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Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in thecosmicdance's InsaneJournal:

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    Tuesday, September 16th, 2008
    7:51 pm
    Why Context Really Is Important After All
    There’s a line in the NT when Jesus tells his followers “the poor will always be with you.” Many Christian denominations and individual leaders have spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out just what he meant by “the poor will always be with you”. I am not about to start claiming that I’ve discovered something no one else ever has but it might help if they remembered the line that comes after “the poor will always be with you.” The next part is basically “but I won’t be here much longer.”

    People concentrate so much on the first part that they forget what story that verse actually comes from. It’s from the story in which Mary Magdalene smashes that jar of perfume and uses it to annoint Jesus’s feet. The disciples were upset because they thought she could have sold the perfume and used the profits to help the poor. So Jesus dismisses that with “the poor will always be with you.”

    The focus of the story is not the poor, or what we should do with the poor or why they will always be with us. That's important to discuss, sure, but the Bible gives us many other opportunities to do so. By obsessing over what that one line means, you’re kind of ignoring the whole point of the scene. In context that line is about Jesus saying “look, forget about the poor for a second, something amazing is happening and I need you to be watching.”

    You can debate about what the amazing thing was that was happening. Was MM performing an ancient, sacred ritual designed to formally announce Jesus as their king? Or was she symbolically annointing him prior to his death? Or was it important because she was a worldly sinner who is so overwhelmed by her religious experience that she smashes her most prized possession? Did she know why she did it, or was it just a coincidence?

    All of those questions are more important here than "why did he say the poor would always be with us?"
    Thursday, September 11th, 2008
    10:57 am
    Maybe non religious people get annoyed by Christians acting like they own Narnia. Because there are lots of Christians who keep using the stories to try and push their beliefs, in ways that I’m betting would have driven the original author absolutely nuts (it didn’t work on him, after all). They’re pushing Narnia as a “witnessing tool” so much that they’ve forgotten Narnia doesn’t need their help. I mean, if the books are a metaphorical, child sized version of the author’s personal testimony, you might want to pause and take a look at how belief in Aslan and Narnia is handled in the books. The more you push, the more annoyed people get and the less likely they are to want to keep enjoying a series that so many obnoxious people are big fans of.

    One of the secrets to the popularity of this series with children is the narrator’s voice, I think. It has a very “this is just between you and me” vibe. The books were a conversation between me and the author, not me, the author and five grownups standing behind me telling me how to interpret things.

    So maybe it doesn’t matter if people are getting things “wrong”. especially if they are very young and have not yet filmed all of their character’s arc and so have not experienced everything that made him who he is.
    Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
    4:07 pm
    Sunday, September 7th, 2008
    2:44 pm
    Friday, August 29th, 2008
    8:24 pm
    Monday, August 25th, 2008
    8:22 pm
    Mabfan's post on evolution. I usually like his opinions on how science can work alongside faith because so many Sci Fi authors are so...not like that.

    But he said "
    it annoys me when creationists refuse to accept the idea that someone could both accept the fact of evolution and be a religious person."

    And I got sidetracked from other stuff I have to do because I have to respond. Even if I'm probably going to run away from any sort of debate.

    ( Here I go )
    Friday, August 15th, 2008
    7:09 pm
    This generator mixes up phrases from your LJ. Some are nonsensical, others are funny taken out of context and mixed up, while others make perfect sense aside from the fact that I never technically wrote them.

    http://hewgill.com/cgi-bin/ljmarkov.pl?user=thecosmicdance&words=100&order=2

    ( Crack!Theology )
    Monday, July 21st, 2008
    2:22 am
    Because I am not sleeping
    ( More on gender issues in Narnia )
    Monday, July 14th, 2008
    1:33 am
    The Last Battle pt12
    ( Further Up and Further In )
    Is that it? Am I done?
    Saturday, July 12th, 2008
    12:35 am
    Friday, July 11th, 2008
    12:20 am
    Thursday, July 10th, 2008
    4:18 pm
    the Last Battle pt9
    I would agree that C.S Lewis had some…issues. Every author does and the majority of them are flawed people in their personal lives. But it's unfair to flip out and overreact to every percieved instance of sexism in books that are hardly worse about gender relations than a lot of their contemporaries. I'm not under the delusion that he's some great feminist, but I can definitely say I've seen much, much worse. Like the last season of Angel.

    Perhaps I own some special edited versions of the books, where all the Horribly Offensive Stuff has been removed?

    Lewis has a chatty, conversational style, at least in these books. And while this means you feel as if he’s confiding in you personally, it also means people tend to feel like he’s personally approving or disapproving of their lives- the favorite uncle telling you wonderful stories by the fireside is someone you do not want to feel like you've let down and you feel betrayed when it turns out he's not perfect. They get very upset if his opinions on something are different from theirs- much more so than they do when they disagree with JKR or Terry Pratchett or Stephen King. And sometimes they overreact when they think he is making judgments about them, and start yelling before even considering that there might be something more to it or that they are taking things too literally or looking at it from the wrong angle. Everyone comes to a book with filters on based on their own life experiences, and sometimes we take these basic sets of meanings and try to plug them into every book whether it works in that book’s universe or not. Even if answers to questions asked are contained in parts of canon we haven’t bothered to read. But this is not a post about why Jadis is no misunderstood feminist icon.

    It is, however, a bit of an UnPopular Fannish Opinion I'm about to express. And I'm probably going to regret it. This one's a two parter, folks.

    ( She Saved the World. A Lot : Girls, Battles and Belief )
    Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
    10:16 pm
    Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
    10:58 pm
    The Last Battle pt 6
    ( The Rapture of the Rapture...or not... )
    7:09 pm
    The Last Battle pt 5
    ( The Last Generation pt 2: If They Want a Fight, Can't Someone Else Give It To Them? )

    Current Music: Bonnie Tyler I Need a Hero
    Monday, July 7th, 2008
    6:33 pm
    Sunday, July 6th, 2008
    11:43 am
    11:02 am
    Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
    8:17 pm
    The Last Battle pt1
    The first line in the last book says “In the last days of Narnia” so it’s very clear that this is, in no uncertain terms, The End. I have a love/hate relationship with this book. It’s well done, except where it isn’t. It’s awesome, except where it sucks. And if you grew up in the world I grew up in, the entire plot has an extra level of scary attached. To make it easiest on myself, I’ll be tackling this book in entries split up by character, group of characters, or theme.

    ( Shift the Ape: Brother Hate’s Traveling Damnation Show )

    Current Mood: achy
    Monday, June 30th, 2008
    3:08 pm
    The Magician's Nephew
    ( This is a story about something that happened a long time ago when your grandfather was a child )

    Current Music: Sarah Michelle Gellar/Buffy Cast Walk Through the Fire
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