Evangelical Christians will come up to you in parking lots, Laundromats and fast food restaurants to tell you about Jesus. They’ll bang on your door to tell you about Jesus. As if we hadn’t heard it all before. But they say that maybe this time we’ll listen with an open heart and receive Jesus.
They claim that if we read the Bible in the right way, with an open heart, it will persuade us. It’s like magic. But if we close our hearts, we won’t get it.
Our lack of belief is our own fault. And that’s important in the minds of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians because not having the right belief, not believing that Jesus died for our sins, means you will be punished. God will hurt you, and you will deserve it because you refused to listen to all those nice strangers in parking lots who tried to warn you…I mean tried to tell you the good news. And you didn’t read the Bible with the presumption that it would magically reveal the truth to you. If you find it confusing or unlikely or unbelievable, you’re just a nasty piece of work.
It doesn’t matter that the world is full of crazy people, and you’d be pretty loopy yourself if you believed everything every stray nut ball told you in a parking lot. The world is pretty full of crazy books, too. A little skepticism is a good thing, generally speaking, but we’re supposed to somehow know to make an exception when a strange evangelical approaches us out of the blue and wants to talk to us about something as personal as our religious beliefs. And out of all the books in existence that make fantastic claims, such as ones that claim sewing magnets into your clothing will cure you of cancer, we’re supposed to take their book on faith. We’re supposed to take it literally and believe it is the word of God. Because that’s so obviously true, right? This book that begins with a talking snake and ends with a loving god throwing the unfaithful into a lake of fire. That bit about people like me being abominations worthy of death, according to the interpretation of evangelicals and fundamentalists, is also a little hard to swallow.
It’s funny how this formula didn’t work on their hero Paul. He didn’t read the New Testament with an open heart because it didn’t exist yet, and he wasn’t persuaded by Christians who told him about Jesus. In fact, by his own admission, he denounced and persecuted Christians prior to his conversion. So what convinced him? Did he finally listen to an evangelical in a parking lot with an open heart? No. Paul claims to have had a vision of the resurrected Jesus himself. He says, that’s what convinced him.
Well, like many others, I’ve not had a personal visit from the resurrected Jesus who came down and told me like it is. All I’ve had are a bunch of yahoos tell me what they believe. I suspect many of them weren’t even aware that Jesus was Jewish or that the gospels weren’t written in Jesus’ lifetime or that the King James Version of the Bible isn’t the original version.
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