I'm Proud To Believe In Christ

There's been a debate brewing in blogger land because a well known novelist has renounced Christianity while still believing in Christ. Here' her quote:

Anne Rice:

Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. ... I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of ...Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

My fellow curmudgeons are openly hostile to the notion of a supreme deity, and we respect each others' belief or lack thereof concentrating on our mutual interests.

John Shore in a rebuttal blog on HuffPo answered in this manner:

There is for me, and it's that I, too, have grown wary, and weary, of calling myself a Christian. The word simply connotes too much that doesn't describe me or what I believe. In a lot of ways, calling myself a Christian makes me feel like a Jew who's gone into some crazy universe where he has to identify himself as a Nazi. Right after the last time I wrote in one of my blog posts the simple sentence, "I am a Christian," my fingers hovered still over the keyboard for a long time. I thought of how to modify that articulation, how to change it, work around it. I thought of deleting it.

But in the end I left it. Because ... well, fuck 'em.

I'm not making waves like Anne Rice to sell a book, her main motive for being "controversial."

I believe that much of the fundamentalist mentality is Anti-Christian. That they have turned the rigid money grubbing, legalism, nationalism, and hypocrisy of the Pharisees that Jesus fought against and had him murdered and are calling it Christianity.

Bruce at Mainstream Baptist has been fighting the good fight against fundamentalism all of his ministry. He's been tilting at windmills all his ministerial life.

I'm in the final stages of finishing my second novel I've named Human Sacrifices that deals with trying to live a Christian life and have strong belief rejecting the conformity and stupidity of fundamentalism.

There comes a time when we feel it's like spitting into the wind and get discouraged. At those times I remember Elijah sitting alone in a cave feeling sorry for himself because he being hunted by the King and God in a small still voice tells him that there are hundreds of believers just like him that need his voice.

I applaud Anne Rice for saying what needed to be said about fundamentalism, but I agree with Shore. Don't let the Anti-Christians who stand for bigotry, greed, hate, fear, stupidity and perpetual war take the name of God and Christ in vain.

I'm a Christian and proud of it. I'm reclaiming Christianity for the Prince of Peace, and the one who gave the Sermon on the Mount which describes the blessed ones as exactly opposite of what fundamentalist consider should be.