Making It Up as You Go Along

That's what Francis Macnab is doing down in Australia. Basically, Francis has decided that Christianity is way too unbelievable, so we need to do stuff that makes it more palatable to our modern (translation: smarter than those old dumb people) sensibilities. He even admits it:

The old faith is in large sections unbelievable. We want to make the new faith more believable, realistic and helpful in terms of the way people live," he said.

Note that it doesn't really matter if it's true or not. It's based entirely on functionality and whether or not it's comfortable for the people. Of course, nothing makes things comfortable like ditching the Decalogue.

The Ten Commandments, one of the most negative documents ever written." With that provocative claim posted high over two city streets, controversial cleric Francis Macnab yesterday launched "a new faith for the 21st century", a faith beyond orthodox Christianity.

This whole article is a good thumbnail sketch of the onset of the kind of Oprah-driven whackjobbery that makes the New Age movement of the 70s look like the Council of Trent by comparison. Note how this guy even escalates to denying a personal God altogether.

Dr Macnab says Abraham is probably a concoction, Moses was a mass murderer and Jesus Christ just a Jewish peasant who certainly was not God. In fact, there is no God, in the usual sense of an interventionist deity - what we strive for is a presence both within and beyond us.

And this guy thinks he's breaking some kind of new ground here? I got some bad news for you, Frank. You aren't exactly planting a flag with this one. I've seen this one on talk shows going back at least to Sally Jesse. Go ahead and think of yourself as a revolutionary, visionary, or whatever "-ary" you choose. The fact remains that you have fallen into the lunacy of the modern age.

On a final note, I should also mention that this insanity seems to be at least partially a fruit of the Jesus Seminar, a council of heresy-spreading blockheads who have taken it upon themselves to determine the things that Jesus really said and did.

"At the Jesus Seminar (a scholarly but sceptical international enterprise examining the statements attributed to Jesus, of which Dr Macnab is a member), we are inclined to think there was a real Jesus but we don't know much about him. The record has been embellished a great deal along the way. He gives glimpses of something beyond him, and that's the most powerful aspect of what he was doing."

Translation: That whole Son of God rising from the dead thing makes a nice story, but we're waaaay too smart to actually believe that crap.