Previous   Stop Video   Columns & Essays   About Christ   About Us   Prayer Requests   Catechism   Contact Us   Donate   Privacy Policy / Terms Of Use   Play Music   Next

stop/reset  audio

PraiseNet Video

Ron Paul Racist Newsletters

Racism In Media

Obama & Black America

The Two Michelles

The Problem With "The Help"

The New Jim Crow

Christians & Revenge

Urban Gun Violence

Slavery Revisionism

Where Is Felycia Barnes?

Trashing The Stimulus

NAACP Resolution On Tea Party

The Tea Party & African America

Clips Copyright ©
Respective Copyright Owners

No. 371 January 15th, 2012

this week

Bad Salesman
This Week In God's Word

Lost In The Matrix
Why The Black Church Looks Nothing Like Christ

Family Plot
Rick Santorum & The Last Safe American Bigotry

Insecurity: A Preacher's Confession
by Rev. Neil Brown

Putting Our Socks On

How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes

I learned absolutely nothing about God from the black church. From black people. I learned about God from the bible. I learned about the bible from white people. White teens, sixteen and eighteen years old, who sat with me on cold Adirondack evenings, while I scowled and hissed at them and called them names. I’d grown up in church, I knew what these kids were teaching could not possibly be true. Knowing God, becoming “saved,” required endless nights of crying out to God, hollering and rolling on the floor and weeping and working yourself into a frenzy. You had to speak in tongues as proof that God was in you. For weeks, these young people sat with me, bible in hand, making me read passages that said bizarre things like the evidence of knowing Jesus isn’t tongues—it’s love. That we are saved by grace and not by works. That the pastor is not a god to be served, upon whom we lavish gifts and unquestioned loyalty. The bible said the pastor is a servant. To be loved, to be trusted, but that he’s just a guy like everybody else. He puts his socks on one at a time the same way I do. I was immensely suspicious of their teaching, but they didn’t show me these verses in their bible—they showed them to me in mine, in the very bible I’d brought with me, the one my grandmother gave me when I was eight or nine. And there it was: the truth of God, and the fork in the road between the inbred tradition of the black church and the truth of God. These white people, up there in the mountains in all of that cold, thin air, yanked out the hoses and released the clamps and I tumbled out of The Matrix, discovering the deception of our traditional religious practice did not entirely meet the standard of God’s holy word. At age thirteen, I accepted the word of God, the truth of God, and was sent back to my world with a new sense of both that consistently conflicted with the warped and false brainwashing of our cherished African American Christian tradition; a beloved experience which nevertheless misses the mark of what Christianity is actually about. It is an experience which produces religious folk, Church Folk, who, as often as not, behave nothing at all like Christ, and a church that looks very little like Christ. This online ministry was born in July of 1974, a generation before there even was an Internet, on the porch of dilapidated wooden cabin near Schroon Lake in upstate New York, where I was ordained to speak the truth and invite my brothers and sisters to find Jesus instead of Pastor, to discover Truth instead of Tradition, Revelation instead of Religion, and to pull the plug on the fruitless deception of a mythologized Christianity. Having heard the truth to embrace that truth and, in so doing, to become more like Him, “Little Christs,” which is what the word “Christian” actually means. Without abandoning the flavor and joy of our unique African American experience, we should strive to sync that cultural accretion to the Word of God, freeing ourselves of bondage and coming to truly know God’s word rather than Pastor’s rhetoric. Knowing God for ourselves breaks the yoke of bondage, allowing us, finally, to escape from The Matrix.

US Navy Rescues Iranians From Pirates


NY TIMES
In a naval action that mixed diplomacy, drama and Middle Eastern politics, the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis broke up a high-seas pirate attack on a cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman, then sailors from an American destroyer boarded the pirates’ mother ship and freed 13 Iranian hostages who had been held captive there for more than a month.
     The rescue, 210 miles off the coast of Iran, occurred against a tense political backdrop. On Tuesday the Iranian defense minister and a brigadier general threatened the Stennis with attack if it sought to return to the Persian Gulf, which it had left roughly a week before. The warning set up fears of a confrontation over the vital oil shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.
     None of that tension was evident at sea. The Sunshine, a 583-foot cargo ship carrying bulk cargo from Calais, France, to Bandar Abbas, Iran, continued its journey. The freed hostages, Iranian citizens, greeted the American sailors with wide-eyed relief.   READ FULL ARTICLE

Mae Jemison Named To Head Space Project


Alan Boyle / MSNBC
The Pentagon's think tank has selected the group that will manage its "100 Year Starship" project to explore what it would take for a multigenerational mission beyond the solar system, and sources say the leader will be Mae Jemison, who became the first black woman in space in 1992.
     In the 20 years since then, Jemison has founded several ventures — including The Jemison Group, a technology design and consulting company; and the Houston-based Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which takes on educational projects. Jemison, a 55-year-old Alabama native who has experience as a physician and a Peace Corps worker as well as an astronaut, played a prominent role in facilitating the 100 Year Starship symposium organized by NASA and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Florida last fall.
     The BBC identified the ex-astronaut as Jemison, based on the text of an unreleased letter from DARPA. It also reported that Jemison's foundation was teaming up with two other groups, Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.  READ FULL ARTICLE

PraiseNet Essentials
PraiseNet 101
The Black Church
Church Growth
Music Essentials
Essentials Sisters
Christians & Sex

 

Family Plot

The Mirror Universe Matrix
of White Christian Conservatives

I hesitate to mention former Senator Rick Santorum, the latest of a series of footnotes to the Republican presidential nomination scramble, other than to say that Santorum, in his own way, represents the white conservative version of this Matrix we are discussing this week: the intolerant, homophobically obsessed wingnut fringe who, likewise, look nothing like Christ. These people are the Christian equivalent of ultra reactionary Shia or Sunni Muslims blowing each other up in a power struggle over religious control of a civil government. The ultra-conservatives believe America is a Christian nation, and claim to seek smaller government and less government even as it attempts to expand government’s reach into private behavior, most especially any and all personal behavior related to sexual activity (abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, etc.) Flying the banner of Jesus Christ, they spit hatred at LGBT persons, routinely spew racially intolerant and insensitive rhetoric, and seek to repeal the tepid, half-a-loaf health care reform set to kick in in 2013, thus denying affordable health care to the poor while fattening the pockets of the out-of-control healthcare industry robber barons. These praying, sacrificing, mostly white people are not Christians. They are, as are most black Church Folk, Lost In The Matrix. They claim Christ but hate is their motivator. Their number one priority is not the relief of the poor or even the welfare of the nation. Their number one priority is to get Barack Obama out of the White House. It is an irrational and personal hatred of this man, whose unassailably and historically productive presidency has unquestionably bettered American lives, that fuels the Stockholm Syndrome of White Christian America coalescing around a northern liberal Mormon whose universal healthcare and pro-choice stances mirror Obama’s and whose religious beliefs not only deny Christ but are, by definition, antichrist.

Observing the clown show across the political aisle, I cannot help but be struck by the similarities between conservative white Christians and black Church Folk. Both groups are, in their own way, immersed in deception. Neither group resembles, in any way, the personal example of Jesus Christ, the imitation of which is much tougher to do than to claim to do. Santorum, whose whack-job fringe “Christianity” included bringing the corpse of his infant son home so his other children could hold it, is simply the latest flash in the latest pan as conservative White America moves grudgingly toward Romney, a man they do not trust and do not want. Neither do they want to be anything at all like Christ. They hate this man Obama so much that they’re willing to sell out their own alleged beliefs in an effort to oust him. Which misses the point that our beliefs only mean anything when we actually, well, believe them.

About Us


PraiseNet.Org is an Internet-based Christian forum with a focus on the African American Christian experience. Views expressed here are sole those of the authors. By viewing this website you agree to our Terms of Use. All Music and Art, Websites and Text are Copyright © and/or Trademarks of their respective owner(s). PraiseNet.Org does not make a profit from this website. This site in no way challenges the exclusive ownership of copyrighted images, sounds or text. See our Terms Of Use for more information. Media clips are the property of their respective copyright owners. The omission of specific copyright information in no way challenges or diminishes the exclusive rights of the respective copyright owners. “PraiseNet.Org,” “eStyle,” “Holla! At Neil Brown,” “Riverside,” “LifeLines,” and “Contextual Criticism For The African American Church” Copyright © 2001-2013 PraiseNet Electronic Media. All Rights Reserved.   TOP OF PAGE