1. Mark Driscoll Versus Everyone: Stifling Monstrosity (posted January 21) "Is there a third option between silence and being a douche?"
2. We Raise All Our Beef Humanely On Open Pasture And Then We Hang Them Upside Down And Slash Their Throats (posted January 22) From The Onion. I'll warn you that the descriptions get really graphic.
3. Judas as Severus Snape (posted January 16) Now there's a cool analogy.
4. Porn and the contemplative life (posted January 19) "An unoccupied mind is essential for serious contemplation." Some of the commenters pointed out this totally applies to every other kind of distraction too, not just porn.
5. God is Not a Torturer (posted January 22) "...the very reason I object is because of the character of the God I have come to know through the scriptures and through the Word." Questioning hell.
6. PSY curve Mathematica meets Gangnam Style.
7. The Scandal of the Evangelical Heart (posted January 24) "They said all of this without so much of a glimmer of a tear, and it scared me to death. It nearly scared me out of the Church."
8. Agree or Disagree: Gender Roles have caused unreasonable expectations on relationships. (posted January 25) "I would just assume those 'non-manly' characteristics were clever lies that he was using to get in my pants."
9. I stopped guarding my heart ten years ago. (posted November 2012) "We ripped giant paper hearts into pieces and agreed that they could never really be put back together and felt sorry for everyone who had squandered their limited love on mere boyfriends."
10. I Hate Loving Mark Driscoll (posted January 24) "If I do pray for him, I want to pray that he will change, which is in many ways the very thing I’m suggesting he has inappropriately done."
11. Faking It: Why You Should Stop Treating Your Husband Like a Toddler, and ACTUALLY Respect Him. (posted January 23) "And I’m sick to death of Christians–CHRISTIANS!–giving advice that appeals to the worst in human character, instead of calling out the best."
Responding to 5: I find Annihilationism much more disturbing a doctrine than any of hell I've ever encountered. That said, I don't have a problem reconciling "loving God" and hell - if you're in a wrong relationship with God when you die, and the afterlife consists of communion with God, of course you're going to find that unpleasant, just as someone who goes out into a blazing sunlit day without protection is going to have a bad time of it. Besides, the consequences of strict Universalism are as disturbing, in their own way, as Annihilationism: it doesn't matter who you are, what you want, or what you choose, God is going to subject you to a certain experience? At least hell preserves the dignity of free will and the option to say no to God. [Rape analogy goes here]
ReplyDeleteInteresting- this is something I'll have to think about a lot more. If we say "hell is separation from God- which is the reasonable outcome when someone doesn't want to be with God in this life"- then hell should just be kinda boring instead of the infinite eternal torture it's commonly thought to be. Hmm. Maybe. I'll think about it more.
ReplyDeleteBoring? I'm not saying it isn't awful. God is the source of everything that makes life worth living. It's certainly torturous, but that's different from torture.
ReplyDeleteCS Lewis's The Great Divorce is a pretty neat illustration, I think, about what eternal without-God-ness might look like.