Friday, January 11, 2008

Oh Joy.

Seems like Joy Behar accepted Weird Al's challenge to "Dare to Be Stupid." Her outrageous reasoning on why the Catholic Church has not declared any saints in the modern era (with the possible exception of Mother Teresa) rivals Caitlin Upton's ( Miss Teen South Carolina 2007) unintelligible answer about maps. According to Ms. Behar, Catholic saints were mentally ill, and since we treat mentally ill people with meds nowadays, in a twist of irony, the pool of available saints has effectively dried up.

Thankfully, Father Jonathan Morris has provided a pointed, yet gentle critique of Joy Behar's disrespectful and off-base remarks.
In true irony, Ms. Behar’s “comedic” monologue — meant to make a serious point —
turns out to be rather funny. She tried to use Mother Teresa to prove her point
that modern saints (that don’t exist?) don’t hear voices anymore (because they
take psychiatric medicine?). But Mother Teresa, in fact, did hear voices and
they were not dissimilar to the ones heard by Joan of Arc, the French saint and
true feminist who Ms. Behar suggested needed a prescription of Thorazine.
Personally, I'm less amused at her motivation for making such comments rather than at the comments themselves. If anyone denies that the Christian faith is the whipping-boy of the secular media and its majority of voiceboxes, I'll gladly point back to Ms. Behar and Rosie O'Donnell again and again. Such tv personalities use their airtime to pontificate their certainty that Christianity is false and oppressive. They, in effect, are preachers of anti-Christianity. They can sure dish it out, but can they take it in kind?

Now, a few distinctions are in order. When Ms. Behar refers to "saints," I know she is referring to Roman Catholic saints. Not being Roman Catholic myself, I can't speak to the specific criteria of sainthood of the Catholic Church. But I can defend my own biblically derived understanding of sainthood and where Ms. Behar is completely off the map (pun entirely intended). In the evangelical perspective, sainthood is conferred onto every believer in Jesus. The Spirit of God communicates to every believer through Scripture and through divine conviction, which is wrought through various means (prayer, reasoning, life experiences), including visions if God so wills.

All true believers have experienced God's revelation in one or more of these ways. No amount of meds in the world can squelch that.

It is evident now that Joy Behar has never experienced God then. Otherwise, wouldn't she be on Thorazine as proof?

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