You Shall Know The Lie, and the Lie Shall Set You Free

My Australian friend Kathy has been working for some time now on a critique of Vision Forum's indefensibly dishonest Jonathan Parks radio adventure series.  

It's thankless work, researching and publishing the precise nature of the lies that Christians tell.  If you take a few minutes to go over a few of her blog posts you'll see why it could be disheartening.

When Christianity feels it depends on the most shallow, unreflective view of the world, when it feels that no argument is too silly to use so long as it helps prop up its "biblical" (?) world-view, it is the enemy of the truth.

Vision Forum has aggressively committed itself to such a faith, and it has to be opposed.

Christianity doesn't have to be that way, and usually isn't, thank God.  But when Christianity lives and dies by the literal interpretation of Genesis, its colossal mendacity cannot be contained.

Kathy recently wrote that her heart wasn't in it anymore.  It's easy to see why: no matter how thoroughly and intelligently she opposes the lies, Vision Forum's hydra grows another head.  What's the use?  They're not going to stop lying.... are they?

Probably not.  The latest installment, Kathy reports, contains the following bewildering (and false) representation of Communism:

America's founders knew that God was the rightful ruler of every nation and that governments must stick to the Bible. Sadly, many other countries have been led by tyrants. Tyrants are people who want absolute power. They want to run their government without being accountable to their people, or even to God.

Under communism, these rulers make the God of the Bible illegal. They claim to own everything and they seize anything they want from people who work very hard. And they try to control every person, and every thought. And they pretend that they can solve every problem and meet every human need.

But their ideas are so opposed to the Bible. They get everything backward - even good and evil. They punish good people and reward the bad. Communist rulers all through history are people who ruin their countries with poverty, misery and much death.

They forgot that the Creator is control of all things. Psalm 33:12 says "Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance."

So Vision Forum is doing for politics now what it did for science.

Kathy's having some trouble knowing precisely where to grip this slippery account of reality. 

But she'll find a way.

Somebody has to.

To Kathy, and people like her:

I think your critiques of the Jonathan Parks series have been incredible reading, and I think if Christianity is going to survive with any pretensions to intellectual respectability at all, it has to self-police in the way you're doing there. 

Furthermore, I think that weakminded people who are swayed by that stuff, who often feel equipped to argue about the things they only understand through the Adventure Series, might very well find their way to your blog as they try to fill out their knowledge so they can make an embarrassing pest of themselves elsewhere. 

Please don't give up yet. I know it feels like carrying water in a thimble, but it's one of the most important, tedious, rewarding things a person of intellectual honesty can do.

And not just because it puts the critique in the archive, but because it does model for other Christians the importance of asking the simple question, "Is it true?"

Comments

[Kathy]

Thanks for this, Otter. I wish I had your way with words.

[Michelle]

Thanks for pointing me to Kathy's blog. Interesting reads indeed. Just a few short years ago I felt I couldn't believe the things I believe and be a "real" Christian. These days I'm learning about intellectual integrity and how to be a faithful Christian without living a life of denial. I thought I had to stop thinking for myself if I wanted to follow Jesus so I avoided taking the plunge, now I realize I can do both -follow Jesus and live in reality!