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Dear Christian parents,
Princeton professor and Minister Kenda Creasy Dean has issued a warning: your child may be following a "mutant" form of Christianity. Oh, and by the way, you’re to blame:
Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It’s a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people’s self-esteem.
Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.
She says this "imposter” faith is one reason teenagers abandon churches.
"If this is the God they’re seeing in church, they are right to leave us in the dust," Dean says. "Churches don’t give them enough to be passionate about."
CNN’s John Blake explains: Link
For a science fiction series, Star Trek had a lot of references to religion. Gene Roddenberry once said he rejected all religions, yet one or another of the Ten Commandments showed up in quite a few episodes. Beliefnet takes a look at some of those episodes.
In “The Apple” from the original “Star Trek” series, Captain James Kirk and his crew encounter an idyllic world whose ageless inhabitants feed a computer named Vaal.
It seems like a dandy setup to Mr. Spock, but Dr. McCoy argues that it can’t be healthy to have all your needs met by a “hunk of tin” (perhaps shortly after polishing off a meal created by the Enterprise’s replicator). Eventually, the Enterprise is forced to zap Vaal with its phasers, sending the binary being to an ignoble, smoky end.
The natives are seriously bummed, but Kirk cheers them up by telling them they can now work and struggle and get sick and die just like everyone else. Yay!
