eChurch Blog

All too rarely, do I happen upon an article that reaches for, and teases out, the positive in mental illness.

Mental illness is of course debilitating and devastating in so many ways, and yet there are blessings in the curse. There is gold to be panned in the river of mental and personality disorders.

There is no doubt in my mind that some of our greatest Christian thinkers, visionaries and artists, were touched with extreme and recurring mental and emotional distress.

Think Scripture if you will.

We have the weeping prophet, the addicted strong man, the bipolar king, the suicidal Qoheleth, the depressed Psalmist, the intensely grieved, and the self-harmer.

This is the very wonder of God, in that He works through and uses our brokenness. Indeed, even powerfully so.

He will not cast asunder the mentally and personality disordered, in fact, he will pursue with relentless abounding passion, that precious jewel He has hidden inside the very disorder that so pervades, and even cultivates who we are as children of God.

Anyway, here is an unusual article from Psychology Today, that seeks for the “blessings in the trial” of bipolarity.

After reading headlines such as this one:

Christians are more militant than Muslims, says Government’s equalities boss

I went to all the effort of popping out and spending two quid on a Sunday Telegraph, to read for myself this….

…..wide-ranging intervention into the debate over the role of religion in modern Britain.

Well, I needn’t of bothered. This rather short interview appears online, in its entirety, free of charge, here.

It’s predictable stuff in the main.

Phillips begins with acknowledging that people of faith “feel” under siege because of “fashionable” anti-religious views. This is a nod to clever and vocal atheists, who are making us believers feel silly and inadequate. Naughty atheists!

Phillips assures us that the EHRC is certainly not part of this clever “mocking and knocking” brigade. Perhaps if the EHRC didn’t give the impression that they equate Christian moral views with an infection, I might be more inclined to believe him on this score.

Phillips goes on to assert that the EHRC will indeed support believers who suffer discrimination, but concedes there is a “perception” that it has not done so in the past. Interestingly, he doesn’t cite any examples of the EHRC supporting believers, and I can’t think of any, does anybody have an example, that would bring down this erroneous “perception”?

Phillips makes the statement that charities performing a public service have to toe the line:

“Churches, Mosques, Temples, religious organisations of all kinds have to some extent protection under the law but they also have to obey the law including anti-discrimination law because they are charities, because they offer a public service.

He cites Catholic Care, the Catholic adoption agency that refused to provide adoption services to gay couples, as a prime example of this.

I will say this. I am of the firm belief that if Christian charities accept denari from Caesar, then they should be bound by the rules of Caesar, and not complain when these rules impinge on their conscience.

Interestingly, Phillips then goes on to say that equality laws should not encroach on the ways religious institutions are run. He says:

It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church of mosque.

[....]

I’m not keen on the idea of a Church run by the state. I don’t think the law should run to telling churches how they should conduct their own affairs.

I agree.

Phillips spends a little time ruminating on the recent high profile Christian legal cases that seem to revolve around the issue of homosexuality. He says this is fueled by evangelical activists who seek political influence. He doesn’t give any evidence for this, so presumably this is just his subjective perception. In fact, Phillips notes that it’s Muslims who experience proper discrimination, and evangelicals are prone to feeling “slighted”.

Phillips says that the types of persecution touted by these activists, doesn’t really exist in the UK, and they just a want a fight, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is: “from Satan”.

Strangely, given all the above, the Telegraph notes Phillips comments on Anglican and Catholic growth from those with African and Caribbean backgrounds, as the most likely to cause controversy.

This is, apparently, due to his comments on their “old time” religious views which put them at odds with mainstream Britain.

I suppose Phillips can get away with this sort of comment as he himself is a black man from, “that kind of community”.

Anyway, it’s no big shocker that immigration is boosting Christianity in this nation. But is it not fair to say that we’ve had immigration from those with African and Caribbean backgrounds, holding to “old time” religious beliefs, for generations now? In fact, would it not be fair to say that these same immigrants actually form part of our British mainstream?

Or is it more the case nowadays, that “British mainstream” is whatever the heck some official commission deems it to be?

Apparently, according to Phillips, some of the attitudes towards homosexuality from these “old time” religionist Afro-Caribbeans are “nasty”, and in some cases, “homicidal”.

Personally, I wouldn’t even equate “homicidal” with Christian. Bear in mind that the definition of “homicidal” is “murderous”. That’s a pretty strong and evocative choice of word from Phillips.

Phillips goes on to say that there’s a lot of “noise” emanating from the church about persecution, but this is mainly down to a “revival” caused by believers in this “old time” religion, which in Phillip’s view is:

….incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.

Phillips concludes with letting us know that Muslims are doing their “damnedest” to integrate and mould a new Islam compatible with their mainstream host. Integration is all about compromise and we’re told that Muslims are:

…trying to find ways of being good Muslims in a way that is consistent with the society they are living in.

There is certainly no hate-filled, homophobic, anti-British, Muslim preachers in this country. Oh no sir.

So there you go.

Do you agree with Phillips?

I was busy reading an interesting piece over at the BBC on the inner life of hackers.

According to Noa Bar Yosef, who works for a security firm and hangs around hacker forums, a favourite subject is religion.

I was very intrigued to read of a poll conducted on such a forum, to find out the faith of its hacking members.

Surprisingly – well I thought so – Christianity topped the poll at 29% of forum members. Second was no religion at 28%, 24% followed Islam, 4% were Hindus and 1.8% professed to be Buddhists.

So there you go, according to this poll the favoured religion of hackers is Christianity.

Anyone else a little surprised by this…..

I’m sorry I can’t resist this one, it’s just classic.

Danny Cohen the controller of BBC1, has cited EastEnders character Dot Cotton, in response to a challenge to provide instances of ordinary believers on television!

I haven’t watched depressing EastEnders for years, but I used to, and remember Dot Cotton very well. I think the Guardian article sums up nicely what I recall of her:

The character is in her 70s and known for her devout Christian faith, chain-smoking, gossiping and hypochondria.

Cohen’s comments were made at a Church and Media conference and apprently weren’t well received.

Big surprise.

Unbelievably, the hole gets even deeper for Cohen, but I’ll let you read about that over at the Guardian.

This one’s definitely going to do the rounds and I suspect Cohen will wish he’d never attended the conference.

It can happen:

…….But one day, for some reason, I gave into my friend’s persistence that I join her on Facebook. She coaxed me on the phone while I logged onto the site and joined.

Hey, not so bad, I thought. I started connecting with old school buddies, moms at my children’s schools, relatives, I was hooked. Although I was having fun chatting it up, I still felt that indescribable void in my life until….

One day, I stumbled across a banner that read “I love God,” which somehow loomed off the page. I stared at it and hit the like button.

I decided to delve a bit further and found that there were pages, upon pages of groups, who loved the Lord and talked about their various experiences as followers. An entirely new world had opened up for me, I had found something that was making me feel whole, a new connection to something that felt so right.

I discovered ministries, churches, clergy, houses of worship, who maintained pages on Facebook. I read through countless testimonies, awakenings, near death experiences of those individuals who had already either found God and had done so via Facebook.

I found myself being spiritually consumed, in a good way, via Facebook. Each posting I read filled me with a newfound love of God and of all he represented. I truly came to understand the limitless expressive capabilities that the digital world had to offer via this marvel of a website, Facebook.

….read all

There’s two excellent posts around the subject of blogging, which I thought I’d mention here.

The first by Tim – The World’s Most Famous Christian Blogger ® – Challies, looking at how to start a blog.

The second by Michael – The Theological Juggernaut ® – Patton, reflecting on 5 years of blogging experience.

These guys are two very experienced, established, and successful Christian bloggers.

Yesterday the Archbishop of Canterbury made some important comments on the persecution of Christians within the Middle East, during an interview with BBC Radio 4′s The World at One.

Doug Chaplain made this observation on Twitter:

Shame +Rowan won’t get so much attention for this. It needs drawing attention to.

Indeed.

Rowan, makes a few political comments and it creates a media frenzy. He warns of extremists killing Christians and burning churches, hardly a ripple.

Anyway, thanks Rowan for drawing attention to this:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that there are extreme forces at work that have turned the Arab Spring into a “very anxious time” for Christians.

Dr Rowan Williams told the BBC that the vacuum left by the end of autocratic regimes was being filled by extremists.

He claimed there had been more killings of Christians and burnings of churches in Egypt than people were aware of.

Life was unsustainable for Christians in northern Iraq, and tensions in Syria were nearing breaking point, he added.

The Middle East is the birthplace of Christianity and home to some of the world’s most ancient Christian denominations.

There is no agreed figure for the number of Christians in the region, though some experts believe there are as many as 10 million.

…..continue reading

I shared this piece earlier on Twitter, but thought it so perceptive I thought I’d share it here also.

This short article by Simcha Fisher – National Catholic Register – looks at vanity and self-loathing as two sides of the same coin.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Here’s something I just realized: Vanity and self-loathing are two sides of the same coin.

That sounds odd, because vanity is an excessive interest or concern with your own assets—an inordinate attention to your looks, talents, etc. And self-loathing means you can’t admit to yourself that you have any assets. Hard to imagine a vain person hating himself—and hard to imagine someone who hates himself ever succumbing to vanity. But I think it’s actually extremely common for these two to go together. This relationship is something I think of as “the Matrix/Disney Heresy.”

I liked the 1999 move The Matrix when it first came out—it was original and entertaining. But now I see its premise—that you can either take one pill and live a life of happy delusion, or take another which will reveal reality in all its grim horror—as a symptom of a modern disease: the idea that the truthiest truth that we can find is always, always, always something bad.

The Matrix mentality says that when we see the worst of something, then we’re seeing what’s at its heart. Right? When someone ordinary does something awful, we think, “Aha, now I know what he’s really like!” (And we see an ordinary person doing something magnificent, we say, “I didn’t know he had it in him!” as if a good deed is some kind of errant parasite that happened to land in this unwitting host.)

The self-loathing person says the same thing about himself: Any virtues I have seem like a transient fluke or like fakery, whereas the flaws—ah, those are definitive.

…..continue reading

That’s what I tweeted earlier after throwing coffee all down myself.

That Tweet sparked a blog post by Richard Littledale entitled: Pulpit Nightmares, I’ll let you hop over and read it.

Richard’s blog – Preacher’s A-Z – is always worth a visit, he’s very buoyant (as in light of spirit, not lightweight) and insightful. I love a bit of blogger interaction, it doesn’t happen that often for me.

Anyway, if you’ve got any pulpit nightmares, do share them over at Richard’s blog, as – let’s be honest – they’re always great fun to read.

The famous Stone Paradox asks, ‘can an omnipotent being make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it?’ A simpler question, and one which I think makes the issues clearer, is, ‘can an omnipotent being fail?’

If a being can fail, then there is something that being doesn’t have the power to do, namely, whatever it is it can fail to do. If a being can’t fail, then there is something it doesn’t have the power to do, namely, to fail.

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