NationStates Jolt Archive

Awful vision of a bloodthirsty Jesus

Militant Christianity is on the march, apparently without love and forgiveness, writes Nicholas Kristof.

If the latest in the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians and toss them into everlasting fire: "Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."

These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest, Glorious Appearing, has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of Glorious Appearing and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the dust from our own eyes.
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In Glorious Appearing, Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses".

"The riders not thrown," the novel says, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement."

One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.

These scenes also raise an eschatological problem: could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbours were heaved into hell?

As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself - and infidels headed for hell.

No, I don't think the readers of Glorious Appearing will ram planes into buildings. But we did jail thousands of Muslims here and abroad after the September 11 attacks, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of inmates at Abu Ghraib, in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.

I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think Glorious Appearing describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.

I often write about religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society.

Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?

People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of non-evangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels. That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that that's what God stands for.

The New York Times

SOURCE.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/20/1090089156914.html

COMMENT.
A most disturbing article.
I now describe myself as agnostic, but was brought up as a Catholic. The God I was taught about was the one who said things like "love thy neighbour",
and told Peter not to resist the Romans arresting him at Gethsemane.
Where has this frightening vision come from?

It's called "greed."

The book already has a good niche-christian fiction isn't the most abundant-and adding wanton violence and other things for shock effect will only raise book sales.

What's next? Christian pr0n magazines???!!!

Surely anyone who enjoyed being in heaven while the majority of the Earth's population were suffering eternal torment in hell deserves to be there themselves. There appear to be two images of God in the bible: One who punishes the non-believers with fire raining down from the sky, and one who celebrates compassion and tolerance. Personally I don't think any supreme being could allow so many to suffer eternal torment, even if they've sinned in life.

I saw that in B&N today.

The series is by a crazy fundamentalist guy why takes revelations word for word. That Pastor at my church (I'm an agnostic, but I still have to go to church with my family) did a sermon on this subject. What he said was that those books represented a small, unpopular faction within christianity and should be treated as the fiction they are. I found that interesting.

God is just and cannot let sins go unpunished. He has, however, extended his grace and gives us the choice to accept it. It's not his fault if you turn him down, much like it isn't a lifeguard's fault you drowned if you turned down the life saver he threw you.

Jesus' second coming will be quite violent and nasty. Revelation speaks volumes of the wrath God will pour out on the unrepentant after giving them thousands of years to change their minds.

Actually, a lifeguard can jump into the water to save a man.

And if God is a supreme and omnipotent being, he can easily destroy the very concept of hell.


Here is a simple fact: A benevolent and omnipotent creator would not condemn his own creations to eternal damnation. To do is is contradictory.

Well, I'm a christian. But if Jesus came to Earth and did that crap, my dying act would be to give him the ultimate atomic wedgie.

That's humor. But let me ask you; COuld you maintain faith in such a 'savior'? If Jesus came to Earth and began purifying the Earth in an orgy of blood and death, I'd lose all faith in Him. Wouldn't you?

too late. . .

Eh, I'm bed-bound. G'night, gents

Nighties/

Truly this is sickening. I have read every book in the series and I did find it very sickening. I am a strong atheist however the books do make for an interesting read.


I find the idea of making jesus even worse than the likes of adolf hitler and yet claim he is forgiveness and love incarnate?


How could any god throw the millions of hindus, muslims, buddhists, taoists, ect. to hell? I mean especially when you consider that religion mostly comes down to culture. It seems totally absurd to me to think that a god would throw millions of good hearted loving people to hell for simply not following a faith that seems so completely faulty. He would have nobody to blame but himself.


If god knows the past, present, and future then surely he knew exactly what was gonna happen before he even made satan. Before he even made man, before he even thought about giving us freewill he knew exactly what would happen. He knew every little thing we would ever do. One has to ask why he would make us go through it anyway. One has to ask what he gets out of the torment of billions of his own creations whos only mistakes were to fall victim to the instincts and flaws that HE gave them.


Could you imagine the movie? Who in the hell would play jesus? Vin Deisel? Arnold?

I've seen the movie to the first book, it wasn't too bad, even if it was a little on the corny side.

Keep in mind the book is written by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and all the terrotory that goes along with it. (no, I am not labeling, that's what they guy is)

God is just and cannot let sins go unpunished. He has, however, extended his grace and gives us the choice to accept it. It's not his fault if you turn him down, much like it isn't a lifeguard's fault you drowned if you turned down the life saver he threw you.

Jesus' second coming will be quite violent and nasty. Revelation speaks volumes of the wrath God will pour out on the unrepentant after giving them thousands of years to change their minds.

Who gets thousands of years to change their mind? Isn't there a biblical three score and ten somewhere?

And isn't there something about loving your neighbour? And accepting sinners (Mary Magdalene comes to mind), and members of other sects (Good Samaritan comes to mind).

Or are those bits missing from your Bible?

God is just and cannot let sins go unpunished. He has, however, extended his grace and gives us the choice to accept it. It's not his fault if you turn him down, much like it isn't a lifeguard's fault you drowned if you turned down the life saver he threw you.

Jesus' second coming will be quite violent and nasty. Revelation speaks volumes of the wrath God will pour out on the unrepentant after giving them thousands of years to change their minds.


So what motivates you to be a christian besides fear?

Why do you believe that any god like that, one that would willingly slaughter all those who choose to think for themselves, is a god to follow?

Why would you willingly indoctrinate new people into a religion based on fear, and what "Happens OR ELSE!"

So..the very same loving, kind, benevolent Creator, would sluaghter and torture all those people who simply think otherwise?


How would such a thing even make sense?

So what motivates you to be a christian besides fear?

Why do you believe that any god like that, one that would willingly slaughter all those who choose to think for themselves, is a god to follow?

Why would you willingly indoctrinate new people into a religion based on fear, and what "Happens OR ELSE!"

So..the very same loving, kind, benevolent Creator, would sluaghter and torture all those people who simply think otherwise?


How would such a thing even make sense?

Simple. It doesn't. We humans are going to screw up. We all deserve to go to Hell. We do. We are all sinners. But luckily we have a loving God who till the very end offers us forgiveness. Whether you are Hilter or Mother Theresa you can get into Heaven if you accept His forgiveness. Anyway, thats what I've been taught and believe. But then again I am a Catholic, and it seems a lot of fundamentalist Christians don't like Catholics that much.

So what motivates you to be a christian besides fear?

It's a comfortable and familiar theology. That's why I came back to a Christian derivative. Not because I particularly believe that non-Christians are "going to hell" or that the Christian concept of God is the only valid one, but because when one is considering the vastness of divinity, no matter what the concept is, it's nice to not have to fight terminology as well. Sort of like doing Physics without calculus. It can be done, but man is it ugly and hard.

People imprint on certain religious ideas and feel comfortable with them. While I'm intrigued by concepts like Nirvana, I always feel like an outsider when I try to consider them in terms of a real spiritual search that has validity for me personally. That doesn't mean they're wrong or that I think they're wrong, just that I don't want to pursue two lines of questioning at the same time: the search for personal divinity and the meaning of religious constructs.

Fear is never a good basis for belief or faith. Like someone else in this thread said, a God that would actually do the things described in these books is not only cruel, but undeserving of the gift of human faith. The trouble is, "God" is personified by people on the basis of their own motivations. This personification is again a technique to make the completely abstract concept of an "all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent God" more applicable to our daily lives. Along with this personification, however, comes the motivations of mankind. So you have to walk a very fine line and realize that you personal conceptualization of God can never be any more than that, not if "God" in the macro sense is going to have any meaning at all. To quote someone who I don't remember, you can tell a lot about people by the gods they worship. If you're going to be a "better" person, you have to demand a "better" God.


Why do you believe that any god like that, one that would willingly slaughter all those who choose to think for themselves, is a god to follow?

I personally think it comes down to fear. Either a fear of some sort of an eternal judgement that has been ground into people since their infancy, or a fear of having to do the spiritual work that building a strong yet flexible faith requires. The world is a huge, unpredictable unknown and this is a hard concept for many people to grasp. There really is no justice, no right, no wrong, no fairness other than that we ourselves create and take responsibility for maintaining. This doesn't invalidate these concepts, but makes them all the more important because if one of them is transgressed against, it's not because "the devil made us do it," but because we let it happen. But these concepts themselves can be hard to handle, contradictory, unsatisfying on a visceral level and we worry, "What if we're not good enough?"

It's much easier to relinquish that personal responsibility for the creation of the world we would like to see and "give it to God." That way, we can always pass the buck. If you fail, you fail not because you weren't good enough, but because of cosmic reasons outside of your direct control, so it's not really your fault. Also, no matter how much you fail or how lax you become in preserving your own personal moral code, by simply "accepting Jesus as your savior" you can again absolve yourself of those failings and even go out and fail again. I'm using Christian terminology here, but it's not just limited to that tradition. There's a fair amount of this type of thought in most religions (not all, of course, but most) and in order to actually have an honest "search for God", you have to guard vigilantly against it.


Why would you willingly indoctrinate new people into a religion based on fear, and what "Happens OR ELSE!"

Well, the obvious answer is that it makes your life easier. If everyone around you is saying the same thing, then you don't have to question things. There's comfort in the heard, in the group. If your opinion differs from the majority, then you can change your opinion to remain with the heard, comfortable in the knowledge that, while you may feel the opinion is wrong, maybe all these other people know something you don't and since there are so many of them, they must know better. Human belief is a powerful thing. It can literally move mountains and one day will propel us to the stars if we want it to. Because it's so powerful, though, it must be treated with respect and not given blindly.

Christianity can be a wonderful toolset for discovering a personal relationship with divinity. Any religion can. But only when they are used correctly. As tools, not as ends in and of themselves. People shouldn't be indoctrinated through fear. That type of recruitment is exactly why so many people have left churches. People should come to a faith because it resonates somewhere within them. Regardless if this resonance comes from an outside source or is a construct of one's own ego, that is the only honest way to embrace a faith and begin a spiritual journey. The best testiment is never, "DO THIS OR YOU'RE GOING TO HELL!" but, "This is what I believe and this is how I live my life and it seems to work for me, so how do you live yours and lets see how we can work together to further both our understandings."


So..the very same loving, kind, benevolent Creator, would sluaghter and torture all those people who simply think otherwise?

Not one worthy of human belief, but again, you're dealing with personification of god and not with "God" the macro concept. A personification might very well do those things because the person who has developed it has attributed those qualities to that personification for their own reasons. In a very real way, that personification is a part of God, but it is not the whole.


How would such a thing even make sense?

It doesn't. It doesn't invalidate the concept of God or religion though, just the improper use of the tool.

What's next? Christian pr0n magazines???!!!

Too late, it's already been made. Check out www.xxxchurch.com

*it is appropriate*

Why would an all knowing good punish people for their human nature, knowing the motivations behind what they did and what in their history made them do evil. Christianity is a sham that forces people to be afraid of being who they are and to reject others; but simultaneously some Christians choose to be good people. They are few and far between as far as I know.

This thread isn't a philosophy lesson, but in all honesty what is the purpose of a vengeful God? I guess power really does corrupt.

PS Grow a brain jerk :mad:

(If you quote this make sure to add :cool: into your post so I know you're :cool: )

Why would an all knowing good punish people for their human nature, knowing the motivations behind what they did and what in their history made them do evil.

It wouldn't. But individual conceptualizations of it might. It's very confusing, really.


Christianity is a sham that forces people to be afraid of being who they are and to reject others;

It does no such thing. That's mankind seeking to use the tool of religion improperly. Using one of the things that binds us together, the question of what happens when we die, as yet another thing to differentiate themselves and their peer groups. The Bible itself never really says there are no other Gods, just that the Christian conceptualization of God is of paramount importance to Christians, which makes sense if you are a Christian. It is most likely the most important concept of God to you individually and the one you will base your personification on. This doesn't rule out other personifications or conceptualizations of God, nor does it satisfy a macro concept of God. It does, however, allow one to form a personal relationship with divinity if one choses to.


but simultaneously some Christians choose to be good people. They are few and far between as far as I know.

Sounds like you just know bad Christians.


This thread isn't a philosophy lesson, but in all honesty what is the purpose of a vengeful God? I guess power really does corrupt.

No, it's more of a rant, but you take what you can get, I guess. :)

As for the purpose of a vengeful God, I think it stems from an individual feeling of helplessness in the face of the vastness of the world. Sort of a "You screwed me over today, but tomorrow you're gonna get yours" thing, like a very angry karma concept.