Dear Bill (You may be wrong, but I'll always love you anyway)

I've liked Bill Maher since he introduced the phrase "crush some tinfoil on your antennae" into my vocabulary in high school. He also introduced me to the idea that if people want their children to be religious, they ought to get off their butts and take them to church instead of expecting the school to do it. A recent google search has revealed he considers himself an apatheist rather than a regular atheist, which I kind of like, and since he's the only one I know of, I guess that makes him my favorite..

I digress. Really. I do. I kind of like this smart ass, because he's insightful. I do. I also recognize that he and I could not be facebook friends because we would wear on each other's nerves too much. I watched a video of him talking about non violence and Christianity today. Mostly, that he thinks most Christians are not Christians because they aren't pacifists. He makes some good points. He's right. Jesus really was all about that "hippie shit". What he's not right about is that he gets to decide who can call themselves a Christian.

Oh, here's the link to the video. Enjoy.

Here's thing: Being a lousy Christian does not make you not a Christian. Baptism makes you a Christian. Shouting on the street corner doesn't make you a Christian. Wearing a t shirt with a bleeding guy on a cross on it doesn't make you a Christian. Strapping a giant wooden cross on your backpack and standing around a flag pole making your class mates as uncomfortable as possible doesn't make you a Christian.

Baptism makes you a Christian. Which means that no matter how hard you try, if you've taken one, no matter how much you protest, no matter if you unbaptise yourself (new European trend), you can't not be a Christian.

Basically, you're under Grace whether you like it or not. You're screwed. You're going to have to answer for all that crazy stuff you do or encourage (pro torture Christians, this means you. If, as Bill says, you look at that image of the suffering Christ and think "Romans are pussies, he still has his eyes", you're going to have to explain yourself) as if you knew better. Because really, you ought to know better. If you cracked that book open or made it to the end of Church school past the age of ten, you ought to know better. If you attended church and were half awake during the gospel procession (You do have to stand) you ought to know better.

Hitler, with his mass genocide and majorly creepy occultism? He ought to have to known better. Maybe he did and he did it anyway to spite his roots. This is the guy who is credited as saying "Antiquity was better than modern times because it did not know Christianity or syphilis". From what I can gather, and given how far he went to separate himself from Christ, he suffered from both. He did work his ass off to distance himself. He set himself up as a god, killed a lot of people who were distant cousins of Christ, and got real obsessed with early German religions. He tried. Hard. Yet people still point at him and say "See what fucking Christian Germany did? That asshole was a catholic."

You can run, but you can't hide, especially when people are looking for something and someone to blame other than the dead sociopath who shot himself in the head and ended up set on fire in a ditch.

Make that connection all you want, and you're right, he was baptized. He was baptized and running as far as he could and as fast as he could from what that meant. There are other ways to run afoul of the gospel, more subtle ways, much less blatantly pagan and murderous ways. In some ways, they're more insidious. These days, now that it's all over, we know the Nazis were monsters. It's harder to tell with people who wrap themselves in the flag and hold a cross before themselves and offer charity.

I agree with Bill. These people are more fans than followers of Christ. What I don't agree with him on is the idea that they're not Christians. They are. They're just really bad at it and totally missing the point.