Rick Warren

Edit: Shit. Not five minutes after I wrote this did I see that Tink has already spoken on the topic and, being far more deep, intellectual, and insightful than myself, his write up is pretty amazing. If you don’t want to read a lot, just read his. Don’t even read mine. Seriously. Link.

PS: Tell me if that link doesn’t work and I’ll copy/paste the contents in here.

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Edit2: On the topic, I just came across this little piece of awesome.

 

Open mouth. Insert foot.

 

 

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Dammit. My keyboard is in French again.éèÉ^çà Okay. So there’s a lot of controversy surrounding this Rick Warren guy. The conservatives tend bash him because he won’t be ignorant and the liberals bash him because they’re confused about how a person can be Christian and still be tolerant or how a person can disagree with another group’s viewpoints and still respect them (specifically the pro-homosexual movement, a part of which Mr. Warren decidedly is not).

I think it’s funny. Mostly because after researching Mr. Warren from a skeptical perspective (the guy is the author of the book “Purpose Driven Life”, which is embraced by many “Christians” in my area and that is generally enough to make me skeptical; then add to that the fact that he’s the pastor of a super church and I become even more skeptical), I came to realize that he seems to be more tolerant and open-minded than most liberals and that confuses them a lot. And he’s also more fundamental (in the sense that he does what Jesus did) than most conservative “Fundamentalists”. (Actually, in my experience, conservative Fundamentalists have always been opposed to the real person of Jesus just like the religious people in Jesus’ time were opposed to Him). So to me, the fact that the conservatives are against him is no surprise but the fact that the liberals are against him is amusing.

Probably my favorite thing about Mr. Warren is that he actually does what he preaches. Look here:

Warren survives the pounding partly because of his personal integrity. He donates 90 percent of his many millions in book royalties back to the church. He says he stopped taking a salary from Saddleback six years ago. No scandals have tainted his ministry.

Also, Warren is doing his part to fight AIDS in the most destitute places in the world. And more than that, he has enough faith in God that he is secure in partnering with non-Christian organizations who also want to be Jesus-like (even though they may not know it) to the poorest people in the world.

Moreover, the fact that he is mature and confident in his political views enough to host an unbiased bi-partisan conference is pretty amazing to me (given my stigma against wealthy pastors). It seems like both He and Obama are actually interested in the causes in which they claim to be interested (as opposed to just wanting to be seen as right or correct) enough to partner with eachother to overcome partisan ignorance. I feel like anyone who hates politics for all of its two-faced-ness and blame-game-playing-ness should love both of these guys. As the above article points out:

It is no surprise that he and Obama have become friendly. Each tries to operate outside a strict liberal-conservative divide, and has risked angering his supporters to do so.

So I’m going to give you some vids to watch and chew on because I’ve found that I respect this guy a lot, even though I don’t necessarily agree perfectly with his views of homosexuality–he genuinely is seeking the truth and not using the Bible as an excuse to hate a group of people.

And watch the video at the top of this page. It’s good. I specifically like what he thinks about Fundamentalism.

PS: “We believe in the separation of Church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics.” – Rick Warren at the 2008 Presidential Forum at Saddleback Church. Now I’m going to post this before I watch the rest of that damn video or I’ll end up regurgitating it to you verbatim.

Peace!