Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Ian and I were having a vibrant conversation today about governments and which form was best. I stood by my belief that our democratic form is most favorable while he insisted a benign autocracy would work - as long as he was the autocrat.
I later was reading on Presbyweb.com an interesting article from Christianity Today:
On April 21, 2447, the death of a 143-year-old woman hailed a new era. Lungs of people everywhere swelled with relief. Impeccability had dawned.

The deceased, Rosa Pecadorita, a coca grower in a remote village in the Andes mountains, was widely believed to have been the last living sinner. As the obituary in The Global Times put it, she was "the last remaining human whose genes had not been therapeutically adjusted to prevent her from engaging in behaviors that the Global Referendum of 2304 deemed harmful to society and which the treaty that ended the Great Wars of Religion of 2105-2304 classified as sins."


Click the Christianity Today link to read the entire article. Any thoughts?

2 comments:

Dave Moody said...

Ian is right. As long as he assumes the throne after his father's natural demise.

I'm just sayin'...

Marti said...

I love the list of sins at the end of the CT article. Reminds me of the taxonomies I would get when asking Central Asians about sin: "killing someone, disobeying your parents, or throwing away bread."

This week I heard someone preach on how he sees our American view of government affect our view of God. I guess every culture has bits of the truth it can see and connect with and bits it's in conflict with or blind to! (Oops, did I just end my sentence a preposition with?)

Richard Pratt spoke at the EPC General Assembly. He said American Evangelicals no longer have a vision deep or big enough to compel us for a lifetime - that our dreams are too small. We need to reconsider the top half of the Lord's prayer instead of living in the bottom half, and adjust how we think about God. God is the emperor of all creation, and we need a vision for Christianity that begins with God as king. We as Americans find it practically impossible to know what it is to have a king, since our country and culture are practically built on a foundation of kinglessness. Our leaders are people to whom =we= give (limited) power, and if they don't handle it well, out they go.

He said this has gone beyond our politics to our religion. We view our God, too, as being 'by the people and for the people.' It's God's job to fulfill our dreams, make us happy, make our lives better. Kings - men with their own agendas and mission and glory which we as subjects are expected to uphold and serve - are terribly inconvenient!

Pratt said America is under thrall to one of the greatest heresies ever as believers hold that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As opposed to saying of God, from him and through him and to him are all things...