When the answers are too pat
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Oops, most of July has slipped by and nothing added to my Journal ! But then, no-one has been after me to see where I might have got to, or if I truly had nothing to say for myself for once. Certainly that is not the case for I have been chatting on a forum or two instead. On a Christian website recently, a new member posted a list of things that (according to the unbeliever who devised it) a Christian is supposed to believe - or rather, a “religious nutcase”. The assumption was that the Christian is a religious nutcase, of course. On reading down the list I found myself having to conclude that I am no “religious nutcase” or at least, not the kind defined by this amazing set of beliefs. |
Here is the full list of those “beliefs” here:
You know you’re a religious nutcase when…
- You feel the world owes you a favor and claim persecution when it doesn’t live up to it.
- When reality and the Bible contradict, you accuse reality of being wrong.
- You believe one’s political party determines their salvation.
- You believe every human life is sacred, but are willing to destroy it if said life belongs to a liberal, Jew, Muslim, atheist, homosexual, or feminist.
- You believe the universe revolves around the earth and all human affairs.
- You believe that a fertilized egg is more of a human being than the woman who carries it.
- You relish in telling people they are going to hell for arbitrary offenses like voting Democrat
- You propose the idealogy that it doesn’t matter how we treat the planet, as God will make a new one if we break this toy.
- You think that if God didn’t exist, you’d be a suicidal drug-abusing criminal, because apparently the promise of a reward in the afterlife is the only thing worth being a decent person for.
- You call people fascists for opposing a religious totalitarian government.
- You attribute all the world’s woes to arbitrary groups of people.
- You find pretty much anything that people do for fun to be sinful.
- You think the Jesus in Near Death Experiences is an imposter because he wasn’t a judgemental prick like yourself.
- You think ‘liberal', ‘atheist' and ‘satan' all mean the same thing.
- You think America was founded for Christians only.
- You think Bush has two-way conversations with God.
- You call for a boycott of telephone and electric companies because they inevitably provide services to homosexuals.
- You are incapable of finding humor in anything except human suffering.
- You think you’re going to be part of the .0000001% of humanity going to Heaven watching everyone who ever annoyed you, beat you at baseball, or proved you wrong logically burn in eternal torment and suffering. You also beleive that pride and wrath are sins.
- You’d rather change the english language to include “nucular” than admit that your president looks like a moron.
- You list sins in the following order of importance: Homosexuality; Abortion; Disbelief in any aspect of the bible; ‘Belief’ in evolution; Pedophila (unless church-related); Liberalism; Atheism; Communism; Promiscuity (particularly holding hands); Theft; Being foreign; Drinking alcohol (unless it’s the blood of Christ). Only then will you reluctantly bother to acknowledge: Murder; Rape; Incest; Nazism; Infanticide; War; Genocide.
- You assume everyone in the bible was white because you cannot conceive that holy men would be of another race
- You’re homophobic, but take great pleasure in graphic descriptions of anal sex.
- Your favorite debate tactic is putting your fingers in your ears and going LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU STUPID HEATHEN LA LA LA LA LA LA
- You’re not a mysogynist; if you hated women you wouldn’t want to own one
- You’re not a homophobe; if you were afraid of gays you wouldn’t hunt them down and beat the *beep* out of them
- You think Hitler is in heaven because he believed in Jesus but all the Jews he killed are in hell because they didn’t
- You think 9/11, Katrina, Virginia Tech, and soldier deaths in Iraq are God’s wrath against America for not putting gays in death camps.
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Well, whoever devised that list must surely have had far too much time on their hands. While it may or may not describe a “religious nutcase”, one thing it does not do is describe the Christian faith. It is little more than a list of straw man arguments - a collection of fallacies based on a wild misrepresentation of (in this case) Christianity.
So often these days I am finding people who are put off Christianity due to their misconceptions (like some of those in the list above) of what it is that a Christian believes, or what the Bible actually says, or what God is supposedly like. I am told that the Bible is full of contradictions, but interestingly, when I ask for an example I am given nothing specific - it “just is” I am told. There is no better obstacle to knowledge than a belief in some vague generalization without the wish to look into specifics in order to discover the truth. Start looking more critically at the specifics and the contradictions are frequently nowhere to be seen. And when it comes to what God is supposedly like, it is worth resisting the temptation to describe or explain Him in some positive way, to provide a pat answer. It is better to ask how the other views God. What often follows then is a painful misrepresentation of God - one in whom the true believer could never believe either. Maybe the nonbeliever, by virtue of his unbelief, is perhaps closer to a truer belief than first realized.









