This Week in God

October 7, 2006

First up from the God machine is, coincidentally, a machine for God. Well, sort of. It’s a machine, which is becoming increasingly common, and which will take your money at convenient locations in the name of God. (thanks to reader B.T. for the tip)

The LA Times ran a fascinating feature on an evangelical congregation in Augusta, Ga., which found that a large number of congregants didn’t carry a lot of cash on them, so Pastor Marty Baker embraced “ATMs for Jesus.”

atm

It was one of Stevens Creek’s three “Giving Kiosks”: a sleek black pedestal topped with a computer screen, numeric keypad and magnetic-strip reader. Prompted by the on-screen instructions, Marshall performed a ritual more common in quickie marts than a house of God: He pulled out a bank card, swiped it and punched in some numbers.

The machine spat out a receipt. Marshall’s $400 donation was routed to church coffers before he had found his seat for evening worship.

“I paid for gas today with a card, and got lunch with one,” said Marshall, 30. “This is really no different.”

The kiosks can let donors identify their gift as a regular tithe or offering, or direct it to building or missionary funds. The machines send information about the donation to a central church computer system, which shoots the donors an e-mail confirmation.

Pastor Baker and his wife began selling the devices to other churches through their for-profit company over the summer. A church buys a kiosk for between $2,000 and $5,000, plus a monthly subscription fee of up to $49.95 for licensing and support, plus a small cut of the credit card-processing company’s 1.9% on each transaction.

The LAT noted that the Bakers have heard some “church leaders apparently fear that a technology so closely associated with commerce might come across as crass.”

You don’t say.

Next up from the God machine is an item Focus on the Family sent to its membership this week about a religion story from across the pond.

Being Christian in Britain may not guarantee your child can get into a U.K. Christian school.

As part of an education “reform,” the British Education Ministry wants “faith schools” — schools run by religious groups, whether Church of England, Roman Catholic, Jewish or Muslim — to prove that their school admissions “reflect the social nature” of the areas from which they recruit.

As part of that mandate, religious schools must now accept “children of all faiths” and set aside one-quarter of their open seats for non-Christian students. That means Christian applicants for the popular schools may soon be rejected in favor of agnostic or even atheist students.

As I understand it, British Education Ministry extends public funds to these religious schools, which in turn leads the government to interfere with the schools’ admissions policies.

Note to U.S. voucher proponents: be careful what you wish for.

October 7, 2006 at 10:23 am

Reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One:

The comedy is savage and macabre, as biting today as it was when it was written. It attacks the commercialisation of what would normally be considered ‘sacred’. The Loved One appeared on most of the ‘Hundred Best Novels of the Century’ lists in 2000.

As I recall… one of the characters…. “lost his fortune in religion.”

Which is all to say just this:

That nifty God machine is left wanting an jackpot arm to pull…
The possibilities of spinning fruit and coins of prayers… makes me $laver.

I attended a Church of England school in the London suburb where I grew up in the late 1970’s. One of my closest friends, who also attended, is Jewish. There were also a number of Muslim students.

State-assisted church schools are nothing new in the UK. The Church of England is the established church. There are also Catholic state assisted schools, and latterly Muslim and Jewish schools have qualified for taxpayer assistance. This only reflects the increasingly multi-cultural nature of British society. Admitting students of other faiths serves to promote diversity, nothing more,

FOF doesn’t understand the British system, and is using this story to up the persecution quotient in its members.

Wankers.

So does anyone remember that part of the story of Jesus as reported in the Bible where He chased the moneychangers and the sellers of odds and ends out of the temple courtyard? And why He did this?

Church Mall indeed.

@3.

I thought of this too. I guess the idea is Jesus will come with a knotted rope and realize he needs a dolly to get rid of the modern-day money changers. This will give the folks who put it in a chance to scamper out the back door. Yuck.

I rarely go to church but this thing creeps me out for no other reason than…it just does. God and candles? Fine. God and insence? Sure. I’ve swallowed my share of the Jesus wafers though I don’t think he’s really in there. But God and plastic? Uh uh. No thank you. It sounds like something Huxley would have come up with. Yuck.

Oh well, the countdown begins: How long will it be before someone hacks into the system and walks a way with peoples’ life savings?

The attached article from this week’s Time captures the need for spiritual humility nicely…

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,1541466,00.html

There is, however, a way out. And it will come from the only place it can come from–the minds and souls of people of faith. It will come from the much derided moderate Muslims, tolerant Jews and humble Christians. The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to say it is, is the great lie of our time.

There is the faith that sees the message of Jesus or Muhammad as a broad indicator of how we should treat others, of what profound holiness requires, and not as an account literally true in all respects that includes an elaborate theology that explains everything. There is the dry Deism of many of America’s Founding Fathers. There is the cafeteria Christianity of, say, Thomas Jefferson, who composed a new, shortened gospel that contained only the sayings of Jesus that Jefferson inferred were the real words of the real rabbi. There is the open-minded treatment of Scripture of today’s Episcopalianism and the socially liberal but doctrinally wayward faith of most lay Catholics. There is the sacramental faith that regards God as present but ultimately unknowable, that looks into the abyss and hopes rather than sees. And there are many, many more varieties.

But all those alternative forms come back to the same root. Those kinds of faith recognize one thing, first of all, about the nature of God and humankind, and it is this: If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know–because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren’t, it would not be God.

In that type of faith, doubt is not a threat. If we have never doubted, how can we say we have really believed? True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God’s truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

In this sense, our religion, our moral life, is simply what we do. A Christian is not a Christian simply because she agrees to conform her life to some set of external principles or dogmas, or because at a particular moment in her life, she experienced a rupture and changed herself entirely. She is a Christian primarily because she acts like one. She loves and forgives; she listens and prays; she contemplates and befriends; her faith and her life fuse into an unself-conscious unity that affirms a tradition of moral life and yet also makes it her own. In that nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love is more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle.

And that is how that kind of faith interacts with politics. If we cannot know for sure at all times how to govern our own lives, what right or business do we have telling others how to live theirs? From a humble faith comes toleration of other faiths. And from that toleration comes the oxygen that liberal democracy desperately needs to survive. That applies to all faiths, from Islam to Christianity. In global politics, it translates into a willingness to recognize empirical reality, even when it disturbs our ideology and interests. From moderate religion comes pragmatic politics. From a deep understanding of human fallibility comes the political tradition we used to call conservatism.

Yes, conservatism.

I doubt the preacher who’s making a bundle off those ATMs for Jesus never read John 2:14-16 (King James Version). Not that it matters in a nation which has no values other than cash value, but here it is.

And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;

And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

Pity this story didn’t make it into This Week in God:

The Pope may be about to abolish the notion of limbo, the halfway house between heaven and hell, inhabited by unbaptised infants. Is it really that simple?

Read the article from the BBC here. Derisive laughter permitted.

Man, it’s tough being infallible!

Well, as a non-churchgoer these machines strike me as eminently sensible. If I were the sort that did go to church and I had a sense that they had decent security, I’d use them for sure.

I don’t think the moneychangers quote especially applies unless they start having the machines double as actual cash machines, or if they start selling advertising space on them. All it is is an alternative (and highly efficient) way of collecting donations.

OTOH maybe my blase attitude comes from the fact that I don’t think there’s anything particularly sacred about churches.

I guess this just missed the deadline for this week’s Week in God (Weekend God? Weakened God? Wee Kin God?):

NYTimes, front page, above the fold:

In God’s Name
As Exemptions Grow, Religion Outweighs Regulation

In recent years, many politicians and commentators have cited what they consider a nationwide “war on religion” that exposes religious organizations to hostility and discrimination. But such organizations — from mainline Presbyterian and Methodist churches to mosques to synagogues to Hindu temples — enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes. And the number is multiplying rapidly.

This is just creepy. The creepy level to which these churches go to should not surprise me but it does.

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