Bible

Steve Jobs invented stuff, and that stuff changed the world.

It’s time to for the leaders of the Black Church to ‘put away childish things’ and to engage in a real conversation about sexuality in their communities.

“One man, one woman” is not biblical, by the way.

It is easy to blame the war machine or the pornography industry, but the more mundane problem is with our addiction to visual thrills. What some people see as a lack of moral vision (watching a porn video, for example) is perhaps better approached as an amoral astigmatism, a lazy eye, a privileging of the visual over our other evolved senses. The thrill of watching may mingle with compassion for those being harmed, but unless you as a viewer do something to actually alleviate that suffering, you are only a voyeuristic addict, entranced by the power of the gaze.

American Christians assume that what prophecy does is predict specific events to happen. And of course that’s the way the Book of Revelation has been read. They read it, as you say, as predicting this means this, or the beast is this. But prophesy, as we know, is a highly interpretative art, and the way this book lives and has lived for two thousand years is by interpretation and reinterpretation.

In a move not widely reported outside of Michigan, the Michigan State Senate passed the country’s first pro-bullying bill on November 2. At first, it was an anti-bullying measure not unlike the laws passed in many other states. But under the perverse influence of a few far-right opportunists, legislators led by State Senator Rick Jones (R, of course) became convinced that the law would somehow persecute those noble enforcers of Christian—I’m sorry, “Judeo-Christian”—values in our nation’s high schools: bullies.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, religious violence is supposed to be resisted, but it’s also violence that the audience is being asked to look at. Over and over and over again.

Lucid visionary states have been sought by a wide variety of cultures, not just for the euphoria and freedom, but because they were believed capable of transforming and uplifting the individual to a divine level.

“Christianity is not supposed to make you secure. Christianity is supposed to give you the courage to walk into an insecure world knowing that you’re not alone and to embrace the radical insecurity. If you’ve got to spend your time proving that you’re better than someone else—males are better than females, whites are better than blacks, heterosexuals are better than homosexuals—you’re always building yourself up by pushing somebody else down. But, you shouldn’t need to build yourself up unless you’re radically insecure. Religion feeds into that radical insecurity with triumphalism—ours is the only religious route you can take to get to God. That’s a really strange idea.”

To the chagrin of Britain’s Secular Society, which has protested, as the Guardian reports this week, that schools are “awash in Bibles,” every state school in England is going to get a new copy of the 1611 King James Version by the spring.