it isn't, I'd like to know what he meant by that statement.

As someone who is strongly conservative, I find it bothersome that someone should use apparently bogus or fringe reasons for saying that people like me are only the lesser of two evils, when compared to those who favor and defend the continued killing of the unborn, whose moral position could be stated as "Find what the Bible says and say the opposite", who deal in lies and spread fear, and promote dependence on a 'big brother' government. To my mind, the lesser 'evil' here seems rather a good thing, while the other, slighty greater 'evil' is a great evil indeed.