I'll be posting a lengthy, generalized response to all the messages in this thread later, when they've come in, and when I've had a chance to decide what I think.

However, I want to reply to one tangential point you make in your post now, and I've renamed the subject "subthread..." so as to avoid cluttering and confusing the main thread.

> Personally, I think it's wrong to laugh or joke about sin. God takes it seriously, and I feel that if He does, I ought to too.

I disagree with this. Humor is a tough call, though, because God's sense of humor is not manifestly evident in the Bible -- yet God created us in his image, and it is pretty clear that we have a human *need* for humor. The potency of the ability humor has to lift our spirits and keep us emotionally healthy makes a convincing case that humor was intended to be a part of our emotional make-up. Like anything, I believe it can be corrupted and employed for subversive uses, but as there is precious little in the Bible to guide us in appropriate ways to use humor, it leaves a lot up in the air.

I do not think joking about sin necessarily crosses the line, and the reason I don't believe this is because joking about sin does not preclude taking it seriously. I absolutely believe it is important to take sin seriously since God does. But the fact that I *do* take sin seriously and yet can also laugh about something that involves sin is enough for me. Humor is the way we cope with things like this. I don't know about you -- different people have different emotional strengths -- but if I were not permitted to joke about things like this, I would be so demoralized by our depraved society that I would not be able to cope very well. For keeping my spirits functioning, of course, my trust in God is (or, when it isn't, should be) first, but humor is one of the things I believe God gave us as a means to cope. I just can't see me trusting in God to help me through something and rejecting the tools he provides to help me do so.