The Internet: It Isn't All Bad

I read Metafilter, a content aggregater site, quite a bit. There are usually posts to interesting sites that really range across the board, and if you're one of those people who know that I regularly tell people about off-the-wall websites, I find many of them (but not all!) originally on Metafilter.

Mefi (as it is called) is popular for it's heavily invested community, and the lengthy comment-conversations that can occur after each post. To call them 'liberal' would be disrespectful to what counts as Liberal in real life. It can get... pretty bad. Like rubber room bad.

But! Every once in a while, you get lucky, like today. I would like to offer up this quote from a gentlemen who spoke at a minister's conference a few years ago, because I agree with him: the faster Christianity loses it's power as a force that acts on culture rather than throughout it, the better.

The story of the temptations of Christ is a familiar one. After forty days and nights of fasting, the devil came to Jesus with three temptations. The first was to turn stones into bread, the second, to throw himself off the peak of the temple and have the angels catch him, the third, to have all the kingdoms of the world. We could summarize these as temptations be comfortable, to be impressive, and to be powerful. I am inclined to believe that those are also the three most common temptations of the church.

Until recent years, the American church was offered each of those and gladly accepted them. Christianity was the default religion for the world’s greatest superpower—a position that should have made us tremble with concern that we were in danger of sliding off the path of self-denial that leads to the cross—but it seemed to occur to very few people that having such a position could be spiritually problematic. We built impressive structures, including dining facilities, recreation and entertainment centers. We turned praise and worship into a profit and star-making industry, and we gladly took our place in the halls of power. It seems that Satan offered us the same things he offered Christ, but we responded “Yes! Yes! Yes!” I doubt that the contemporary trends that are stripping away the power and prestige of the church are the work of the evil one—more likely it is the work of the Holy One, who is leading us step by step back to the paths of righteousness.

I get excited by the thought that Christians might have to learn how to be Christians again, you know?