In which the bromancer is a blessing for the pond ...

So they successfully bullied the women to be silent about the bullying, and while the parrot got plucked, the Caterist got away with his quarry whispering, and Malware is beavering away at the mutton Dutton …

What blessings this day, but how they pale for the pond up against the sight of an uxorious bromancer transferring his love to a new idol …

Yes, idolatry is all the go, and ScoMo is the fatted calf …

Oh stop it, stop it, the pond can feel the excitement surging in the loins …

Such is the so and the thusness of the bromancer being blessed by ScoMo,  the pond feels there's almost no need for editorial comment …instead the pond feels like Cleopatra indulging in a bath of sour donkey milk …

Now the bromancer has been blessed with the cult status of a Lobbecke, but did the pond detect a certain wry tone in the 'toon, with the speaker in tongues showing a remarkable ability to walk on water?

Could Lobbecke himself be part of the "ambient culture" that poses such a threat to the delusional bromancer?

The pond was startled by the use of "ambient culture" as a concept, until it stumbled across the phrase in a Patheos rant here …

In a celebrity, media-driven, personality-celebrating culture, many of us care more about whether someone has an iMac, drives a flex-fuel car, and likes our favorite magazines and cult blogs than whether they stand for life and truth. This seems true of many Christians. We’re voting and living based more on mood, on feeling, on impressions, on personality, than we are on lasting, durable, rock-solid things, things that have shape and form and character. Are we doing the same thing in our churches? Are we bowing to ambient culture and letting “the cool” or “the impressive” lead us simply because they are cool or impressive (or whatever else)? If so, we are in danger. We’re not to identify with passing things, but eternal things; not shifting sands, but foundations that stand all of time’s tests.

Oh they're so wet, these Xians, so threatened and resentful, with their nerdish sense of exclusion, and with their code words, "ambient culture", as if talking of "ambient temperature", for the heathen, the alien, the materialistic, the atheistic, and all the Satanists destined for an eternity of hellfire …

And now see how the bromancer tiptoes around what Xians really think … well Xians who have at least the first theological clue, the ones who don't nod off for a quick nap in the pew on a Sunday ...

Pentecostals are completely mainstream and their doctrine is orthodox?

Each time the pond reads the bromancer, the pond is astonished at how he can make the barking mad sound like a reasonable nsight …

The pond could spend all day, racing all over the full-to-overflowing intertubes to dig up the many tracts by Catholics and 'straight' Protestants consigning  charismatics and pentecostalists to hell for their many heresies …

Some are fairly obvious about it …

Accompanying the so called “speaking in Tongues” the Charismatics will often be found screaming the name of “Jesus” or rolling on the floor, or making ecstatic utterances frequently unintelligible to listeners. In the history of the Church such behavior has always been condemned. In fact in Scripture it is only those who have been possessed by devils that can not restrain themselves from acting in such a manner. That is why most theologians agree that one of the signs of demonic possession is the speaking in strange or unintelligible tongues. (here)

Some contain poignant tales of being caught up with pentecostalism before escaping to the safety of a belief in Sunday cannibalism in the Catholic church …

Pentecostals believe in the in-filling of the Holy Spirit characterized by the gifts of the Spirit, especially speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healing. Unlike Fundamentalists, AGers teach that sanctification is a process that continues until death. They are millenarists who believe in the "rapture" (basing this doctrine on 1 Thess. 4:14-16) and a literal thousand-year reign of Christ (Rev. 20:4-5). 
Fear of being left behind at the rapture was one of the things that kept me in the AG for so long. I didn't like the AG services when I first started going to the church. The style of worship was alien to me; I thought it bizarre and irreverent. The congregants shouted and threw their hands in the air, babbling incomprehensibly with tears streaming down their faces, as the song leader whipped them into ever greater fervor through hand-clapping, foot stomping music that led to a cacophony of spontaneous worship. (here)

And so on and on …

One thing's certain. The pond guarantees a splendid time for anyone who sits through a full-blown speaking in tongues, rapture laden pentecostal service done in old-school style. It's not quite up there with a snake handling service, but it's jolly good fun ...

As usual, the bromancer doesn't get it quite right, and it's really quite wrong of him to all the credit for modern pentecostalism to William Seymour, as if being black and the son of freed slaves gives the movement the right Christian feel …the vibe, you might say, if you were thinking they were dreaming ...

Another big early mover in the movement was Charles Fox Parham, and he was just your average barking mad Iowan …go Hawkeyes ...

It was Parham who associated glossolalia with the baptism in the Holy Spirit, a theological connection crucial to the emergence of Pentecostalism as a distinct movement. Parham was the first preacher to articulate Pentecostalism's distinctive doctrine of evidential tongues, and to expand the movement. (Greg Hunters go here).

Pentecostalism is at the top of the heap when it comes to the delusions that grip religions in these rapture-laden, fundamentalist times, with a particularly virulent form of homophobia at work, turning up in countries such as Uganda (The Conversation here)… not to mention all sorts of incomprehension when it comes to science, and not just climate science ...

Why does the bromancer dissemble and distort such elementary matters and joke about Gregorian chant v rock music?

Well in the pond's experience it's because Xians are as able and as capable a bunch of hypocrites and liars and shapers of reality in their own image as any secularist, materialist or atheist  doing the rounds…

Take that bromancer blather about the old hostilities and rivalries between Xian denominations having substantially disappeared …

On the surface that might sound true, but that could only be because Xianity is on the downward spiral in some countries, so the wretches feel surrounded and mutually persecuted...

But put an angry Sydney Anglican in the same room as a fundamentalist Catholic theologian, mention Mary or some other bit of nonsense, and watch the theological fur fly …

These are competing brands, intending to build up the flock by hook or by crook …

Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe that understanding who Jesus is and what he has done for us clearly through the Bible is the way to go in evangelism, but perhaps it isn't the first thing to talk with Catholics about. Think about how Paul began talking to the Greek philosophers in Acts 17. He started talking to them using the way they thought about God first. Catholics and Protestants think about God in different ways and if we realise this, then it makes evangelism a lot easier. On the whole, Catholics get to know God by belonging to a church and the experience they have there. Very few Catholics make a rational decision to become Catholic; they are born Catholic. Catholicism is who they are, their identity, their culture. We see this when we go doorknocking and get told, "No thanks, I'm Catholic". (Sydney Anglicans go here).

Save the Catholics, and maybe they could throw in a complimentary woman as an inducement ...

The pond loves it, but if anyone thinks that peddling a barking mad religion and preaching clap happy sermons in the guise of political and social harmony is going to keep ScoMo in the lodge, they probably also think that the rapture is just around the corner …

Luckily, there are raptures and then there are raptures, as the parrot discovered with his own peculiar form of speaking in tongues, and with more rapturous Rowe to be found here …