Skip to main content

Just stop it!

*Raw, quick thoughts, just thrown up here, at my peril, with very little pondering.
Wayback machine or other internet tools used to dig up dirt on people, I'll probably edit this as I have better formed thoughts on the matter. Please don't hold this rant against me. It needed to get out there in order to spur further thought*

Division. No, not lists of the dreaded mathematical function represented by ÷

I'm talking polarization. 

No, that buzzword has become too familiar. 

I'm talking cleavage. 

Not breaking up (that can be a thoughtful act) but breaking off. Casting out. 

The world is facing polycrises: climate change, species loss and natural disasters are bad enough without us adding wars and racism and systemic injustice to it all. 

Christians, if we are to have any hope of faithfully representing the God we claim to obey, it is high time we put our differences aside. 

Those of you who are purity minded, okay, you probably have a point. God's holiness does demand something of us. But for the most part, you have not successfully shared that perspective in a way that has led people to find shalom. 

Maybe what we need right is to put aside all our differences. Stop with the heretic hunting. Stop with the purity tests. Stop arguing about correct doctrine. Even if that means accepting some yahoos who you don't think should get to claim the name of Jesus. We can work on harmful rhetoric later. Right now the biggest threat is the harmful rhetoric of othering.

We need to stop throwing people out on their ear. We need to model Jesus' radical love that FIRST of all says you are loved and accepted. Only after that is clear do we have the right to say, "listen, there are some things you do or say that do not lead to your flourishing nor the flourishing of those around you." But that needs to be said in the context of walking together, and mutual correction, not finger pointing and boundary policing.

Unity − but not uniformity − needs to come first.

 If we can't live a capacity to get along despite differences, I think we have failed in our mission.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keep Canada a country of welcome

We're supposed to be grateful that we got a Liberal government instead of a Conservative one that would scapegoat immigrants. However, even under Trudeau, Liberals had subtly started to send the disgustingly popular message that Canada's social ills can be traced to our newcomer population, when in fact, in both housing and education (favourite victims of the blame immigrant narrative), the real villain is the federal government's funding cut backs.  And now Carney is blaming immigrants for health care too. Now he's claiming we can't afford to pay for health care for immigrants (as though we can afford to waste human potential by allowing folks to languish in untreated illness for lack of funds!) So here's a letter to the PM and the immigration minister to protest the cuts to immigration. This time from MCC. Mine, of course, has my own flavour added.  Click here to send your own. I am writing to you to ask that you keep Canada as a country of welcome.  Stop bl...
Post a Comment
Read more

No more public money for LNG

It’s just so ludicrous that we’d be sending any public money to fossil fuel extraction. It doesn’t even make financial sense with major Asian markets ramping up solar and wind. And that's beyond the known climate change consequences of continued extraction.   So, another adapted form letter, thanks to Stand for earth.  Write your own here I am writing to urge you to reject any investment, financing, or de-risking of new LNG projects in Canada. I am sick and tired of public money flowing to subsidize fossil fuel extraction.  It does not benefit ordinary Canadians.  It is known to contribute to global warming – the effects of which we are already feeling with a huge increase in disastrous climate events which are costly and harmful. It doesn’t even make financial sense because the market is drying up. The rest of the world is smart enough to switch to renewables.  You are continuing to dehumanize Indigenous peoples by running roughshod over their territory a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ecological disaster through data centres nobody even wants

Glitchy products that never do what they say are bad enough, and then they add genocide into the mix. But what real options are there to Microsoft? Another (adapted) form letter from Stand for earth. Write your own here You’ve trapped us all into being forced to use MS for word processing since you simply drove all the competition out of the marketplace with injust business practices. The least you can do it not lie to us about your supposed commitments to green energy sourcing.  I was disgusted to hear Microsoft struck a 20 year deal with Chevron to supply massive amounts of polluting methane gas for a data centre in Texas. Microsoft used to pretend to have climate commitments by setting goals far off in the future so you could keep kicking the can down the road and never meeting them. But now you're not even pretending to try, Now it’s pursuit of ecological disaster through unnecessary AI data centres nobody even wants to use.  I’m asking: please start listening to the commu...
Post a Comment
Read more