This week has been full of fantastic blog posts. Better writers than me are saying things that I have been thinking for months or years, and it’s delightful to read their clear, succinct essays on these subjects. I’m not Emerson, so I don’t have a problem with hearing my thoughts in another’s words.  Happy reading!

Why the kill-your-lust and modesty culture is just as bad as slut-shaming: Beauty vs. Sexuality, by Hugo Schwyzer

“. . . we shame men by insisting they’re fundamentally weak, constantly vulnerable to being overwhelmed by sexual impulses. We shame women for not being better stewards of that supposed weakness. That shame doesn’t just lead to unhealthy sexual relationships (including between husbands and wives); it leaves too many men feeling like potential predators and too many women feeling as if they’re vain, shallow temptresses.”

An incisive argument for true compassion in Christianity: Dear Me and You and You and You, We’re All Screwed Up, Forever and Ever, Amen, by Max Dubinsky

“Why are we as Christians so obsessed with nailing the perfect relationship? . . .  Every single example of a relationship we have in the Bible is totally jacked up. They all deal with infidelity, same-sex attractions, multiple sexual partners, lying, cheating, and stealing. Not to mention the very first couple in the history of couples is responsible for the fall of the human race. And we think we’re going to get it right? All I know is there is no absolute instruction manual for dating and abstaining, and what to do with your pulsating libido if your 40 and single. We are all going to screw it up, one way or another.

Wasn’t I supposed to be building orphanages in Africa, or choking the life out of Kony with my girlishly-soft and moisturized bare hands? Shouldn’t I have been starting underground churches in China? Or was I called to just give generously to those specifically called to start underground churches in China? If these are the things Christians are to be doing, why were we sitting around like a college study group discussing theology and dating as if it was the key to saving the human race? Because that’s also what Christians do. I played it safe within my community because the world out there was a scary place and hated me. If I could create the illusion of doing what Jesus had supposedly called me to do, and surround myself with likeminded individuals equally afraid of the world, I knew I’d be just fine.”

Why we should believe in the harrowing of hell: More Creed Tinkering? by “Chaplain Mike” [an apologetic for understanding how Christ’s humanity makes this part of the Creed valuable]

“Among the errors feeding rejection of this creedal affirmation are an insufficient doctrine of Christ’s humanity, an opposite error that Christ actually completed his suffering in hell, and an insufficient appreciation for the Beatific Vision and how it applies to Christ. In Marshall’s article, he gives eight verses from the Bible on the descent into hell and concludes by challenging evangelicals who want to excise this point from the Creed . . . “

When a psychologist does a study of Christians who say that God talks to them:  “When God Talks Back” To the Evangelical Community, by NPR.

[This hits on some of my carefully-guarded skepticism about people who say that they feel that God tells them to do thus and so, or to have some sort of special insight into God’s plan for my life. Like that one time when two different guys told me that God gave them each a vision/word that they were supposed to marry me. I told them that I’d talk to them about it if God ever gave me the same message. He didn’t. I married someone else.]

In these classes, congregants were taught to discern thoughts coming from their imagination with thoughts that were coming directly from God, says Luhrmann.

“What I was fascinated by, was that when people would enter the church, they’d say, ‘I don’t know what people are talking about. God doesn’t talk to me,’ ” she says. “And then they would try praying in this interactive, free-form imagination-rich kind of way, and after six months, they would start to say that they recognize God’s voice the way they recognize their mom’s voice on the phone.”

Congregants in the prayer classes at The Vineyard are taught that they are unconditionally loved by God. Luhrmann says she saw prayer groups in which a group would pray over someone who felt inadequate in some respect and remind that person that God loved him or her unconditionally.

“People practice experiencing God as a therapist,” she says. “They have a sense of God being wise and good and loving, and they talk to God in their minds and talk about their problems, and then they are seeking to experience themselves as seeing it from the perspective of a loving God who then reflects back on their anxieties and interprets them differently.”

The terrifying future of self-publishing: Birth Control is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and also Robbing God of Priesthood Children!! is now available on Amazon.com for only $132.48!