During a recent segment of Glenn Beck's Bozo the Clown hour, he called in an "antichrist expert" to talk about where the current political situation in the world fits in to God's final countdown to the end of the world. Beck and his "expert" often referred to the return of christ, and that just makes me plain old disappointed in Man's progress, and a little annoyed, if truth be told. Anyone who has seriously looked into the subject of Jesus of Nazareth reaches no honest conclusion other than the Jesus of the New Testament is a mythic figure; there isn't the slightest shred of history behind the Jesus mythology. Jesus as a flesh-and-blood figure was created to make christian principles more accessible to the uninformed masses and to place the salvific christ sacrifice into a setting that people could relate to. The Gospels are not a record of historical facts or even doctored facts or even badly retold facts. They are entirely made up in order to present christian principles in narrative format.
When you're a believer, as I was for many years, you train yourself to ignore the problems in the bible that indicate Jesus was not real. You gloss over biblical difficulties and in the back of your mind you trust those wise old preachers you adore to understand it all and comfort you that there really is no problem, these are not the droids you're looking for. But honesty compels us to look at the bible squarely, expose it to the light, scrutinize its claims, in effect, treating it as if it were the word of God. If it is God's word, then it will be perfect in all respects, as God is perfect. Oh, but wait! Now, the christians claim that because the bible was given to Man, and Man is imperfect, we have somehow corrupted the bible, the perfect word of God. The perfect word of a God is able to be corrupted by Man? That calls into question its original perfection, wouldn't you say? Oh, but then wait again! It is SO perfect that we just can't grasp it well enough to resolve the conflicts found within it. Then why did the God give it to us in the first place if He knew we couldn't understand it very well? Oh, but wait! And on and on in that vein... That's how the christians will lead you down the convoluted path of their circular logic until you get so mired in their preposterous nonsense that you either surrender (a word they LOVE to use!) or just give up on the whole subject.
When the modern radical right, which includes the evangelical cults all across the country, start bringing in their mythology as though it were real history (or real future), it's a harbinger of serious conflicts to come. The christians have talked about the "coming conflict" for as long as I can remember, and I'm not a young man. They feed on conflict. They become giddy in the anticipation of conflict. War, battle, and bloodshed are very common themes among the evangelical cults, and when you have millions of people who have grown up inured to those three horrors, who knows what they're capable of? They anticipate a "second coming" of a Jesus who never came a first time. They have been hoping for this since the third century, and they have remained disappointed all that time. Now they have slowly but surely grasped great political power in the most heavily armed nation on earth, the nation that holds the most wealth of the world, a nation whose general citizenry has a long tradition of political apathy. Will they try to make their prophecies come true? Was that what caused George the Second to invade Iraq, to invoke his cult's mythic views? I wouldn't be surprised, though we'll probably never know. Christians in politics is not in itself a bad thing, in fact, it's a good thing for as many citizens as possible to be active in politics. However, they are not active in politics for the good of the nation, but to install their mythology and doctrine as the law of the land. That is not a good thing. Politics has to come to conclusions that benefit the most people possible, not just one strict ideology. Politics has to deal with the real world as it is, not as some see it through bible-colored lenses.
No comments:
Post a Comment