Today's Slacktivist

[telophase]

I've mentioned him before, but in case you totally forgot*, Fred Clark at Slacktivist is a Christian blogger who is going, very slowly, through the apocalyptic Tribulation Force novels and pointing out just exactly how bad they are: bad theology, bad writing.

Today's entry is most excellent: he rips apart a scene where the main character** and his maybe-almost-possibly girlfriend are walking through an airport and stop to buy a cookie from a bored teenager, to whom the main character is rude.

What makes this so good is that you have to remember that this book supposedly takes place after the Rapture, when all the saved and the innocent have been bodily taken to heaven. Which includes all the children. The way the books are written, nobody is affected by this emotionally. Nobody.*** But really: if a huge chunk of the world's population vanishes and nobody knows why, are you really going to get a bored teenager working at a cookie kiosk?

So Clark writes his own segments from the viewpoint of the cookie-kiosk owner and the "bored" teenager that works there. And ... I'd read that book.





* You don't actually remember everything I say here? SAY IT AIN'T SO!

** I can't call him a hero. That would require him to actually do something.

*** None of the sinners and unbelievers have a clue what happened, either. Because we're apparently too stupid to know anything about religion. Cue the link going around today to the article about the study that shows atheists know more about religion than Christians. (I got 14 out of 15 correct.)****

**** There's a 10-question version here you might be able to get into if the other one is slashdotted.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Fred Clark at Slacktivist is a Christian blogger who is going, very slowly, through the apocalyptic Tribulation Force novels and pointing out just exactly how bad they are

It's the fact that he continues to be so eloquent and precise in his dissection of the books that stuns me; I'd have descended into incoherent ranting a long way back.

May I just mention slacktivist_feed, for anyone who wants to read Mr Clark on their DW reading page?

[telophase]

My hat is off to him, for sure!

[lady_ganesh]

God, I love the Slacktivist takes on Left Behind.

[jonquil]

100%. (WE'RE NUMBER ONE!*)

I'd love to read Slacktivist's novel. I might cry a lot, though.

* "We're" being "people on your flist". I'm somewhere between Episcopalian and Deist.

[onthehill]

Yay 12/15 (better than 87% of surveyed).

[sub_divided]

I love Fred Clark.

13/15! Whoo!

[trobadora]

Cue the link going around today to the article about the study that shows atheists know more about religion than Christians.

I'm curious about what kinds of questions they ask, but the survey won't load for me. :(

[camwyn]

That makes two of us. Possibly the site is choked?

ETA: Yep. "We are experiencing technical difficulties and are working to resolve them. Please try again soon."

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think so. I was able to get in earlier, but it took multiple reloads to get through all the questions.

[trobadora]

Oh! Thanks, that makes sense. It just timed out for me earlier, but when I try now I get the error message too.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think they're being slashdotted right now. A couple of the questions I remember involved asking where Jesus was born, what the majority religion in Indonesia is, and what the majority religion in Pakistan is.

[chomiji]

I wonder whether there is more than one set of questions, because I didn't get asked about Indonesia.

But wow, most of those were seriously easy. Mother Theresa's religion? The Biblical character most often associated with suffering despite following God's will? Hnnnh.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. There's a link somewhere on the results page to a PDF of the full survey and not only were the questions and answers scrambled, but some of the questions had different forms/answers, including the Indonesia one. (I read through the full survey and marked the answers I was sure of on a piece of paper - there were only two I wasn't sure about.)

[trobadora]

Oh, I see. Thanks! I'll try again later, maybe it'll work then.

And thanks for the examples, that does give me a pretty good idea what it's like. :)

[chomiji]

I had to fight with the survey and make it reload pages over and over. I got 13 out of 15 correct.

Atheists scored better than Christians, but Jews scored even better! (OK, only one point better ... .)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

After reading Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted, I'm not surprised that Christians tend not to know much about their own religion, especially the bits in the Bible, since they don't read it in a critical manner, but in a devotional manner, not comparing bits to other bits, if they read it at all.

When the quiz asked where Jesus was born, I started waffling a bit, because not all the Gospels mention it. Sure sign of the over-educated!

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

That has long been my objection to organized Bible study - it's always far too superficial. I want to consider it critically. I want to dig deep,to look at the original language, to understand the textural references, to compare similar passages. Kind of like (how I understand) the Jews to approach study of the Talmud.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I definitely recommend Ehrman's book, then! He does what he calls a horizontal reading - placing the Gospels side-by-side and comparing what they each say about the same thing - instead of the usual vertical reading, which is just reading through each one from beginning to end, then moving to the next. As he points out, that way we can more easily see what each author was trying to get across by what he said and how he said it.

I'm going to have to read more by Ehrman - I came across him when I heard a radio interview with him on KERA's Think, and I liked his academic historical approach. (Now I just have to find books as engaging as his that deal with other religions, about which I admit I know not very much.)

[catystorm.livejournal.com]

Hm, it loaded the page but no button for the survey. Damnit, I was curious!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Try again in a few hours - I think they're being slashdotted now.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

Yeah, looks like slashdotting from here too.

I did eventually get the quiz to load, though. 13 of 15 - and I knew the one about the Catholic transubstantiation, I just overthought it.

[rurounitriv.livejournal.com]

...and I so should have used this icon instead of my default. XD

The study merely confirms what so many pagans could tell you, though - we tend to know more about the Book than the average fundamentalist, and we don't even believe in it!

[matildarose.livejournal.com]

Obviously that teenager played D&D. Just saying. :|

[maxineofarc.livejournal.com]

I love Fred Clark so, so much.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

15/15! Woo!

This actually lines up with my experiences in a World Religions course: the atheists knew more about the tenets of most religions (especially Christianity) than those who identified as religious. My conservative Christian classmates knew the least. :/

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And people are so surprised when it turns out that questioning often leads to education. Who knew?!

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

15/15...but surprise surprise, the "compare your score by religious affiliation" doesn't even include a catchall lump-all-the-obscure-faiths-together "Other" category. *sighs*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The full survey (http://pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Belief_and_Practices/religious-knowledge-questionnaire.pdf) (PDF) recorded "other" responses, and what that "other" was, but nobody seems to be reporting on that. I wonder if there's a way to get hold of the full data?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, looking at the leading questions they used to try to pin down the "something else" responses, they seemed really interested in pinning down if something was a Christian or non-Christian religion, and go into fairly fine-grained details about different branches of Christianity, but are rather less focused on narrowing down Muslim/Jewish/Buddhist/Hindu subcategories, and don't even suggest prompts for anything else. Seems fairly obvious which angle the survey designers were most interested in... o_O

[xebra42.livejournal.com]

So my office just sent this quiz around... It's to start a conversation about how we should all understand everyone's faith and how it allows people to "bring their whole selves" to work. But, the conversation only includes the Christian group, Jewish group and Muslim group having a discussion/Q&A. I should ask why atheists aren't be represented... :-D

[telophase.livejournal.com]

At a previous job, an event invitation was circulated amongst the staff and to explain the sort of clothing that should be worn to this event, the inviters said "Wear the sort of thing you wear to church."

One of the reasons I loved my boss at the time? His immediate reaction was the same as mine: "But what if you worship skyclad?"