You will know that they are Christians by their love
"How much do you have to hate people to not proselytize."
The Anchoress has a moving video of Penn Jillette encounter with a fan who gave him a bible. I also really liked what The Anchoress had to say in relation to this.
I remember Penn Jillette's tirade against Blessed Mother Teresa which he has in common with fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens. Though Jillette seems like a much more honest atheist than Hitchens. So please send some prayers his way. Speaking as an ex-atheist I love the joy of truth and that truth was also born unto us.
On a side note I remember back in the early 90's when Jillette was a columnist for PC/Computing magazine. He did one classic prank which I took advantage of. A fellow Chief who I had been working with at the time had just bought a new 386 computer and he was bragging about the price he got. I told him there was a better sale going on and have him a 1-800 number. Jillette had sat up and paid for the line and on the other end was a recording that sounded like a pitch from a computer business giving the specs on a great computer for the time at an extremely low price. The recording ends though berating the caller for believing such a amazing deal. It was a pretty cool prank.
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Objectively speaking, since I don't know who this guy is, I think that clip was awesome! I'm sure that Mother Teresa is praying for him in a special way, too, and would not expect us to despise him for her sake.
I do think that he's got 'proselytize' and 'evangelize' mixed up, though.
How much do you have to hate people to split infinitives?
Ïðeîãpîìíûé pecïåêò aâòîpó… Bàñ ïpèÿòíî ÷èòàòü âñeãäa… Ñòaòüÿ ïî äåëó, ñîëèäàpíà )))
BTW, Jeff, your advent wreath (and hence mine!!)is two candles behind...
;-)
Have a happy Christmas...
I think Penn will be enriched by reading the Psalms.
I'd love to TrackBack, but I don't know how to do it. :-\
http://whimsy-whimsy.blogspot.com/2008/12/psalms-reading-for-sane-man.html
What I thought interesting was the way he described the event and then said something like "I know there is no God..."
Well, he actually can't 'know' that. He can assume it, he can theorize it. He can even say he's never experienced God, but he can't KNOW God is not there. It would be like me saying since I've never been to Antarctica and felt the extreme and bitter cold I cannot imagine so I KNOW its not really there.
I'm assured by many people who have never been there, that indeed Antarctica is real. They've seen maps and photographs. They have a vague understanding of it through various books and magazines, although sometimes getting facts about it quite wrong (there are no polar bears hunting peguins there, for example, but some think polar bears live there) They understand, however, that it is there even though they have never seen it themselves. Other people assure me they have been there (one being my husband's uncle) They've seen its strange landscape, felt the ice, they've experienced the cold and the wind and the constant dark months.
If I doubt it is really there, it puts me almost in a category of insanity, wouldn't it?
If I claim to KNOW there is no God, yet for millions of years human beings have understood that there is indeed Someone who made us, wouldn't that put me in a similar category as one who claims that a strange dark hostile continent isn't really there?
Some have only a vague notion of what it is like to know this God, but manage to get the facts of God quite wrong. Others HAVE experienced God themselves, personally and intimately, and that number is quite high from centuries and centuries of human history, even from before Christ (Socrates, for example, who came to know there is a God through reason). In the Catholic Church alone, there are at least 27,000 people we are reasonably certain have experienced God to such a degree that we hold them in highest regard to call them Saints.
Nearly every person who prays will tell you of some extraordinary thing they have witnessed or experienced through prayer or during worship or even when they weren't even praying - an overwhelming urge to do something odd that saved a life or a voice directing them explicitly to do an action they didn't understand that has a miraculous effect in someone's life. In addition, things happen in this world so odd and out of natural order, recorded in great detail and examined by science, photographed, witnessed by one or several very rational persons or seen by thousands at once that there is a God, or at least something very different than humanity working among us.
To deny that is a kind of insanity.
I was very impressed by Penn Jillette's heartfelt 'Thank you for caring'. I have this view that all people have a message for me from God somewhere. So when someone speaks sincerely about their life experiences, I perk up. And I have this view, that all men will accept God, or not, on God's own time clock, not man's. That their journey when they give their life's testimony will be the message that many will need to hear at God's appointed time. We all contribute aspects of our experience to the needs of others. Penn's assertion that he KNOWS there is no God is just his wearing of his heart on his sleeve. He's no more zealous than St. Paul before his conversion. What a St.Paul he might make if he does convert.
P.S. I loved the Greek Captcha joke. I had already gone to the dictionary to look up the Greek alphabet and decided that the answer is 'dxlba' before I read the word 'joke'.