Sigh. Imprecatory prayer teaching rears its ugly head.

Calling down God's wrath or love. Which do you think is more powerful? Check it out.

Wiley S. Drake, a Buena Park pastor and a former national leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, called on his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The request was in response to the liberal group's urging the IRS on Tuesday to investigate Drake's church's nonprofit status because Drake endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for president on church letterhead and during a church-affiliated Internet radio show.

Drake said Wednesday he was "simply doing what God told me to do" by targeting Americans United officials Joe Conn and Jeremy Leaming, whom he calls the "enemies of God."

"God says to pray imprecatory prayer against people who attack God's church," he said. "The Bible says that if anybody attacks God's people, David said this is what will happen to them. . . . Children will become orphans and wives will become widows."

Imprecatory prayers are alternately defined as praying for someone's misfortune, or an appeal to God for justice.

"Let his days be few; and let another take his office," the prayer reads. "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

It's a thought

The atheistic onslaught of late

Blasphemy is a tribute to God? Brilliant, in its own way. Check out this great article by Michael Gerson in the WashPost.

British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. "If anyone doubts this," he wrote, "let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor."

By the evidence of the New York Times bestseller list, God has recently been bathed in such tributes. An irreverent trinity -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn't approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny....

How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: "Obey your evolutionary instincts" because those instincts are conflicted. "Respect your brain chemistry" or "follow your mental wiring" don't seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: "To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I'm going to do whatever I please." C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains."

Difference between evangelicals and church-going evangelicals

Wish the pollsters would change their research methodologies. It would make a difference. Not all evangelicals attend church, for instance.

My recent research for the Russell Sage Foundation indicates that evangelicals who attend religious services weekly, when compared with average Americans, are less likely to cohabit as young adults (1% vs. 10% of other young adults), to bear a child outside of wedlock (12% vs. 33% of other moms) and to divorce (7% vs. 9% of other married adults divorced from 1988 to 1993). So churchgoing evangelicals, who are also the ones most likely to be involved in political and pastoral efforts to strengthen the family, are actually achieving some success in their efforts to focus on the family.

But their nominal brethren--that is, evangelicals who attend church rarely or never--are a different story. According to my research, nominal evangelicals have sex before other teens, cohabit and have children outside of wedlock at rates that are no different than the population at large, and are much more likely to divorce than average Americans. One reason that nominal evangelicals have been particularly vulnerable to the family revolution of the past 40 years is that they are much more likely to be poor and uneducated than other Americans.

But even after controlling for class, I find that nominal evangelicals do worse than other Americans. Why? I suspect that many nominal evangelicals are products of a Scotch-Irish "redneck" culture, still found in parts of Appalachia and the South, that Thomas Sowell and the late Southern historian Grady McWhiney argue has historically been marked by higher levels of promiscuity, violence and impulsive behavior. This cultural inheritance, and not their Protestantism, probably helps to account for the poor family performance of nominal evangelicals.

So the next time one hears about evangelicals trying to impose their family values on the rest of us, remember that they are probably more concerned about the families of their nominally Protestant brothers, cousins, neighbors and friends in the Bible Belt than they are about folks in Massachusetts.

Church and homosexual funerals

I can imagine this comes with issues that aren't as easy as covering the event with "Of course, we'll do the funeral for a gay guy!" What I do feel about it is this - if the people want to hold the funeral in the church then it is the pastor that is the decision maker as to how the funeral proceeds. Don't like his take? Have your ceremony at the funeral home, then.

An Arlington church volunteered to host a funeral Thursday, then reneged on the invitation when it became clear the dead man's homosexuality would be identified in the service.

The event placed High Point Church in the cross hairs of an issue many conservative Christian organizations are discussing: how to take a hard-line theological position on homosexuality while showing compassion toward gay people and their families.

The unevangelist - "Jesus was a fag"

How are we to conduct ourselves in the face of such, uh, revelation?

Finally, your dream pastor

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Don Lawrence preaches three times a week to an appreciative congregation at Life Baptist church. His sermon tapes often sell out, and this year he is leading the people through a study of Matthew’s gospel.
But Lawrence is not a real person. He is a virtual, on-screen pastor whose sermon topics, personality, even mannerisms are chosen collectively by his congregation.
"We’ve never been happier," says head elder Louie Francesca. "We finally got the pastor we all want."
Virtual Pastor, a UK company, began pioneering the "virtual pastor model" in 2005, and has created a dozen lifelike, on-screen avatars which preach, joke and give personal anecdotes as if they were real people. All their sermons and personal stories are scavenged from the Internet.
When a church subscribes to Virtual Pastor, each person in a congregation helps "shape" their pastor by entering likes and dislikes into a response box during services. This live feedback is fed into the company’s servers and helps to change the pastor’s sermon topics, hair style and more in following weeks. The result is a pastor perfectly tailored to the will of the congregation.
"We unify churches and remove any reason for quarreling," says co-creator Gavin McReady, standing next to the servers in Scotland where all the virtual pastors reside. "It’s a monumental achievement." More

Sex and the Evangelical Teen - good grief!

From Gene Edward Veith over at World. We are the world! We are the children!

Christian parents and churches need to face up to a problem long hidden in the dark: Evangelical teenagers are just as sexually active as their non-Christian friends.

In fact, there is evidence that evangelical teenagers on the whole may be more sexually immoral than non-Christians. Statistically, evangelical teens tend to have sex first at a younger age, 16.3, compared to liberal Protestants, who tend to lose their virginity at 16.7. And young evangelicals are far more likely to have had three or more sexual partners (13.7 percent) than non-evangelicals (8.9 percent).

What about abstinence pledges? Those work—for a while—delaying sex on an average of about 18 months, with 88 percent of pledgers eventually giving up their vow to remain virgins until marriage.

Proud atheists, unite!

Read Richard Dawkins' Introduction to The Out Campaign here

Atheists have always been at the forefront of rational thinking and beacons of enlightenment, and now you can share your idealism by being part of the OUT Campaign. Send us money and we'll send you a T-shirt with a great big "A" on it so you can show your pride in your atheism. Woo-hoo!

Evangelistic smackdown quote of the day

"Every man needs reconversion at forty on general principles! Because at forty we settle down, begin to lose that sense of spiritual expectancy, begin to take on 'protective resemblance' to environment, and to play for safety.

I once heard an Anglican bishop say that the period of the great number of spiritual casualties is between forty and fifty and not between twenty and thirty, as one would expect. Why? Well, if 'heaven lies about us in our infancy,' the world lies about us in our middle age. We come under its standards, fit into its facts, and are slowly de-Christianized." (E. Stanley Jones, Christ and Human Suffering)

My kind of atheism

Hattip: http://arbevere.blogspot.com/

Low Bible, low church

Insight from one of my online students this summer:

I was in a church of a main line denomination last February in East Dayton, OH. The congregation had shrunk from over 1,000 in the 90's to 14 in 2007. The main sanctuary was locked up because they could not light it or heat it for the lack of funds. While I was waiting in the church library I found hundreds of monogrammed and embossed Bibles that were left in the church. I initially thought that they were of old saints that had passed on. I was wrong. These were Bibles that living people had just abandoned as they left the church. It was like an Army, whipped in the field, throwing away their personal equipment to run faster. These people had thrown away their Bibles and left faith period. It is a sad commentary as to the general state of faith outside of evangelical oriented churches. (SG)

Discount the Bible, discount people, discount evangelism. But where there is a high view of scriptural authority (otherwise known as biblical inerrancy) you see spiritual vitality spreading around the world.

So, why do so many want to fight for biblical errancy?