As will often happen when I kind find any other way to pass the time, over the weekend I resorted to reading Chick Tracts.
Spending the hours in a combination of amusement and horrified fascination, I came to a couple of realizations.
For one thing, Jack just can’t even conceive of someone actually believing anything other than what he believes.
This is why, for example, when someone in a tract confronts a Muslim and says, “What you believe is wrong, believe this instead,” it usually either works or results in a response along the lines of, “Ooh, yeah, sorry. I would believe what you believe, but then my friends and family would make fun of me, so I can’t. But yeah, it’s not because I actually believe in Islam or anything. Nobody actually does. We’re choosing not to be Christians because it’s what expected of us or because we want to be different.”
The notion that someone could believe in the precepts of Islam as fervently as Jack believes in the precepts he follows is just completely beyond him.
What’s also mind-boggling is the way that he assumes that just because he believes the bible is inerrant and 100% accurate, so does everyone else. Okay Jack, I understand that you fully believe in its veracity and literal truth because it’s central to your faith, but why would a Hindu who hasn’t been converted over to your way of thinking regard it as the ultimate source of truth?
“You say that Jesus Christ was the son of God? But in the Upanishads it says that…oh, wait, you got that information out of the bible? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? I guess my thinking is all turned around about this thing, because if the bible says something it must be true.”
Apart from the Jack-centric stuff, though, as I read multiple accounts of the Fall of Man in various tracts, I realized something else.
Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Prior to that, they had been happily cavorting about in the nude, but once they ate the fruit they were scrambling to cover themselves. Why? Because the fruit allowed them to see that it was wrong to be naked.
Now here’s where you could run into an interesting ontological question. Was being naked wrong before they ate the fruit and they were simply incapable of seeing that, or did it become wrong after they ate the fruit?
The latter, I think, leans toward a kind of moral relativism that would be unacceptable to most Christians (and especially Jack), who tend towards more of an absolutist system.
But for the sake of argument let’s say that being naked is inherently wrong (and ignore the fact that God was letting them run around starkers for the time being) and that Adam and Eve only became aware of this fact after eating the fruit.
The fruit not only gave them the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong, it introduced the actual concept of “wrong” to them.
Prior to that, they lived in what was described as an “innocent” state, having no concept of right or wrong.
Honestly, to me that sounds like a description of a sociopath.
Is that the “ideal” state in which mankind was supposed to live before becoming aware of the difference between Good and Evil?
I mean, it would make a certain amount of sense. Nothing that man does could be considered wrong because man has no concept of rightness or wrongness.
You could argue that man didn’t need to know the difference because he always did what was right, but how can that be true? After all, Eve ate the fruit and got Adam to do the same, so they already had within them the capability of doing wrong. Not knowing that disobeying God was wrong – since such a concept didn’t exist for them – how could they do anything other than give in to their sociopathic natures and do whatever they felt like doing with no consideration of the consequences, particularly given that they were living in a place that was free of consequences?
But my point is this: their real transgression against God was not disobeying Him, but by learning the difference between right and wrong and developing a conscience.
Just a thought…
In any case, Brian is about to pick me up for lunch.
I’m sure I’ll be back later with a more standard entry.
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