Roadside pulpits

I love reading roadside pulpits - those signs outside of the buildings of religious communities, and auto repair shops. I am just amazed at how poignant, and true, some of these short bits of wisdom can be and really keep me thinking. I am also amazed at how weird some of these are and how irritated I can get about them .

There is a fundamentalist church in our town that has me really puzzled. Their minister is the official minister to KU Sports, which I find bothersome, and he has been very outspoken in the community against GLBT non-discrimination clauses. I am not a fan.
His church recently had the following on their roadside pulpit:
Sin Closes God's Ear.

What the heck is that about I thought to myself. That doesn't invite me to come there. That doesn't offer me hope. That makes me feel really awful for anyone who believes that. I thought that maybe the other side of the pulpit would then read: But Opens God's Heart

Nope. Nuthin.

I thought maybe this was a passage of scripture and since I am not really up on the bible I was missing out on the connection. Googling this phrase got me nowhere.

I find it hard to believe that making this statement is attractive to anyone, let alone that this is a message that is possibly reiterated inside their walls on Sunday morning. Sin closes god's ear? So we all "sin" and there is no repenting? No apologizing? No forgiveness? No LISTENING? I can't get behind a god that won't listen to me because I make poor choices and honest mistakes. I screw up... I'm still learning. Sometimes I am making it up as we go along. Aren't we all?
God won't listen to me because I'm human? What about good intent? My first ever fortune from a fortune cookie said "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

If you know me, you can imagine the amount of incredulity in my voice. I am totally baffled by this attitude. I don't consider myself a theist anyway, but good grief - from a marketing standpoint that is not good advertising. How can god be a forgiving god if she/he/it can't hear us because we're so awful?

You can tell I am pretty upset by this since I am writing all these choppy sentences. What on Earth are they thinking over there? Anyone? Buehler?

Is there some theology that can help me understand what this means in a positive way?

The Golden Compass

I got one of those emails recently warning of this awful movie coming out that will damage me and my children permanently and seriously!!
The Golden Compass is a children's fantasy novel by an atheist and the characters kill god at the end. I looked it up on imdb.com, and no mention of killing god whatsoever. Hmmmm.

So I head into my 5th grade son's parent-teacher conference with his homeroom teacher who is also the reading teacher and a very liberal Southern Baptist. She laughed when I asked about the book and told her about the frantic email warning. She loaned me the book from the 5th grade library, and then emailed me the next week to share that she had just received her first email warning about the evils of fantasy literature, which apparently some people cannot identify correctly.

Having just finished The Position by Meg Wolitzer (a great read about a family whose parents wrote a groundbreaking book about sex), I am ready for another fiction read. My non-fiction task is currently a book recommended by Phil Lund - The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. This one will take a while for me to plow through.

check out for yourself the imdb info on the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0385752/

The content of the email (from my fundamentalist sister-in-law) and the snopes comments are at:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/compass.asp

Heaven forbid we teach people to discern fact from fiction and make decisions for themselves. SIGH