Raw Story has a pretty succinct take on the deteriorating state of Rick Warren's mental health:
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow believes that the uproar over Barack Obama's selection of Pastor Rick Warren to deliver his inaugural invocation might have been subsiding by now, except that Warren himself -- very much like Reverend Jeremiah Wright last spring -- has stirred things up again with a video address in which he accuses his critics of being "Christophobes."
"Not only it is getting worse," commented Maddow, "it's getting weirder."
In the 22 minute message to his congregation placed on his website last Sunday, Warren first denied ever "equating gay partnership with incest and pedophilia" -- which Maddow quickly disproved with a clip of him doing just that -- and then went on to attack his critics for their "false accusations, attacks, outright lies, and hateful slander, and really a lot of hate speech."
"It's what I would call 'Christophobia.'" Warren concluded. "People who are afraid of any Christian."
"Might those people possibly just be Pastor Rick-o-phobes?" Maddow asked.
But there's a deeper story than Rick's mental ticks.
You see, here's what Christ said about homosexuals:
That's right. Let me repeat that:
And that's just got to scare Pastor Rick, don'tcha think?
What I've also said is that it is important for America to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues... That dialogue, I think, is a part of what my campaign's been all about, that we're never going to agree on every single issue. What we have to do is create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable, and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.
Greg Seargant asks "why campaigning against division and polarization by picking an equally radical choice on the left to give the invocation would be politically unthinkable?"
We did not invite this group and I will not be meeting with them. They invited themselves to draw attention to their cross country publicity stunt. My staff has already told them that neither my wife nor I will meet with them for any discussion or debate.
Bear in mind that the Soulforce families were not asking to speak from the pulpit, or for Warren to publicly embrace them. They wanted a private conversation, to let Warren get to know some real people who were being hurt by his teachings and actions. And yet, not a chance.
But that's not just being disagreeable. That's being Chistophobic! Soulforce is a Christian organization. Those are other Christians that Warren is apparent afraid to meet with.
Perhaps even more to the point, he's afraid to confront what they know--and he knows it too! The fact that Jesus Christ never said anything against homorsexuals.
As you may know, biblical ignorance is an epidemic in the United States. A recent study quoted by Dr. Peter Gomes in The Good Book found that 38 percent of Americans polled were certain the Old Testament was written a few years after Jesus' death. Ten percent believed Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Many even thought the epistles were the wives of the apostles.
This same kind of biblical ignorance is all too present around the topic of homosexuality. Often people who love and trust God's Word have never given careful and prayerful attention to what the Bible does or doesn't say about homosexuality.
For example, many Christians don't know that:
Jesus says nothing about same-sex behavior.
The Jewish prophets are silent about homosexuality.
Only six or seven of the Bible's one million verses refer to same-sex behavior in any way -- and none of these verses refer to homosexual orientation as it's understood today.
Most people who are certain they know what the Bible says about homosexuality don't know where the verses that reference same-sex behavior can be found. They haven't read them, let alone studied them carefully. They don't know the original meaning of the words in Hebrew or Greek. And they haven't tried to understand the historical context in which those words were written.
The whole pamphlet is well worth reading. But that one sentence: "Jesus says nothing about same-sex behavior."
That sentence is priceless.
Because that's the sentence that Rick Warren is terrrified of.
