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Subject: Re: Chapter 25 Author: kzin [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] Date Posted: 11:38:47 01/27/10 Wed In reply to: Deadly Ernest 's message, "Re: Chapter 25" on 04:48:41 01/27/10 Wed The way the story seems for the moment to have turned into a sermon is not a surprise. Wes, as usual, gave plenty of hints that this might happen. I just hoped it would take a slightly different turn here. I don't mean to criticize the author for telling the story he wants to tell. But I guess the only way I see to get past this chapter is to use it as an occasion to explain, to myself as much as to anyone else, why I feel as I do about what some of the characters are doing. The earliest thought I remember having about God was a question: "Why do people pretend to believe in God?" I had been dragged into churches (mostly Methodist) by my parents on a fairly regular basis, with the idea that it was supposed to be good for me somehow. I was unable to imagine that anyone really believed in any of the Christian creed that the congregation recited robotically every week, or that anyone believed more than a small fraction of the ideas that they listened to respectfully from the pulpit. It was easier for me to imagine that they were all lying about what they believed. Since then I have had conversations with many kinds of Christian and not a few followers of other belief systems. I have seen a lot of evidence that many people, good people, sincerely believe in various versions of Christianity. Just after High School, I made a sincere effort to believe in it myself. There was a social group that I wanted to be part of, and being a Believer seemed to be a requirement for full membership. After a few years I gave up; I seem to be just plain unable to believe in that sort of thing, or even to believe that anyone really believes it. These days I feel that, just as some people report that they can sense the "presence of God" directly, I feel the "absense of God", a mystical certainty that nothing at all like the Christian God exists. The universe without a God makes sense to me; add God to this universe, and the result is something horrible and alien. And yet I seem to be always surrounded by people for whom the idea of a Good Person, and the idea of a Christian Person, are one and the same. It's the old South, the Confederacy that still dreams of rising again, you see. Home and yet never really home. And now suddenly the Spearfish Lake universe seems to be infected with this same thought-virus. Say it ain't so! "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

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[> [> [> [> Subject: Re: Chapter 25 Author: Kirby Lambert [ Edit | View ] Date Posted: 14:11:42 01/27/10 Wed >I totally disagree with your definition of what a >Christian is, in the basic terms, a Christian is a >person who accepts Christ into their lives and >believes Christ to be the son of God, their redeemer, >and an interceder with God for them. There is NOTHING >in being a Christian that requires you to attend >church every week or month or year, it's all to do >with what you believe. > >Having said that, I will agree that a lot of the >organised churches push the line that you can't be a >Christian unless you attend church each week, but >that's the church management saying that, not the >faith in Christ. > >Yes, once you saw Noah being brought in as a >counsellor, a natural action, it was inevitable that >some religious aspects would follow. But I do like the >way how Wes has Noah wrestling with his own present >and future. This is something a lot of ministers go >through, but it's rarely mentioned. > >Regards, > >Ernest Ernest: I agree with what you have to say about Noah and his personal struggles. My father, in his life, was both a minister and a funeral director. A lot of people in his church organization gave him a hard time about leaving the ministry. They thought that he was betraying his calling. He spent the last 34 years of his life as a funeral director. Dad's funeral was on a miserably cold and rainy March day. Somewhere between 400 and 600 people attended his funeral and somewhere between 100 and 150 went to the cemetery in the rain for his graveside service. A few years later his older sister told me that she thought that he had been more of a minister as a funeral director than most ministers with a church and congregation. Kirby