Posted on 07/30/2010 7:54:04 PM PDT by mlizzy
"In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control," the author wrote Wednesday on her Facebook page. "In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen" ...
"I believed for a long time that the differences, the quarrels among Christians didn't matter a lot for the individual, that you live your life and stay out of it. But then I began to realize that it wasn't an easy thing to do," said Rice, speaking from her home near Palm Springs, California. "I came to the conclusion that if I didn't make this declaration, I was going to lose my mind."
Rice said she is a Democrat who supports the historic health care legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama and believes gay marriage inevitably will be permitted throughout the country. Although no longer part of any denomination, she remains a believer and continues to read theology and post Biblical passages on her Facebook page. She has no immediate plans to write about her leaving the church and will continue with her metaphysical fiction series, "Songs of the Seraphim."
Rice will not be taking up vampires again, but she said she is a big fan of the HBO series "True Blood," enjoyed the first two "Twilight" movies (she has yet to read any of the Stephenie Meyer novels) and is interested in seeing her most famous character, the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, return to the screen.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
You never were to begin with, Anne.
Yet another person that assumes to know what GOD is all about, someone that has not read HIS word. If she had, she would understand. I pray for this person.
In the interest of being able to kill babies, there is no god, there are no absolute values and I quit Christianity.
. . . Pretty much sums Anne Rice up.
Too late.
Just pray for her.
Gay marriage is inevitable in every state only if imposed by the Sup Court.
So yeah, it probably is inevitable.
My thoughts while reading the article.
Anne Rice who? =.=
Why did I even read this?
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Who?
A serious whack-job. The woman is mentally disturbed. Actually, she would fit right into Islam- death obsessed.
what a coward....
I hope Ms. Rice learns some things are much bigger than petty, pet political issues.
whatever.
The American Catholic Church is run by apostate bishops who place no value on true religious education, which made it easy for the devil to have easy pickings of Anne Rice, who was raised Catholic.
I always thought her vampires were gay. When you have two male vampires move in together, pick out furniture and then adopt a little girl vampire - well, her books were horrifying, but not in the way she intended.
Pray for this woman ... she had an abortion early on in her life and it screwed her up.Yes, prayers always!! Do you perchance have a link regarding her abortion early on in life?
Almost impossible to convert out of them thar things she is/was/is into. I know you’ll claim u know of converted witches etc.
They haven’t converted (either).
Our Sunday Visitor (mildlib “Catholic”) had a cover story on her “conversion” about a year ago. I didn’t bother to read - its my Mom’s and I can’t wait to put this article in her hand.
There isn’t enough grace in this world (so few True Masses said) for such people to convert. Call me a TRADITIONALIST CATHOLIC.
So when Jesus said “WHOSOEVER believes in me...” he was just kidding?
I always thought her vampires were gay.
... All of the narcissistic pathologies find their culmination in the homosexual, whose lifestyle is a triumph over nature and therefore over reality as well. Since there is no reality, then there is no check on the narcissistic fantasies. But since those fantasies are ultimately illusory and, therefore, debilitating, giving the person who gives into them an increasingly “empty” self, they also function as the prime instrument of control. In other words, the culture of narcissism promotes the illusion of omnipotence that is the prime characteristic of the grandiose self knowing full well that it is an illusion because it knows just as well that people can be controlled by manipulating that illusion. Media phenomena like the Harry Potter movie are an example of that manipulation. However, the main instrument of control is using consumption as the device which fills the “empty” self, which has been drained of content by the destruction of family, tradition, community and religion. The narcissist consumer is condemned to “buy life-style in a vain attempt to transform” lives which are unsatisfying because they are based on illusion and as a result “unfixable.” As a result, “the late 20th century has . . . become an advertising executive’s dream come true: Life-style has become a product that sells itself, and the individual has become a consumer who desperately seeks to buy.”
The subsequent “desperation to fill up the empty self” brings us to the other metaphor for the homosexual as the best example of the narcissist consumer, namely, the vampire, who, like the homosexual, has been reduced to a primitive, magical form of social intercourse where he must suck parasite-like on the people he admires in order to continue in existence. Social life in the culture of narcissism is essentially magical ingestion, increasingly desperate attempts to fill up a permanently empty self. As in the homosexual and the vampire, the grandiose self experiences alternating states of omnipotence (eternal life) followed by periods of despair based on fears of emptiness, which in turn lead to the same desire for compulsive ingestion which will create this vicious circle once again. Like the homosexual, the narcissist is the culture’s ideal citizen. In fact, the homosexual is being promoted in that role precisely because he represents an extreme form of narcissism ... --E. Michael Jones
This woman’s got a “real screw loose”, as my dad would put it.
And what a lot of people don’t know, is in some bizzare tributes to one of her idols, the Marques De Sade, she penned a series of 3 books under the fake name, A.N. Roquelaure, where she retells the tale of sleeping beauty, but in this story prince charming awakes her via rape, and then forces her back to his Kingdom which involves every cheesy BD&SM and hardcore porn cliche known in the universe.
I knew her conversion to Christianity wasn’t to be taken serious and eventually she’d revert back to her bizarroland.
That's no secret--she's always been open about that, and the books scream it from every page (that I could stand to read before i bailed, that is).
The books celebrate a very 'glamorous' celebrity lifestyle, and are dull as dirt to anyone looking for writing better than purple-prose romance novels. For some reason women like reading these gay romances.
I think they're utter garbage that have a following among folks who have bad taste and read little else besides fantasy and romance and "dark" stuff like the endless vampire hunter crap.
When I started to read "Interview with the Vampire" I thought it could be a great story, but she quickly demonstrated how to screw up a good idea.
I knew that she had a baby die on her, but mis-remembered it as an abortion, instead of leukemia. My apologies for steering anyone wrong on this.
They don’t know what they believe.
Malachi Martin tried to exorcize more than one Vat2 ‘bishops’ who came to him having made devil pacts and wishing deliverance and he had no success.
Do you think Christ might also be referring to Himself in the Most Blessed Sacrament? Do you edit this Great and Generous Manifestation of the Savior out? Woe to you if you do!
I read a fascinating book by E Michael Jones long ago titled Degenerate Moderns. He is brilliant, and I’m not Catholic. I believe he was also editor of the magazine Culture Wars.
sounds good to me Annie.
Don’t let the door hit ya...
The vampires in her books are very homo-erotic because they can live for centuries, but can’t procreate and lose the ability to enjoy sex.
They get off on the blood sucking which is supposed to be their sex.
The books center on the idea that given that scenario, the male vampires hookup for companionship and live like gay men together.
It’s the homo like relationships in her books that attract soo many goths and the all black clothing crowd.
I remember when I was 20 years old and I got a job working at a nightclub that catered to a lot of alternative dance and goth stuff. Anne’s vampire books were extremely popular with regulars that frequented the club. They did a lot of X, wore black, the girls were all going for that semi-dead look and miserable drama queens to be in relationships with, the boys acted really girly, lots of bi-sexual behavior, lots of haircuts like The Cure. That’s always been Anne’s demographic.
It is impossible to follow Christ and not be a Christian. I am saddened by this, but not surprised.
Who writes a press release about their religious conversions? BIZARRE.
I enjoyed it for about fifty pages. I thought it was a pretty good book considering she wrote it in like ten days. Then it just started dragging, pardon the pun.
The vanpire has long been about “forbidden sex” and Rice started this whole trend that faded for awhile and then was renewed first with Buffy and now this Twilight stuff. It’s come first circle; they’re romances for “hip” kids who’d mock the idea of reading romances. The Twilight books are shrewdly written: they’re about a girl no one notices but is wooed by a non-threatening prettyboy, for an audience of girls who think no one notices them but they’d love to be taken away by a nonthreatening prettyboy.
I like quoting the old woman from The Stand when dealing with atheists: you may not believe in God, but he believes in YOU, like it or not.
Details, please?
Details, please?
(Note the corrected tagline...)
Rice wants her own Christ, and not the Christ of the Scriptures or the traditional church. She another one of those spiritual people that rejects religion, for religion has rules. She wants to make up her own rules. There was a time when people believed that they were to conform to the mind of Christ, not Christ conforming to their minds.
Darling celebrity..., Christianity is not an identity. It is faith in Jesus as your savior. Abandon Him at your peril...
As I read this article about Ann Rice, I saw a woman in conflict. A woman who is trying to follow Christ, but be true to herself and her conscience at the same time.
Perhaps for some FReepers, at the point of conversion your minds, your thoughts, your attitudes, your political preferences were immediately and irrevocably converted to mirror those of Jesus himself. Perhaps.
But for many of us, these changes come about only after time and conflict.
And for some, surrounding themselves by like-minded people, these changes never come.
Unlike Ms Rice, I came to Christianity with a preset conservative social and political background. This meant that many of my views went unchallenged for years, because they were the views of my peers; and by extension and assumption the church and Christ.
But having the right views with the wrong heart is probably more damaging to the Kingdom of God than having the wrong view and the right heart.
Of course, ideally, we'd all have the right view and the right heart. We'd be transformed, conformed to the image of Christ. And that's the goal, isn't it.
But I for one don't know of anyway to get from ‘where I am’ to ‘the image of Christ’ without change.
And change often means conflict. Because if there is no conflict, there is no motivation to change.
Sometimes this comes as what I like to call ‘epiphanettes’. Little epiphanies where you just realize that you've been wrong about something.
But typically these changes come from rubbing conflicting ideas together until the friction, the heat becomes so great that you recognize that you can't hold both things at the same time.
In those moments of moral choice, we are not always prepared to give up our long held views easily. We look for ways to fit the seeming (and often truly) conflicting pieces of our conscience together.
And too often we find Religion unsympathetic and cold in those moments. It's not that the position offered by religion is wrong- if it were it could be dismissed out of hand and the conflict would be resolved. It's just that religion is more self absorbed in its perceived purity than willing to dirty its hands to help a struggling co-journeyer along the path.
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
For a public person, who draws attention much earlier in this journey than do most of us; these conflicts have the added pressure of being public. How grateful I am that my crises of faith have been limited in scope to a few faithful friends.
Religious people are far too ready to jump on someone when they are struggling. Many posters on this thread seem to think that unless conversion meets their standards, is pristine and without any errant positions, it is suspect at best and most likely false.
I'm much more sympathetic to the person who says (as I believe Ann Rice is saying in this article):
This I believe:
Jesus is Lord.
However, I can not accept the yoke that religion is trying to put on me as I follow Christ.
I reject religion.
I love Jesus.
As Jesus said to Martha, “She's chosen the better part”
Does that mean she's right in all her social and political positions. No. But neither is any of us.
Can you serve Christ and be wrong on social and political issues? Absolutely.
I pray that as she lays aside the yoke of religion, she finds a way to be correct not only in her positions, but that she find a way to show the love of God to those many religious people reject out of hand.
And I rejoice with her that she's taking her journey seriously enough to experience the conflict of conscience.
It is a prayer I pray for myself regularly.
Will Wallace
Well, Mr. Will Wallace, I like the way you think.
You wrote:
“Yet another person that assumes to know what GOD is all about, someone that has not read HIS word. If she had, she would understand. I pray for this person.”
Actually she read the New Testament quite deeply. She produced one or more books about Jesus afterward. What she lacked was not the reading of the NT, but humility.
She means: "In the name of anti-Christ ..."
Rice was a perverted author and never was Christian.
I read a fascinating book by E Michael Jones long ago titled Degenerate Moderns. He is brilliant, and I’m not Catholic. I believe he was also editor of the magazine Culture Wars.Yes, he *is* brilliant to the point I have some difficulty getting through his longer pieces. And he is still the editor of Culture Wars; my husband had one of his writings published in CW in May of this year.
Christ wasn't anti-gay either, Anne. His ministry was to sinners.
He was, however, very much anti-sin. Too bad you couldn't see the difference. We'll keep praying for you, though.
She can add taking the name of the Lord in vain to her sins.
To hold that such cannot be saved in indicative of never having realized God’s salvific grace. Read the story of John Newton, the slave trader, who went out of his way to convert others away form the Christian faith, and would not repent even after being humbled and afflicted, until in an extraordinary situation He found grace to repent.
Multitudes more. http://www.christian-faith.com/forjesus/true-stories-testimonies-of-jesus-christ
http://www.truthsaves.org/testimony/
http://www.cbn.com/700club/features/Amazing/ (video testimonies)
http://www.shelovesgod.com/library/testimonies.cfm
http://www.doolittleraider.com/raiders/deshazer.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=xqP_YmOAaxUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=story+of+John+Newton,+the+slave+trader&source=bl&ots=hkrEItVtgF&sig=KwOdQAW9k1jmOhd7ecqIF4V6Vmk&hl=en&ei=nDlUTIr5AYP78AaO96zzBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=14&ved=0CFsQ6AEwDQ#v=onepage&q=story%20of%20John%20Newton%2C%20the%20slave%20trader&f=false
The word you should have capitalized is BELIEVES.
Although I can’t know her heart, I can use common sense. It does appear that Rice has demonstrated how easy it is to convince yourself you are believing in Christ when in truth you are only believing in yourself.
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