Killing in the Name of

It has been said by some that Christians are the only ones that kill their wounded.

Somthing for you to chew on.

Fairy Tales

Calvin & Hobbes
Calvin: "Dad, what makes wind?"
Dad: "Trees sneezing."
Calvin: "Really?"
Dad: "No, but the truth is more complicated."
Calvin (later, to Hobbes): "The trees are really sneezing today."

Should it surprise us that so many teens who have grown up in the church have a tough time seeing God as “real”? I mean, look at how the children’s ministries that they grew up in portray God. I never grew up in church but it seems to me that teaching the Bible to kids as if it’s a sort of fairy tale book with a host of fantastical stories is counterproductive in the long run. I suspect it gives kids a false image of God and the Bible as they grow into adulthood.

Sunday school stories don’t look significantly different to a child than the stories their parents read them at bed-time or the Disney movies, other than the fact that in the Bible the characters are people instead of talking donkeys (maybe that isn’t such a good example).

It seems to me that children often grow up viewing the Bible stories in the same realm as Santa Clause. Both are fun whimsical stories that adults have assured them are true. But what happens as children grow up and find out that they were effectively lied to about the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and even the big guy - Santa. They “grow out of” their belief in the Tooth Fairy, why should we expect Noah’s ark to be any different when it’s taught in the same way.

When we teach kids the Bible as if it were a glorified Aesop’s Fables, they’ll treat it as such sooner or later.

I think the Bible loses its power when we make its stories suitable for children when they often are not. For example, on the walls of many children’s ministry rooms is a scene depicting the ark w/ some animals in it and the whole thing is floating in a bunch of calm blue water – and the elephants are smiling. That’s the children’s version.


Have you ever seen video footage of a really bad flood on TV? There's some pretty horrific footage out there from the tsunami back in 2004 that occured in the Indian Ocean. The tsunami was unbelievably devistating, something like a 9.1 on the Richter Scale. When it was all said and done almost 230,000 people were dead or missing. The earthquake was so violent (the second largest on record) that in caused other earthquakes around the globe as far away as Alaska. And yet, if you believe the Bible, it was nothing compared to the flood.

It’s nothing like the paintings. The water is black with the mud, grime and filth. There’s chaos all around as trees, people, and houses float by. Screaming mothers try desperately to cling to their helpless children. Doesn’t look quite the same when you paint it that way on the children’s ministry wall.


I don’t pretend to know the solution. I’m not speaking as a children’s ministry expert by any means. Unfortunately, I only tend to see its affects on the guys and girls who have grown up with this. But I don’t see this problem so much in Judaism, at least not in its ancient form, so I’m confident it can be done better. Maybe part of it is that Jews tend to read the stories as part of their own history whereas Christians can sort of view the Old Testament as a land “far, far away.”

I wonder if we might be able to learn from how they used to do “children’s ministry” in ancient Judaism. On the first day of class the rabbi would smear honey on the child’s fingers, or hands, or writing slate. Now back then people ate dirt and gravel so honey was like the sweetest most delicious thing you could imagine. And the rabbi would say to the children, who are around 6 years old, something like, “Now lick the honey, and may you never forget that the words of God are like honey. May you never forget that the words of God are the most enjoyable, most pleasurable thing you could ever have. May you be like Ezekiel who tasted the scroll and said it tastes sweet like honey.”

I don’t know if that’s how you see the Bible, but I can say that most teens don’t see the Bible that way. I wish they did.

Calvin: "Dad, why are old photographs black and white? Didn't they have color film back then?"
Dad: "Of course they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It's just that the WORLD was black and white then.
Calvin: "Really?"
Dad: "Yep, the world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: "Oh."
Dad: "Well, truth is stranger than fiction."
Calvin: "Then why are old paintings in color? If the world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted that way?"
Dad: "Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane."
Calvin: "BUT... but how could they possibly have painted in color? Wouldn't their paints have been in shades of gray back then?"
Dad: "Of course, but they changed color like everything else in the '30s.
Calvin: "So why didn't black and white photos turn color too?"
Dad: "Because they were color photographs of black and white, remember?"

Lessons from The Beautiful People

To some - crazy, others - genius
To his adversaries - possessed by demons, to his advocates - a god
An extremist to some, a much needed thorn in the side to others
To king him or kill him?
Dismissed and deified
Glorified and vilified
Friend of the sinners and enemy of the saints
Rebel or ruler?
Idolized and demonized
Condemn him or commend him?
Destroyer or creator?

It’s curious to me how such a considerable critic of Christianity can have so much in common with Christ. Not unlike Jesus, the religious establishment has demonized Marilyn Manson from the beginning, and not without valid reasons. But has it ever stopped to listen to him? To hear the cry of those he represents? If his fanbase isn’t the oppressed, the broken-hearted, the poor in spirit, the downtrodden, the hurting, then who is?

Like most of Ecclesiasties or the first half of a Psalm (before the typical redemptive ending), his lyrics cry out to a meaningless world and a god who seems absent and oblivious to our suffering. I want to look at some of the lyrics and see what we might learn.

“it's all relative to the size of your steeple” – Beautiful People

How often have we made Christianity into building our own empires bigger and bigger? The cooler we are the bigger our church. The bigger our church, the more God must love us. We seem to be under the distinct impression that there’s some sort of direct relationship between how much God is blessing us and how many people are coming to our church. But by that standard Jesus would make a sad sorry savior as his group of a mere 120 people (Acts 1:15) when he died was far from acceptable by our standards.

In fact, Jesus seems to have regularly invited people to walk away from what he was doing by making inflammatory remarks (eat my flesh), bucking the system (Pharisees and teachers), confusing people (parables), and not being ‘nice’ (“Get behind me Satan!”).

“Dear god if you were alive you know we'd kill you” - GodEatGod

We could make some obvious parallels to Jesus' life and death here, but what about God in general (the whole trinity, so to speak)? We may not have killed Him, but aren’t we often guilty of twisting him up into a little ball until he fits into our own little box. A place where we can control him and manipulate him to acquiesce to what we want. We tame the Lion of Judah until he becomes irrelevant, a fate worse than death.

How about this passage from C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe just before Lucy meets Aslan.

“Is — is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of the Beasts? Aslan is a lion — the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh,” said Susan, “I thought he was a man. Is he — quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and make no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver, “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver, “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Let's look at another song from Manson,

"I want to fly into your sun
Need faith to make me numb
Live like a teenage christ
Im a saint, got a date with suicide

Oh Mary, Mary
To be this young is oh so scary
Mary, Mary
To be this young I'm oh so scared
I wanna live, I wanna love
But its a long hard road, out of hell
I wanna live, I wanna love
But its a long hard road, out of hell” – A Long Hard Road Out of Hell

I think this echoes how a lot of teens feel, I know it’s how I used to feel (and still do sometimes). Doing their best to live like a “teenage Christ” on the outside, but slowly bleeding to death on the inside, where few people take the time to look. I think we could do a lot more to give friendship and hope to all the teens that are deeply hurting, the type of teens that make up Manson’s fanbase, the type of teens that have generally been scorned out of (rather than loved into) our churches. This isn’t exclusive to teens of course but I think it’s the locus of our collective error as well as where we have the most opportunity to affect lives.