Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I’ve got a couple of posts quoting shockingly bad things from an interview with Rick Warren, “Myths of the Modern Mega-Church” (Monday, May 23, 2005) . He is very intelligent and perceptive, though, and has lots of good ideas. That’s why it is so dismaying to see him ashamed of his religion and defensive about it. Here are some good excerpts from the interview.

… really “mainline” is sideline now. They’re not mainline anymore, they’re sideline denominations. The mainline is evangelicalism. The sidelines are the ones that used to be the mainline. And so, it’s kind of like when we talked about the mainstream media. What is the mainstream media? There’s old media and there’s new media, okay, but what’s the “mainstream”? It depends on what stream you’re in….

…what’s an evangelical? Let’s just review. An evangelical believes the Bible is God’s Word, Jesus is who he claimed to be, salvation is only by grace — in other words, you can’t earn your way to heaven — and everybody needs to hear the good news; information, not coercion .

First Things is a great magazine. I read it cover to cover….
For instance, in our church, to be one of those 9,200 lay leaders you have to take a 52-week systematic theology course.

Now the ridiculous thing is this myth that all religions are not mutually exclusive. If you’ve studied them— anybody who has studied the world religions knows they cannot all be right because they totally contradict each other. Anybody who says they don’t has never studied the world religions. They are mutually exclusive, and that’s why I come back to my earlier statement that I’m going to bet my life on one of them because I cannot bet my life on all of them. And I think the stupid thing is not to make a bet.

Here’s the issue. “Tolerance” has got a new meaning, and we need to go back to the old view of tolerance. Tolerance used to mean “I value you even though I may violently disagree with your world view. I may not agree with your world view at all, but you are worthy of value.” That’s tolerance.

Today “tolerance” means all ideas are of equal value, or if you have an idea that is exclusive, then you are intolerant. Well, that’s not intolerance at all.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 6th, 2006 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Religion, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.