Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Ask and Ye shall Receive: Off the Peg Belief
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Faith: Off the Peg Belief!
Christians, especially the door knocking evangelical types, always are sure about their faith. Few of them ever seem to have wondered about the basis of other faiths or tried them on for size. They prefer their Christianity straight off the peg. Christians have an easy task, it seems, though they always make out it is far too hard for atheists or anyone else who has been offered it and rejected it. All they have to do is believe! Once they do that, they can move mountains, ask for anything and get it, and feel assured that they will be regaled even more handsomely than the lilies in the field.
The trouble is that all of this is plainly untrue. The poorest people in the world, mainly non-white or only slightly white people, remain as poor as they ever were, dressed in rags and scarcely getting a crust to eat. Right wing oil barons from Texas are invariably white and wealthy, and so have a good reason for accepting these Christian “truths”, and making a show of going to church. Anyone who thinks at all, even shallowly, cannot help but noticing this and asking more questions about the real role of Christianity in society.
The people who believe, believe without question, or at least are satisfied without adequate answers. It is these inadequate answers that Christians blithely spread about as Christian truth. There are always plenty of people who are gullible, or think the best even of the wicked, and cannot see why evangelics should want to con them. Such people have accepting or dependent personalities, essentially opposed to questioning or asking for reasons. They are putty in the hands of the doorstep and pulpit Christian missionaries, who encourage this blind acceptance because it makes their task easier—getting recruits who will remain loyal, through avoiding doubts.
There is no good reason in life why human beings should avoid doubting. Doubt is what motivates and causes us to solve the problems that enable us to exist, and to exist happily. The churches do not want thinkers but automatons, who will imagine they are paying for their salvation by putting bills or coins in the collection platter. The professional Christians that take the money from the platter, are much more likely to ask questions, but few will rock the gravy boat by revealing what they have found.
The many people brought up in some form of Christian faith, who actually wonder about it, are taught to have faith and not to question for fear of losing eternal life! But nowadays, with the extension of education and the secular acceptability of doubt, the churches are having to take the opposite tack, telling people it is quite natural and therefore all right by God to doubt to some degree, as long as ultimately their faith remains sound. They might even suggest that the Christian God himself seemed to doubt, though quite how an omniscient God manages to doubt is one of those mysteries that Christians will not attempt to answer. They will warn their doubting flocks not to take their doubts so far as to be cynical—meaning to try out other religions to see whether they fit better. Needless to say, this is the enemy of faith, and therefore will lose believers the bogus reward of eternal life.
