Take, for example, the following comments from an article by Christian media critic Ted Baehr:
At the Inaugural Summit on Peace and Tolerance in Warsaw, Poland, the late Mrs. [Benezir] Bhutto, Dr. Ted Baehr, world renowned Christian theologian and cultural leader, and leading Muslims, Christians and Jews debated the conference theme of how to promote peace, the importance of interfaith relations, and building tolerance between Christians, Jews and Muslims. Dr. Baehr told the Inaugural Summit on Peace and Tolerance, a conference of international Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and political leaders, that the love of God manifest in Jesus Christ is the answer, not tolerance.
Mrs. Bhutto was a gracious, intelligent, friendly person who told the conference that her father taught her that Islam was a religion of peace. Dr. Ted Baehr told her and the delegates that Jesus Christ is the only answer.
"Tolerance is wrong," Dr. Baehr said. "I don't tolerate my kids staying up late. I don't tolerate my kids talking back. Man is always trying to establish a new global order. There is a global order, but the global order of Jesus Christ is the only true global order because it's based on love and truth, not tolerance.
"The Bible says you have to be loving if you're from God. If you're not loving, you're not from God. But, God's love does not tolerate evil or falsehood."
Mrs. Bhutto was committed to reforming Islam. We pray that she found the Truth who is Jesus Christ before she was assassinated by the people of the Muslim jihad.
Translation: Mrs. Bhutto was a nice lady, but unless she abandoned Islam and embraced Jesus prior to her assassination, the poor, ignorant lamb is surely burning in hell along with Mahatma Gandhi and all the Orthodox Jews who died in the Holocaust.
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I actually saw Ted Baehr speak at a local church in 2001, and he seemed nice enough during post-lecture comments. But Ted is also a classic passive-aggressive Christian--a sort of iron-fisted Ned Flanders--who sees the world strictly as black and white, and God as a manic avenger.
Fair enough. I honestly don't care.
What does irk me, however, is Ted explicitly using an event based on social understanding between all faiths to piously brow-beat all non-Christians in attendance (I wonder how Ted would have responded to, say, a Muslim cleric delivering the same message). Frankly, such behavior is beyond the pale, as is Ted addressing Bhutto's murder to hawk his beliefs in the same arch-superior tone.
In my opinion, Ted Baehr--and Christians like him who solely express their beliefs in authoritarian, My-God-Can-Beat-Up-Your-God schoolyard-style rhetoric--truly represents the worst the faith has to offer.
"Before God we are equally wise, and equally foolish" -- Albert Einstein
1 comment:
On one hand I am inclined to thank you for the kind words; yet on the other I feel obliged to respond to your logical fallacies.
To refer to me as "a sort of iron-fisted Ned Flanders" did make me laugh. I suppose I do come across like the character from the "Simpsons" sometimes. I would prefer to think of myself as the perfect combination of American Capitalist and committed Christian. Capitalism is the best system in the world, with Democracy as a close second, and nowhere but America is this more true.
When you said I "piously brow-beat all non-Christians in attendance" you are off the mark. My sermon was no different than any of God's Truths that I tell on my website, www.movieguide.org
Had there been a Muslim cleric speaking at the conference, I certainly would not have remained in attendance. It is the duty of patriotic American Christians to turn a deaf ear (and not just the other cheek!) to all False religions, Islam especially.
I should like to think I represent the paradigm of Christian faith in 21st century America. In touch with the Word of God, patriotic, avidly pro-Capitalist, anti-pagan, anti-gay, anti-Choice, wealthy, and white. I am sorry you would tend to disagree.
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