is it really Jesus vs. religion?
Posted by jaked | Filed under art?, i don't need no stinking label, thought questions
tony anderson – the prophecy
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i’m sure you have seen the video “why i hate religion, but love Jesus | spoken word” making the rounds on the internet lately. when i first saw the video it had around 300,000 views and at the time i’m writing this i has over 17 million views. if you haven’t seen it yet you can check it out right here.
now a lot has been made about this video… both good and bad and while there’s much within the video that really rings true there was something with it that kind of sat a little uneasy with me. as someone who’s been in vocational ministry for the past 4 years i have seen much about the church (note that’s little c church not big C Church) that would make you just want to rip your hair out and I can relate to his (his name is jefferson bethke) passion as well as frustration with some of the state of “Christianity” in general.
rather then beat a dead or dying horse you can read a pretty great breakdown and clarification of bethke’s poem here at the gospel coalition written by a pretty smart dude named kevin deyoung as well as a follow up with bethke here. what i wanted to focus on was some of the responses i’ve seen posted on youtube. most specifically one by a catholic priest and a muslim guy. both of which would disagree with the first poem. you can check out the first “why i love religion, and love Jesus a catholic response” first.
this video features father claude burns, a priest in chicago il also known as pontifix on the catholic website phatmass. (i’m not even going to go into why i think that’s really funny…) i also found that there was much in this video i agreed with and liked. I don’t want to take any sides or cast any stones… there’s a lot that both protestants and catholics fall short on because they are both made up of fallen, imperfect men, but i feel like both videos here are making valid points and that it all really comes down to the definition of religion that is being taken here, neither of which really take the time to define. i’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. lastly this video (“why i hate religion, but love Jesus || muslim version”) caught my eye in the recommended links on video after it had finished playing. you can check it out here.
i’m having trouble finding out the author but i know this video is posted on behalf of the facebook group talk islam. this is the video which i was really the most interested in because of my time spent in muslim countries. during that time i found it difficult sometimes to really get a good understanding of who the average muslim believes Jesus is. i know this is just one person’s perspective and one thing that all three of these videos are critiquing is lumping a large group and judging them on a few fringe members, but i feel like this kind of epitomizes what the general muslim thinking is on Jesus. he was a man, a man who pointed to God but was not in fact himself God. i’d also love to hear your thoughts about this video in the comments as well. i just thought this stuff was interesting and that i’d share it.
ink’d… ‘love dad’
Posted by jaked | Filed under art?, billings, holidays, just4fun
so i managed to steal someone’s computer long enough to throw together a quick post because well, it’s been forever since i have done anything here. so here goes…
i work a part time job right now while i’m raising support in order to pay of those oh so lovely student loans. not my top 10 things i wanna to be doing with my time but hey i gotta pay back my debt to the state of montana.
anyway, one cool thing that the job’s given me is the opportunity to rub shoulders with some folks who i’d normally not get to and have gotten into some cool conversations as well as heard some crazy life stories. my latest is with one of my only male coworkers (trust me not as cool as it may sound) and this guy has had a rough life. he grew up in cali and did his part to raise the local crime rate. i mean california has a reputation to uphold right?
all of that aside he had a pretty rough time at home as well. His dad disappeared when he was 7 and the last he heard from him for a long time was the birthday card he sent for his 8th birthday. as sad as it is this seems like a reoccurring theme i hear in alot of people’s stories. it’s almost uncommon to hear about a family that has stayed whole for the long haul…
this guy pretty much grew up without really knowing his dad and after a while he just gave up hope ever reuniting with him. well he’s grown now and has a two year old daughter of his own. after this new adventure came into his life and he started to understand the importance of the father’s role he wanted to try and find his dad to try and rebuild their destroyed relationship.
with the amazing jumps in technology and the internet he said it didn’t take a whole lot to track the man down. i’ll skip some of the gory first meeting details to the next part. they started working things out and his dad was grateful to have the opportunity to be a part of his grand-daughter’s life and father and son became a family again.
this whole story came out when this guy i work with came into work with a bandage on his forearm. i asked him what had happened and he said he got a tattoo.
he peeled back the bandage to reveal, in what looked like handwritten script, the words ‘love dad.’ i asked him what the significance of it. he told the aforementioned story, as well as its conclusion… last year at about this time his father passed away from lung cancer. he said he had really only known his dad for about 8 and a half years of his life.
the tattoo was how his dad signed the birthday card he received on his 8th birthday. it was actually even made to look just like his father’s hand-writting. he got the tattoo on the one year anniversary of his father passing away. so at this point i was about to break into tears…
we had the opportunity to keep talking and i go to share about my relationship with my dad as well as how that too has been redeemed and everything that went along with that and how it was part of a bigger life change. a much bigger life change.
now depending on your own personal view of tattoos you may fall on one of two sides of the fence: the people who like tattoos or the people who are scared of people with tattoos. i kid i kid. tattoos are interesting to me because they mean so many different things to so many different people.
now you could be like this guy…
and just go to town. i mean i don’t know this guy… i just googled ‘stupid tattoos’ (i would recommend putting google’s safe search on strict first) and he was one of the first to pop up. and who know maybe all of those have some sort of deep meaning to him… right…
lots of people have tattoos to profess love, faith, loss, pain, sorrow, happiness, accomplishment, and almost anything else. i mean i don’t have any… as of right now but i know i’ve experienced all of those things and i never want to forget any of them because they’ve all been a part of the master plan for my life and have shaped me into who i am today. cheesy right?
like this whole support raising thing, i think i’ve probably felt all of those things throughout this whole process, and when i get through the initial part of it maybe i’ll get some ink to always remind me of the provision that has gone before me.
how about you? do you have a tattoo? do you look similar to the guy above? what event (events?) that have happened in your life might warrant commemorating with some ink? feel free to share in the comments.
they're coming to get us
Posted by jaked | Filed under art?, nugget from the net
saw this amazing little flick while perusing the net. turns out this little you-tube beauty cost the maker around $300 and it landed the film maker (fede alvarez) a $30,000,000 deal with ghost house pictures (the fellas responsible for the spider-man movies). so the next time someone makes fun of you for posting your work on you-tube you can point to fede and say… what if. what do you think about it?
