Christianity

The use of religion as a political tool.

Cinema: Jesus camp

"One is tempted to think that what we're seeing is a cult. But "cult" is a wholly inadequate word when some 100 million Americans are evangelicals and 30 million of them are charismatic or Pentecostal -- the type who lay great store in speaking in tongues, rolling and writhing on the ground, and who believe in healing through the laying of hands...

Such churches are not confined to America. They're here in Singapore, some with the "mega" label too. Have they gone as far as Becky Fischer? I don't know. But one cannot help but wonder what really, really, goes on in some Sunday schools."

"And as a gay person, I have seen an unremitting campaign to spread disinformation about gay people. One of the most common tactics is the conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia. Homosexuals, according to the propaganda handbook, are always on the lookout to recruit children into the "homosexual lifestyle"."

Yawningbread argues that some homophobics conflate homosexuality with paedophilia, commiting the fallacy of association. I suspect he himself is guilty of it in this post ridden with political agenda - associating various standards of christianity together. While, he only refers to "some Sunday schools", his lack of effort in clarifying what "schools" these are makes it an attack on Sunday Schools as a whole. For the uninformed, this may translate to disinformation about christianity - since you do not know which sunday schools are extremist in nature, you grow to think that all Christians are out to wage war against pagans.

Erwet posted the article "The next Christianity" sometime back.

"Perhaps the most remarkable point about these potential conflicts is that the trends pointing toward them have registered so little on the consciousness of even well-informed Northern observers. What, after all, do most Americans know about the distribution of Christians worldwide? I suspect that most see Christianity very much as it was a century ago — a predominantly European and North American faith. In discussions of the recent sexual-abuse crisis "the Catholic Church" and "the American Church" have been used more or less synonymously...

By any reasonable assessment of numbers, the most significant transformation of Christianity in the world today is not the liberal Reformation that is so much desired in the North. It is the Counter-Reformation coming from the global South. And it's very likely that in a decade or two neither component of global Christianity will recognize its counterpart as fully or authentically Christian."

Surely, yawningbread should realise by now there are different schools of thought within christianity itself - I do not think the liberal Christians in America actively discriminate against homosexuals, nor do I think Christians in Singapore are as charismatic as those children in "Jesus camp" yet.