There have been a couple of Google memes making the rounds of the Blogosphere. For those of you who don’t know what they are, a Google meme is an incomplete sentence or phrase that is entered into the Google search box, The results are supposed to complete the sentence or phrase, often with humorous results. The two most common are "Tom needs…" or "Tom wants…", and "Tom was killed by…". Obviously, you would use your own name rather than mine. Using these results, I was apparently either killed by bushwhackers or killed by a mad gunman.
I refused to stoop to repeated blog memes, so I decided to create my own. I was recently ticked off by some Fundamentalist spouting drivel on the radio, so I decided to try, "How can you be a Christian and". As one might expect, there were some interesting results…
How can you be a Christian and vote Democrat?
How can you be a Christian and a journalist?
How can you be a Christian and deny the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ?
How can you be a christian and a psychiatrist?
How can you be a Christian and be a lawyer?
But how can you be a Christian and be into leather? (one of the more interesting ones.)
How can you be a Christian and be a science fiction writer at the same time?
How can you be a Christian and a liberal?
How can you be a Christian and believe in evolution? (yep, this one popped up a lot.)
how can you be a Christian and a horror writer? (I would say, just read almost any portion of the Old Testament.)
How can you be a Christian and a Wiccan?
…and so on. Often, the author is relating a question frequently asked of them. However most of the time it’s someone who can’t fit a broader view of reality into their narrow view of what a Christian is.
To give equal time, I Googled the phrase, "How can you be an Atheist and". The results were much, much more predictable, usually ending with condemning the one questioned to eternal punishment.