It’s IN the BOOK
Oh yay, it’s like old times – I’m the lucky recipient, along with the president and the secretary of Atheist Alliance and 184 others, of an email telling me “the Good News of Salvation in Yeshua (Jesus), our Saviour.” The generous donor is one Céline L – funny that she’s coy about her last name when she has this good news to offer.
And how does she know? The bible, duh.
The texts of the prophets in the Bible bear witness to this. In particular, the prophecy of Isaiah 53.
As seen below:Isaiah 53:
1 Who believed the announcement made to us?
Etc etc etc; you know the drill.
And there are a whole bunch more – bible extract after bible extract, on and on and on. What more do you need to know?? Look right here: it’s in this book.
That’s me convinced.
It’s all there in Phropecy. Phropecy, I tell you.!
Phropecy.!
Just ask the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, if he can spare the time. (Google rev jimmy swaggart, phropecy.) But he could well be busy in his counting house, counting out his $$$$$, no doubt under a picture of Our Lord and Redeemer, and facing one of his likely real inspiration: H.L. Mencken, who famously said: “Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Or words to that effect
I also got that email (plus an almost identical one titled “The prophecies of Tanakh (Bible) on the Messiah”). But I ignored it because it said:
so, I guess not for me. (Perhaps sent to Ophelia in an affirmative answer to the question “Does God Hate Women?”)
But what about this book and that book? What makes Celine’s book so special? All of these other holy books also claim to be as authentic and authoritative as hers.* How do we know which one’s right? I think there should be some sort of race, best of seven playoff series, or musical chairs game to determine which holy book gets to speak for all the rest. Theists can’t even get their side straight, so why listen to any of them. Until they can claim to have some proven, clear advantage over the others (along with one of those big, gaudy WWF style belt thingies), they’re all just wannabees.
Last night I saw a trailer for a movie produced by National Geographic called The Mission about a young man named John Chau who thought his book was right. One of his beliefs was that he thought he had the right and duty to force his beliefs upon others, in this case a community of isolated islanders in the Indian Ocean, whom were under a protective ban by the Indian government intended to prevent just the sort of unsupervised visit that Chau decided to undertake. He believed he was “saving” these benighted people, writing in his diary “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold, where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” After several visits and attempts at communication, the islanders killed him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Chau
This self-justified belief in the necessity to convert the world, conveniently inserted into the texts of supposed “holy books” has led to untold suffering, misery and death on both sides of the “missionary” collision, giving pretexts for empire and the destruction of cultures on a global scale. It can cultivate a toxic arrogance in the minds of the zealous, providing them with an unarguable belief in the inferiority of any and all other beliefs. Of course “Not All Missionaries” are like this personally, but the the subtext is going to be there all the same. There’s a very great risk of the “target audience” becoming little more than props and backdrop to the missionary’s own Faith Journey**. Pain, suffering and even martyrdom are to be expected, perhaps even sought out, and add to the merit of the mission, showing the missionary’s depth of faith.
Missionaries out to convert are starting from the basic premise that You are Right and The Other is Wrong. It didn’t matter what the islanders already believed; whatever it was it had to be “Satanic” because it wasn’t Jesus. A woman appearing in the above-mentioned preview said the islanders’ human rights were being “violated” if they weren’t allowed to hear about Jesus. Indian regulations intended to shield the islanders from intrusive interlopers didn’t matter. Any desire of the islanders to be left alone didn’t matter. Chau had the God-given right and duty to break those boundaries to win converts to Christ. His Christian “identity” trumped all other considerations because he believed his calling came before all, his reality compelled others’ needs to stand aside for the urgency of his desire to “save” people. In Chau’s case, the body count went against him, but historically, over the course of the last several centuries, things have been worse for the cultures and people subject to “conversion” than for those doing the converting, who often had the blessings and the power of the state behind them. Though more honoured in its breach than its observance, at least Star Trek has its Prime Directive, wherein Starfleet personnel are prohibited from interfering in the natural development of alien civilizations, whereas the religions which have global conversion encoded into their holy texts operate without any such restraint. It’s rather sad when a fictional worldview created for entertainment is more well-intentioned and better thought out than one*** supposedly authored by an omnipotent, omniscient being.
*I’ll give them that; all these “holy books” are equally authentic and authoritative.
**This sounds strangely familiar for some reason…
***That is of course, equally fictional.
Here’s a link to the film trailer mentioned in the previous post: https://www.hylandcinema.com/movie/the-mission