Tag Archives: mars hill

Shunned Andrew Watch: Mars Hill Cult Excommunicates Member Who Wouldn’t Write Out His Sexual History

The sheer fanatic creepiness of this is worthy of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The following appeared yesterday at the Christianity Today website: Over the last month, several blogs have discussed the case of Andrew, a member of Mars Hill Church’s Ballard, … Continue reading

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Religious Ecstasy in Politics: Lou Engle and the Republican Anti-Health Care Reform Pray-a-Thon

I’m confused. I thought that followers of Christ are supposed to pray for the interests of the sick and the poor, not pray against them. But here’s a group of Republican lawmakers and right-wing activists, led by Lou Engle and Michelle … Continue reading

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I Break Their Nose?

Is that in the Sermon on the Mount—or Mein Kampf? Oops, the video doesn’t embed. Watch on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kayRXtITyw&feature=related

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The Devil Trying to Disrupt and Discourage the Heroic Vitalist

This Albrecht Durer drawing from 1513 made me think of John Calvin (who was born in 1509). I like Durer’s depiction of the devil on the left side of the drawing, with his Medusa-echoing snake hair and taunting display of … Continue reading

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John Calvin: Jesus’s Bulldog?

In the 19th century Charles Darwin had a bulldog (T.H. Huxley), but in the 16th century Jesus had a bulldog too. And this bulldog didn’t just bite rhetorically. His name was John Calvin, and under the right circumstances he had no compunction about literally taking your head … Continue reading

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Can an Authoritarian Tree Produce Good Fruit? Thinking about John Calvin’s Geneva

After Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth? Here’s the historian Will Durant, from his book The Reformation (1957, pp. 473-474), on what John Calvin’s Geneva was like in the 16th century: Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community … Continue reading

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If You Ever Hit Me, I Swear I’ll Leave You—Even If the BIBLE Does Not Give Me Permission To!

Where is that passage in the BIBLE that says, “Thou shalt not, under any circumstances, STRIKE or batter thy spouse. It is an abomination unto the Lord”? Ah, there isn’t one? Okay. But isn’t there a passage somewhere in the Bible … Continue reading

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Question of the Day

If Jesus could (and did) heal individual blind people, as the gospels assert, why didn’t Jesus just go ahead and heal blindness as such? After all, either Jesus had the power to do it, and did not. Or he wanted to … Continue reading

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He doesn’t like “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ”: Mark Driscoll, a Seattle Religious Authoritarian, is Profiled in the NY Times

Can we just start calling some fundamentalist “Christian” leaders by a more accurate designation: religious authoritarians? And instead of calling the places that they build “mega-churches,” can we call them what they actually are: personality-driven mega-cults assisted by the shameless use of contemporary … Continue reading

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