Holy Shit.

Religion. what a fun topic. nothing brings out more foam at the mouth from everyone than religion. be it believers or non-believers, everybody gets riled up talking about religion. i feel no need to attack religion itself. plenty of smarter, cleverer and British-er people have done it before me, so really there is no point..

However personal takedowns about specific people... yes that is my cup of tea. There are so many public figures involved in modern religion today that it seems almost silly to pick on one specific person. i should also be upfront and say that i think if you meet one person who claims to be of a certain belief system, and you can't stand them, it doesn't mean that everyone who has similar beliefs are also jackasses, or that those those beliefs themselves are bad.

So... with that said... today i want to talk about a man named Mark Driscoll.

Mark Driscoll is the hip, young(ish) leader of a church in Seattle called Mars Hill. Mars Hill is named after the famous Seattle candy flood, when the Mars Bar factory exploded and sent melted chocolate every where. most of the chocolate gravitated towards one area and when it solidified, it made a hill of Mars Bar chocolate, or "Mars Hill". I might be a little off on some of these details, but that is basically it.

Driscoll has gained notiriety over the last couple years for being a bastard. I'm sorry, i mean pastor. He is part of a growing movement to make men in the Christian church become "Real Men". Not that sissy hippy shit that people like Shaine Claiborne, Rob Bell and Jesus Christ talk about. He has often said that too many churches have been "chickified". Being a former member of a frat, i'm not sure he knows that "chickified" is not a word. But to his credit, making up things can be fun. imaginary friends, alter egos, god; imaginations are wonderful things!

Here are some of his beliefs that he preaches:

homosexuality is a sin, but so is sex before marriage or outside of marriage. marriage is specifically for a biological man and a biological woman.

women may not be leaders in a church, i.e.: pastors, priests, reverends, etc...

women may not ask a man on a date.

the man is the head of the household and the woman is subservient to him

a man may not be a stay at home dad.

yup, all that and looks to.

an issue he often talks about is how there are not enough young men in church. and so his approach has been to make church cool. while preaching he often wears hip clothes like a t-shirt with Jesus at a set of turntables, or Paul hitting a woman.

Being the patriarch that he is (a wife, 5 kids and counting) one of his main messages is that men need to stand up and be men. men men men. stop being not-men, and be men. He says that the church loses men because its feminine, and there are too many girly things in it. for instance, here is an actual quote from this guy:
"The problem with our churches today is that the lead pastor is some sissy boy who wears cardigan sweaters, has The Carpenters dialed in on his iPod, gets his hair cut at a salon instead of a barber shop, hasn’t been to an Ultimate Fighting match, works out on an elliptical machine instead of going to isolated regions of Russia like in Rocky IV in order to harvest lumber with his teeth, and generally swishes around like Jack from Three’s Company whenever Mr. Roper was around."

thats a real quote. he said this. to people.

part of the hilarity of this Sports Center reject's message is that even his incredibly offensive definition of "real men" is not an actualization of the stereotype itself. the idea that WATCHING Ultimate Fighting Championship makes you a real man. just watching it. not actually fighting, but watching. he can't even take this masculine stereotype to the level of participation and say that men should be fighting. being masculine is watching other people do stuff.

He does make a good point about Christianity becoming too feminine. when i think of this religion with a male God, male Savior, mostly men speaking from the pulpit, a rule book that says women cannot preach or be leaders and should be subservient to their husbands, my first thought is : whoa, there are way too many women here! what is this, a maxi pad convention? let play some fucking HALO 3!" and then i high five some dudes. after all, bros before ho's.

His claim in a youtube video that church is too "feminine" because "all the innovative dudes are home watching football, or they're out making money, or climbing a mountain, or working on they're truck", begs the question; is he a pastor or the PR guy for SPIKE TV? seriously, after watching a bunch of his sermons, i kept waiting for him to say, "and now what we've all been waiting for; girls jumping on trampolines!"

what is innovative about ANY of those activities. nothing. none of those activities are innovative. they aren't bad activities to take part in per say, but innovative? making money? CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN? look, i love hiking and climbing. its really fun. but its not innovative. i mean its practically the opposite of innovative. people have be doing it for hundreds of thousands of years. oh whoops, sorry i mean 6 thousand years.

even if one gives him the benefit of the doubt and says he is making the point that truly innovative PEOPLE often aren't encouraged the right way, and often settle for less than they can achieve (and that is really stretching it) its a terrible point within his context. Innovation is exactly what the people he criticizes are doing. Encouraging people other than men to preach, accepting LGBTQ members into their communities, addressing poverty, criticizing capitalism are all (for Christianity, which isn't saying much) pretty fucking innovative. But Mark Driscoll doesn't actually want innovation, Mark Driscoll wants the 1950's.

Believe it or not, we have even gotten to the offensive part. In 2006 when mega-church leader Ted Haggard, a staunch opposer of gay rights was (surprise surprise) called out on having "relations" with a gay prostitute, Driscoll stepped up to point out the obvious cause: Haggard's wife.

I'll let the poet himself explain this one:
"Most pastors I know do not have satisfying, free, sexual conversations and liberties with their wives. At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness."

Ah yes, because the reason men cheat is not because they are untrustworthy to begin with, addicted to power, don't respect women, live in a culture that encourages it, or can't deal with the often unrealistic expectations of monogamous life and don't have the guts to have an open relationship or at least least discuss these problems with their wives. no no no, the reason men cheat, is because their wives have gotten ugly. or fat. or fat and ugly.

thank you Mark for showing the us the light.

here's a fun nugget i pulled off his wikipedia page:
"There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity."

plenty of things to say, but only gonna say one: "I cannot worship a guy I can beat up". um... i thought the thing about Jesus was that he could get beat up? i mean wasn't there a hit movie a few years ago that was nothing but Jesus getting his assed kicked for 2 hours? isn't that supposed be the whole fucking point? maybe not. after all im just a "self-righteous blogger critic of Christianity".

Dricoll was also featured on a debate on ABC. the name of this debate was... i can't believe i am saying this...."Does Satan Exist?"

this was an actual debate. on TELEVISION. "Does Satan Exist?" Four people actually spent an hour in front of a live audience debating whether or not there is a guy named Satan, and if he is king of hell. and people watched. it seems like a bad skit. the whole time i was waiting for Deepak Chopra to be all, "and so the existence of Satan is not provable because LIVE FROM NEW YORK, ITS SATURDAY NIGHT!!!!"
but that never happened.

In Driscoll's opening statement of the debate, he had this to say on the subject:
"Satan was an angel who rebelled against god. In so doing led an insurrection. Other angels followed him. Our first parents (Adam and Eve, NOT STEVE!) joined that rebellion, and ultimately that is the cause of moral evil. it is rebellion against god."
he then followed up with, "One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."

Driscoll addresses issues like atheism by not actually addressing it. During a segment of a recent sermon, Driscoll threw the usual "isn't the idea of no god really scary" routine at the audience, while not addressing the scientific realities of hard agnosticism or atheism. I have heard this and seen this before. instead of dealing with with the actual idea of is there a god or not, people go straight to "well i would really prefer to live in a world where there is a god." this is all nice and good, but doesn't change a damn thing. i would love to live in a world with genuine equality. but genuine equality doesn't exist just because i want it to. and if i am gonna criticize those who believe that genuine equality DOESN"T exist, i sure as hell better have a more thought out argument than "because if it doesn't exist, that would suck."

the most offensive bit of his sermon on atheism, is his notion that suicide is the likely end for someone who doesn't believe in his god. i feel no need to make a joke about this, but only to say in my personal experience on the issue of suicide, Driscoll's assessment could not be more opposite of the truth.

Mark Driscoll is just some person in Seattle. I shouldn't really care about people like him if i disagree. But unfortunetely i do care. Mark Driscoll makes me embarrassed to be a man. Hell, Mark Driscoll makes me embarrassed to be a human. He is everything i have ever thought was wrong with religion, which is why i don't bother anymore. As the book of Revalations says:

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Mark Driscoll, he was a total assclown and Hell followed with him"