Letters to the Editor | Opinion | newsandtribune.com – Evening News and Tribune

Reader responds to columns

This is a response to Tom Mays July 31 column, The Church wrestles with how to apply truth to turmoil and his Aug. 7 column, Show people first they are loved.

In his July 31 column, his subject addresses an age old, always reoccurring problem for the Christian: how to live in a culture of different believers and non-believers especially considering that only 47 percent of adults in a 2020 Gallup poll stated they were members of a religion. Nones, comprised of Agnostics, Atheist or nothing in particular came out 21 percent, Pew Research 26 percent and Cooperative Elections Study 32 percent. So, why the religious members decrease and nones increase? One explanation is that Christianity is becoming more politically conservative (Christian Nationalist) and people leaving often cite politics of the Christian right as the reason. Secondly, for decades, there has been a growing mistrust of large institutions and a view that organized religion is hypocritical. The third explanation is that this trend matches the trend we see around the world: wealthy countries are less religious and poorer countries are more religious. (meitler.com/2021/05/05)

Mr. May uses and describes the city population of Corinth as analogous to the Christians in our society today, certainly a good analogy. Pauls ministry there is covered in his I and II Corinthians letters and Paul addressed four major issues at this church: wisdom or spiritual insight, eating practices, spiritual gifts and rhetorical eloquence. Of course, he used Christ as his guide to address these issues and he also states for them to be imitators of himself, as he is of Christ (I Cor. 11:1), and he uses the human body as analogous to the body of believers (I Cor. 12-26). This contains his interesting eating meat sacrificed to idols solution. Christ gave up power for the sake of others. Those who know the idols are meaningless have the right to eat meat sacrificed to idols. But this could encourage their weaker believers to eat meat sacrificed to idols and weaken their faith: therefore, like Christ, those who have this right should give this power up in order to help those who are weak (I Cor 8). (TGC, Understanding the New Testament, Brakke)

One criticism I have is his statement, Can Christianity survive to the next generation in a modern, multi-cultural, ATHEISTIC community? (Capitalization mine). Using my first paragraph numbers, roughly 26 percent of our population are nones and Atheist are one of three parts of that group: ATHEISITC is inappropriate.

Finally, Mr. May list three issues Paul used to encourage the Corinthian church to relate to non-Christians but I am only going to address the first one. We discover unity when we embrace diversity and he uses the unity of those supporting IU basketball at a game. This speaks to me, hopefully, something I have seen change since I started reading his columns in 2015: there are many acceptable ways to interpret the Bible in being a Christian. As I wrote with a poem I composed for my grandsons 13th birthday, It is not the Bible that is evil; it is the abuse of the Bible that is evil.

In his Aug. 7 column, Mr. May spent most of it describing the city of Ephesus during Pauls time, archaeological discoveries and how they worshiped the goddess Dianna. For someone who will never visit there, I enjoyed this part of his column giving a feel for what life was like during this time. His second to last paragraph stresses the need to be tolerant of other beliefs we may disagree with and the last paragraph emphasizes the title. Great article!

Larry Farr

Jeffersonville

Reader questions Senator

Senator Braun,

Does this mean you are in favor of allowing tax cheats to get away with NOT paying their taxes?

See this FOX news quote:

Fox News | Mitch McConnell, Mike Braun to roll out bill to prevent Democrats from weaponizing IRS to target conservatives. Sounds like you are admitting that conservatives are the ones cheating on their taxes and you oppose making them pay.

Jamey Aebersold

New Albany

Go here to see the original:

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