philcrissman.com

It’s been awhile since I posted anything of this sort, but I thought this was pretty intense.

Full disclosure; I’m a Christian. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t write about that much on this blog, though I’ve stated in the past that I would (or could, or maybe should), I really haven’t, much. And, you know this is just a blog, mainly about techie stuff, so whatever, but Penn’s commentary on his experience is pretty gritty: “If you believe there’s a heaven … a hell … How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?”

Now, there are ways of proselytizing that clearly do nothing more than convince people that believers are nuts. The guy Gillette spoke to was clearly not being a nut, and I’d say this is definitely a huge part of what made the experience affect him as it clearly did (not in changing his beliefs, as he stated, but it’ s pretty clear he had much respect for the individual). He felt compelled to mention, several times, that this guy he talked to was sane. That tells me that way too much of the time — maybe most of the time — Christians are coming across as unhinged, insane, impractical, or worse. Something tells me that’s not really a good thing.

If we’re going to communicate something, I believe the most important thing we could communicate about God is that He loves and will accept people; that we believe it’s true that Christ was here for the express purpose that the rest of humanity would not need to be condemned. Or even just giving away a Bible, like this guy did, and expressing a willingness to talk more about it, if the individual wants to.

Anyways. I’m sure we’ll have some more Ruby or Rails or something on here tomorrow. I don’t know, maybe a few like this, once in awhile. I imagine that as long as I’m not insulting anyone’s intelligence, even those who disagree aren’t going to mind that too much.

A tip of the hat to Ben Thorpe at JediMoose for posting this.