Religious faith - points everywhere...and nowhere.

   

     Christian churches are not about the overarching message of the Protestant Bible, but rather about which interpretation of the book is correct. They all squabble with each other over the most inconsequential, ignorant, and petty things in their interpretations (Immersion vs. sprinkling, wine vs. grape juice, Saturday vs. Sunday...etc.) but they fail to address whether the bible is even worth basing an entire life-system on. (Full Disclosure: It's not.) Then, there's the matter of the Protestant Bible deriving from the Catholic Bible with its six extra books. Which one is the real "Christian" book? Does older mean truer and more reliable?

    Christianity's core is completely lacking in substance but has been protected, camouflaged, and embellished over the centuries spawning several offshoot industries and power centers all meant to conceal its main emptiness. They were designed to gloss over that emptiness and give it a veneer of authenticity, reliability, and truth. It is none of those things. It only pretends to be. 

    The Christians themselves sum it up with their vacuous "You just gotta have faith." What good does that do in proving the truth of something? If faith is all that is required, then Muslims are right about their faith. Mormons are right about theirs. Hindus are right about theirs... Who could ever be wrong if "you just gotta have faith?" 

It's time to grow up and realize gods were created by cavemen to explain thunder and lightning.

Cold-Cocking for Jesus

Nothing speaks to the veracity of religion better than a good, solid punch. Cold-cocking someone into having faith or as a way of getting them to question their non-belief is just what God wants. Otherwise, why would He have said in Exodus 21:19 that “the one who struck the blow will not be held liable if the other can get up and walk around outside with a staff…”. People are convinced of a supernatural being’s existence if someone bloodies their nose or sucker-punches them as proof.

Eric Dammann, a pastor at Bible Baptist Church in Hasbrouck Heights New Jersey, discovered a surprisingly successful knuckle-ministering technique. Last month his church posted a video of him bragging before his congregation about leading a young man to Christ by punching him in the chest “as hard as he could”. The video shows him demonstrating just what kind of blow he dished out on the unsuspecting youth, a short clip of which you can see at this YouTube address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu7o6l1YAt8

Seems while Eric was visiting a youth group in Calgary Canada years earlier he met Ben who he describes as a nice, bright kid, but a smart aleck, which in Eric’s mind made him dangerous. Throughout Eric’s proselytizing and preaching, the young man didn't seem to be taking “the Lord serious” [sic]. (What he meant was Ben wasn't taking him seriously.)This apparently enraged Eric because he said he then “walked over to him and went BAM, punched him in the chest as hard as I could. I crumpled the kid, I just crumpled him.” He then claims he leaned over the young man and said “Ben, when are you going to stop playing games with God?” (He meant stop playing games with him.) and this kid willingly converted right then and there.

I’m sure he did. I’ll bet Eric doesn’t think the kid did it out of, say, duress or to keep from being slugged again. Instead of God convincing the wayward youth, Eric decided it was up to him to show Ben that he may be a man of peace with the love of Jesus inside…it didn't extend to his fist. That’s where his God abided. And that God spoke to smart-alecky kids by being balled up and slammed into their chests. God loves a cheerful giver.

  I wonder what the kid's parents thought when they heard some American preacher came to their town and, in order to convert their son, he beat him to the ground. Hopefully, Pastor Dammann has a good lawyer in his congregation because he is going to need him now that he's admitted to child abuse.

I was surprised when researching this story that there have been numerous recent incidents of ministers who applied Eric's method in their own churches. They just didn't post anything on a webpage or on Facebook afterward. Many lawsuits have been filed as a result and there were several photographs of kids with split lips, swollen faces or black and blue marks on their chests, but none of the preacher-suspects used the opportunity to say they did it for God. Most admitted they just lost their temper.

  For me, this story was not a new one. In the 1950s and '60s my grandfather, a Disciples of Christ minister, preached about his youthful memories of a tall, brawny and very combative preacher who used to go into taverns, barrooms and hotels in West Virginia in the late 1800s and challenge men to a fight. He would then beat them senseless after eliciting a promise from them that, if he won, they had to attend services while he was at the local church or his tent revival was in town. Grandfather never seemed to grasp the irony of talking about Jesus who supposedly said ‘Turn the other cheek’, and then in the same sermon he all but gushed about this preacher slugging and pounding people until they were streaming blood, covered with bruises (and in some cases needing immediate medical attention), in order to get them to accept the preacher's religion. Jesus was always portrayed by my grandfather as the complete antithesis of this supposed man-of-God who was nothing more than a bully with a bible. Terrorists use fear as a way of achieving their aims, and fear was this preacher’s technique, but instead of using the fear of hell, he used the fear of his fist and another thrashing. I often wondered if grandfather secretly wished he could have put the fear of God into people the same way. It confirmed to me that fear is man-made...and religion is fear.

Worshipping Nonsense

              On April 20th, Easter Sunday, a letter to the editor from Richard Pluth of Casselberry was published in the local newspaper entitled ‘Worshipping the creation’, claiming an undefined ‘some’, later identified as ‘modern environmentalists’, had created a new religion that, in his words, worships a mass of rock and soil on Earth Day.

             Mr. Pluth asserts that this environmental religion has spawned new high priests known as scientists, is infallible, its orthodoxy cannot be questioned, and the commandments are not to be debated or challenged. All these are pointed out to the reader as unmistakably negative attributes. Yet the religion he is contrasting it with is every bit as undesirable. The Christian bible is claimed to be the infallible word of God simply because it says so. Christianity brooks no debate or challenge to the commandments, its orthodoxy cannot be questioned, and it has rewards and punishments. Those who don’t conform will not only be ostracized, the believers will tell them they are going to hell. As little as five hundred years ago, the non-believers would have been burned at the stake. Nothing says a belief is true like the threat of death if you don’t subscribe to it. The message of God of the bible is: “You humans that I created have offended me. Here, take my son and murder him so I can forgive you.” And He loves us so much; He created a special place called hell just in case we don’t love Him back. That is not the hallmark of an intelligent creator.

            For reasons only Mr. Pluth can explain, he also juxtaposes Vladimir Lenin’s birthday with the same date as Earth Day, April 22^nd, as though one had something to do with the other. Lenin may have been many things, but an environmentalist he was not. He didn’t give a damn about the environment, only building up the Soviet state at any and all cost. His faith was in communism, not environmentalism. Mr. Pluth starts off his article by mentioning ironies but fails to note that this Easter Sunday is also the birthdate of Adolf Hitler. So if Lenin and Earth Day are synonymous, does that mean there is a correlation between Easter and the Fuhrer?

            When it comes to science, Mr. Pluth’s scorn for rationality comes out at the end of his letter where he claims he puts his trust in a dead man who walked out of a grave. Isn’t that the description of a zombie…a dead being who walks out of a grave? And that is supposed to be a valid argument against science?

            What we can agree on is that religion or faith is not a good thing.