C.S. Strowbridge wrote:Didn't one of the Stevens leave the show?
Steve Carrell left for a while, but he has returned, and Stephen Colbert is still there, as fucked up and twisted as ever -- he's probably the funniest person on the show.
As for the whole "moderate Christians" deal, most Christians I know are moderates, but they're simply ignorant of the Bible. They lead their lives by largely the same principles that I do; they just assume that the Bible teaches those principles and that it's the origin of them.
Of course, most of the Christians I know are from Catholic school. They never once were exposed to an environment or belief which directly criticized the Bible, and they were indoctrinated to the extent that defending the Bible became a knee-jerk reaction, even when the criticism was perfectly legitimate. Hell, I used to be like that. I always started from the assumption that the Bible was right, so I used many of the common justifications for atrocities like the Great Flood or God's various smitings.
However, most moderate Christians -- and I mean the ones that actually do believe in Christianity; lots of people pay lip service to it or pray whenever a loved one dies, but they give little consideration to it in their daily lives -- subscribe to the idiotic doctrine of "True Christianity."
For those of you who don't know, True Christianity is the latest attempt by Christians to disassociate their belief system from its bloody and violent past. True Christianity assumes that all Christians are moral, and that no person responsible for mass-murders or genocide -- particularly historical figures, like Hitler -- was a
true Christian. People who buy into True Christianity believe that you get to Heaven by having faith
and doing good works, even though Jesus never said anything of the sort in the Bible, and many times, gave the impression that faith was the only requirement. Thus, if you profess a belief in Jesus being the son of God, go to church every Sunday and burden yourself with unhealthy amounts of sexual repression, it's
still not good enough to call yourself a Christian. Religious bigots like Jonathon Boyd think that good works should come from faith, so if you're not doing good works, you don't have faith, so you're not a Christian. Beautiful display of circular reasoning.
This True Christianity garbage is what bothers me about most moderate Christians. There are the ones, like my best friend, who admit that their beliefs have no logical backing, that the Bible is full of atrocious material and refuse to believe that someone like me, who leads a perfectly decent life, would go to Hell just for using his reasoning faculties. They're pretty rare, though.
When all is said and done, people tend to pick the belief system that they think works best for them. Some people, for whatever reason, just like Christianity for what it is or what they think it is. And that's fine. Although, to be fair, lots of people simply aren't given a choice. From birth, they're surrounded by one religion and told it's right, so when the times comes for them to make their own decisions, of course they choose the religion they grew up with.
