Calling a Probable Spade a Spade, All the While Trying to Avoid Blasphemy

While in bible study this evening, the lesson discussed was about dispensations and the compartments of hell. I tend to really like bible study because I approach my Christianity a lot like I approach school, I like learning.

Anyway, things got a little funny to me when the etymology of Gehenna was mentioned. Gehenna is one subgroup of hell but its name comes from an actual geographic location directly outside of Jerusalem. Gehenna was a burning trash heap. Apparently, Christ in his teaching referred to hell as akin to a burning trash heap but I can't help but think he was (for lack of a better word) dumping on that place. What's funnier is that when you think about it, He's sort of done this before.




In my heart of hearts, I know Jesus was loving and forgiving. His teachings were the next stage of Judeo-Christianity. This is a religion of tolerance, no matter what others say about it. But that still doesn't change the fact that in moments like these, my Savior seems a tad racist. Although, I'm thinking Christ's tactics are akin to him being relatable to His audience.


At worst, He could have been oversensationalizing in order to capture attention.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Partnerships

I had intended for my next post to be about America's socio-economic economy, but I'll save that for a little bit later. I was just reading through my normal load of publications and I ran across a brief article that bothered me so much upon reading it that I just had to write something about it. NME reports this morning that John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page got tired of waiting for Robert Plant to make up his mind about doing a new tour with Led Zeppelin and they're just going on without him . Considering how late to the game I am to one of the best bands ever, I cannot feel right in saying whether or not this must stand, but I know this certainly bothers me. Maybe it's a matter of perspective, but at what is the art still pure from its source when the authors are missing? Is Led Zeppelin still Led Zeppelin if Bonzo's son is playing the drums and some other dude is doing all the singing? When it was 75% original band and things were kept in the family for the ot
Read more

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

About a month ago, Patrick Jarenwattananon of NPR's A Blog Supreme  put together a group of lists of recent gateway jazz albums from prominent young jazz enthusiasts and bloggers.  The Jazz Now Project was a rather brilliant idea and opened up a lot of discussion and awareness about the future of jazz and really shows what the field looks like right now.  Early on the the culmination of this project, Jarenwattananon opened the submission of suggestions not only to those he specifically asked but also to other readers of the blog and on the email list.  So it didn't take me long for me to submit my own Jazz Now list .  (And special thanks to him for linking the post on the compilation of Jazz Now submissions. I got my highest hit count yet of 29 readers because of him. I really need more readers.) When I emailed him the link to my blog for submission, Jarenwattananon thanked me for my list and mentioned that I was the only black guy to have sent anything.  He figured that this
Read more

2022: I Lost My Father and Got Into Milton Nascimento

Image
"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." --Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Folks have been bandying that quotation around the last few weeks on Twitter, the social network that just won't quit no matter what literal Apartheid-era Afrikaner and dumb Bond villain does to stomp all over it, asking what 2022 was for them. I didn't know after ruminating on it for some time, ultimately joking it was a year that made very pointed, declarative statements about how my life herein would go in some ways and made phrases that trailed off into nothing, leaving me to guess its intentions in others. It was a year of feast and famine as my years often are, and always interesting, as I often hope my life is. I wasn't not entertained, even when I was sad or even when I was irritated, and that's always been my hope to approach life that way. But I still don't know what this year was to me. Freelance music journalist Larry Fitzm
Read more