“Rowland Croucher” <> writes:

>A ‘Net friend wrote in message

.

>> Sean McHugh wrote:

><>

>> Why are

>> you here bashing Christians/Christianity anyway? At least I don’t feel a

>need to

>> hang around with, and befriend, ppl I supposedly disdain, and seek

>sympathy from

>> those who I consider to be stupid and irrelevant.

>> Pete.

>Now that’s a good question. Why do Sean, Chris, and Barry (and some others)

>frequent this newsgroup?

>I think our task with questions like this is not to weep or laugh or rage

>but to understand. Reading between the lines, I’ve never seen/read Sean so

>fired up (sorry about the pun) as he was in the Prayer/Bushfires thread.

>It’s obvious why, I think: his home was in danger, and I hope we’re all

>sensitive to that… Barry is pedantic about ppl and U.S. spellings and is

>generally negative: but over the last year or so his _positive_

>contributions to discussions have increased. Chris has been quiet lately

>(fathering? holidaying :-)?

>My hunch is that from what I’ve read of the stories of these three highly

>intelligent people in particular, there’s a history there… And I dare to

>hope that those of us who follow Jesus (note I’m _not_ using the word

>’Christians’: not all ‘Christians’ follow Jesus, and as the article on my

>website says, I don’t think Jesus was a ‘Christian’ in terms of the major

>modern understandings of that term)…Anyway… where was I? Oh, yes… I

>hope Jesus-followers will show some restraint/patience in responding to the

>offerings of atheists.

For Christmas I received from my wife (as well as some other things)

the latest book by Philip Yancey: “Soul Survivor”. The introductory chapter gives some of his background, and how he is still a Christian despite the church. The remaining chapters are brief outlines of how reading about various people and their lives has helped him retain his faith.

I’ll try writing a review of this sometime over the next week or so, and post it. But in the meantime, one of the people who inspired Yancey – and got him into a lot of trouble with Christian fundamentalists in USA – was Ghandi. I’ll just quote part of what Yancey writes on page 157.

When I read the history of Mahatma Ghandi alongside the history of the Christian church, I cannot help wondering what went wrong. Why did it take a Hindu to embrace the principles of reconciliation, humility and vicarious sacrifice so clearly modelled by Jesus himself? Ghandi credited Jesus as his source for these life principles, and he worked like a disciplined soldier to put them into practice. What has kept Christians from following Jesus with the same abandon?

Later on Yancey mentions the volume of hate mail he received when he wrote an article about Ghandi for “Christianity Today”.