Oh, crap. It’s Sunday morning, and all I need is a sermon from dumbshit Jim Carrey. It’s nice that he’s working with former prison inmates, but the most help he seems to providing is dollops of platitudes, while promoting a pernicious and ugly Christian doctrine.
Ultimately, I believe that suffering leads to salvation. In fact, it’s the only way.
No. Ten thousand times no. This is the gospel of Mother Teresa, and it does not lead to salvation — it leads to the veneration of poverty and misery and pain and death. This is why Christianity is a death cult (although, in the case of the prosperity gospel, some splinters of it are transforming themselves into a money cult, which isn’t any better).
Suffering is not a blessing. We should not look on human beings in pain and console ourselves with the thought that the more despair they experience, the more likely they are to find Jesus. We should look on that pain and do what we can to end it.
So yes, it’s good that Carrey is trying to do something to help the needy, but praising their suffering is not the way. Would he also praise cancer for bringing people closer to his god?
Probably. Because he’s a dumbshit.
Suffering leads to salvation if you’re stuck in a Jim Carrey movie. But you don’t have to be Epicurus to know the answer: leave.
Judicial punishment as a way of bringing about reform hasn’t worked pretty much ever. The whole idea of warehousing people for a time so that they somehow come out pure… yeah, that works as well as chanting the 10 commandments or whatever other magical crap christians come up with. But you can’t expect goddists to have any sense about this – after all, they believe in a divine authority based on power and retaliation. You can only build vile moral systems on a foundation like that.
I didn’t know he was a god botherer .
Yeah, quoted for truth.
Suffering isn’t good or noble.
It’s just something to be avoided as much as possible.
This idea that suffering is good and noble is very Catholic.
It’s also xian fatalism.
An example of Catholic god babble.
Jesus Christ is with me through every moment of suffering, I must always remember that.
Oh really?
Then why doesn’t jesus act like a normal decent person and do something to alleviate your suffereing? Jesus is god and can do anything.
What we see though is that jesus is nowhere and does nothing.
Quite often the humans around you can fix your suffering. Sick and in pain? Go see a doctor.
He thinks suffering is a good thing? That explains why he went out perpetuating anti-vaccine bullshit. He spread more suffering through that scare campaign than he could ever imagine.
Back in the good old days of Solomon and Josiah, suffering was explained by the Jewish prophets as a result of God punishing sinners. The Jews’ suffering was increased when Israel and Judah were conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians. By the 1st century BCE the Jews had learned their lessons through redemptive suffering and were complying with God’s laws, but their Syrian overlords forbid their worship practices under penalty of death. The prophets then explained the resulting suffering as a result of dualism, the battle of good versus evil. Then came Jewish apocalypticism, in which the prophets explained suffering as a consequence of the temporary victory of evil over good. Then came John the Baptist, Jesus and the apostle Paul, who all preached the imminent victory of good over evil, and that suffering was only temporary given the coming End Times (any day now, as indicated in Mark 9:1 and Mark 13:30 and numerous predictions by Paul and Matthew)).
Well, damn it all, now 2,000 years have elapsed. Jesus and the End Times are still missing in action, but we again have idiots like Jim Carrey (who’s probably enjoyed more than his share of women and drugs) preaching redemptive suffering all over again. Mr. Carrey, please go back to your women, drugs and crappy movies and stop with the sermonizing.
Yep, desperate people will do anything, even beg non-entities, to be saved from their suffering. This isn’t surprising. What’s horrible is the way some people exploit it. In any case, the “suffering gospel” is the corollary of “prosperity gospel”…god punishes you if you don’t obey, rewards you if you do.
If you think that’s bad, you should see the comments on the linked article. “He has a lot of good points. but the only way to Salvation is Jesus! ” “Great article, but I would love to read of Jim coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.” “It’s a good thing to try to do positive things to help others, but no amount of good works for will make up for our sin.” Etc.
In other words, Jim Carrey is a Fake xian and going to hell with all the other Catholics.
Of course, the Catholics say the fundies are the Fake xians.
It’s faith versus faith and good works, part of the old Protestant-Catholic split.
That and indulgences.
Where I really wish they’d split was on the abuse of parishioners. But nope. That’s still pan-denominational.
Hey! So long as he votes for the right party and marches at all the trendy protests, we shouldn’t care what Carrey believes? No matter how wrong they are about the fundamental nature of reality, a woo-woo liberal Christian is much nicer and morally superior than those New Atheist meanies.
If he really wanted them to suffer he’d force them to watch his movies.
Well, that would explain Fire Marshal Bill.
Akira MacKenzie @11: Thanks for demonstrating the beautiful simplicity of blinkered
faithideology.I’ve always noticed that most of those who revel in suffering for Christ always seem to be reveling in other people’s suffering, not their own. Funny how that works…
Someone should explain the meaning of the word “fact” to him.
If suffering was genuinely intended to lead to salvation, then surely one of the centrepieces of Christian worship should involve torturing people in the name of improving their souls? Now, I’ll cheerfully admit I’ve run across some dull and uninteresting sermons in my time, but I wouldn’t put any of them into the category of “torture”. Sitting for two hours a week in a church building which seemed to have been carefully designed to exaggerate the worst features of the Australian weather (the place managed to be freezing cold all winter, then switch over the course of a single week to being boiling hot all summer) wasn’t exactly comfortable, particularly not in one’s “Sunday Best” clothing, which was generally chosen in the interests of looking good rather than providing comfort, but again, it wasn’t actually torture. Okay, had the communal hymn singing in my father’s congregation actually been accompanied on the drastically-out-of-tune piano, rather than the electronic organ which had been moved into the pulpit slot, that might have got nearer to my personal definition of torture, but even then, I would have been possibly the only one in the congregation who would have actually suffered as a result.
I find myself deeply curious about the finer points of Catholic worship as a result of Mr Carrey’s theology, however. Does it involve careful choice of priests who could make a reading from the racier bits of a pornographic novel sound uninteresting; highly fine-tuned selection of choristers to put together a choir in which every single member is just off the exact note by a subtle degree; exhaustive design work by architects to put together a building which somehow manages to never maintain a comfortable temperature, no matter how carefully the climate-control is adjusted; or is it just minor stuff like cayenne pepper baked into the host and sriracha sauce in the wine?
But:
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Suffering leads us to believe that Christinanity is the Dark Side.
–Gospel according to St Yoda.
I watched the video and am wondering whether or not Carey’s a Christian. I don’t mean a True Christian, but a Christian at all. He refers to Jesus as someone who suffered and had to make a decision: to give up, or forgive. Jesus as example, not Savior. He mostly talks about suffering as a way to become stronger. He throws around words like “God,” “grace,” “salvation,” and even “Eucharist,” but I don’t think he meant these terms in an orthodox way. They didn’t really seem to be about the atonement, they were about self improvement and self-salvation. .But I think a primarily Christian audience could relate, so he used them.
Carey also explained that we are God. He gave a long recommendation for the value of meditation.
Okay, I’ll admit that I had previously been under the impression that Jim Carey was a sort of New Agey Spiritual adherent, so I watched carefully to see if anything he said would make me change my mind. It didn’t. The Spiritual often claim Jesus as one of the many atavars of God who show the way towards our recognition of God, which dwells within ourselves. They use Christian language (“salvation “) to mean different, more generic concepts (“letting go of resentment and control.”) If so, then the Christian blogger’s glee over Carey’s Christian sermon may be a little out of place.
Or, I could be wrong, and I’m the one seeing what I expect to see.
(He was also wearing a shirt that said “mentally gone.” An interesting choice.)
Akira, #11
Hmmm. Saying suffering makes you awesome or harassing women/defending rapists/sending rape threats.
Such a tough call.
I am a vocational rehabilitation counsellor. I deal exclusively with people suffering the aftereffects of car & industrial accidents. The chronic suffering that most of these people go through ought to give Carrey et al. religious ejaculations in their shorts. But not me. I just have NORMAL EMPATHY for other human beings without cogitating on imaginary sky-friends who might let these people into some fantastic cloud-club after going through decades of suffering.
Religion poisons all reasonable thought processes.
@Meg Thornton #17:
Australia has a winter??
Australia is a continent. Up north, around the Gulf of Carpenteria, it is indeed hot all year round, But Australia’s far south goes down to 42 deg S. latitude (at Hobart). For comparison, Butte, Montana is at 46 deg. N. Latitude. So, yes.
Rich Woods,
Yes, southern Australia definitely has a winter season. However Australian ‘winters’ are balmy compared with winters in the higher latitudes of the US or Europe.
I’d nominate Jim Carrey for Hollywood’s most annoying ‘comedian’, watching him perform is suffering enough for me. He’s the contemporary Jerry Lewis.
Yeah, I mean, pretty much. I’d rather hang with Jim Carrey than Shermer or Dawkinsl