I don’t like to think about religion. It depresses me that an elaborate and strangely long-lived scam has ensnared so many decent and well-meaning people (which is not to say that no good has come of it).
I have nothing special against Rick Warren: yes, he’s a homophobe who resembles a chunkier Chuck Todd, but at least he doesn’t blame 9/11 on teh ghey or drunkenly masticate David Gregory’s neck and cheeks when he’s on the “Meet the Press”. So it depressed me to read that he said this:
“In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil. And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, “Hitler, we are yours.”
And they nearly took the world.
Lenin once said, “give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I’ll change the world.” And, he nearly did.
A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.
When I hear those kinds of stories, I think ‘what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say ‘Jesus, we are yours’?
I don’t understand modern Christianity. As I’ve said before, Jesus has always seemed like a hippie to me, and I don’t think there’s so much in the New Testament that resembles Mein Kampf. So, seriously, what is up with so many Christian leaders wanting to emulate Hitler, Stalin, Lenin Mao, Genghis Kahn, etc? Is there a simple explanation for this?