American Chronicle, CA
Oct 27 2006
A TV Evangelist and Public Ignorance
David Kessel
October 26, 2006
Some two decades ago, I was watching a famous preacher on TV. The
topic for that day’s sermon was `India`. According to the preacher,
India was poor because it was not Christian, and he was inviting
people to go there and teach Christianity. At the end of the speech,
he raised his voice and shouted something like: `Jesus will take that
country out of poverty!’, `Jesus will make India advance!’ The people
in the audience were nodding with meaningful expressions on their
faces- `That’s right! Amen! Jesus will help India!’
`Wait a minute`, I said to myself- `doesn’t the audience know that
there are many countries that are even poorer than India and that are
Christian, to boot? Don’t they remember that just some time ago,
there was a huge drive on TV to gather food and medical supplies to
be sent to starving Ethiopians most of whom were Christians?" Were
the people, enthralled by the charisma of the evangelist, so
uninformed and with such a short memory as to not have been aware of
such important details?
On another occasion, I was reading a publication by a very radical
Christian organization in which there was an article that said that
the Jews had suffered the Holocaust because they would not accept
Jesus. Ha! You mean, if the Jews had converted to Christianity, the
Holocaust would not have happened? Dream on! Don’t they know that the
Nazis were very busy asking foreign governments to give them the
names of converted Jews (which they duly received) so that they could
send them to the gas chambers along with the non-converted ones?
Don’t they know of so many devoted Christians who had ended up in
Auschwitz along with the Jews? The authors were probably not aware of
such niceties of history or thought the readers were not aware of
these small details, either. Is ignorance really such bliss when they
can mislead you by having you believe such worthless statements?
And if the Holocaust was the punishment for not becoming Christians,
what did those who were, in fact, Christians, suffer for when
genocides were carried against them? I mean, the Armenians, for one.
At the beginning of the 20th century as many as 1.5million very
Christian Armenians were annihilated by the Ottoman Turks. What was
that for? That shouldn’t have happened- they had accepted Jesus and
thus, they should have been protected. Why did they perish? And, one
also forgets the massacres of the Huguenots in France when
Protestants were being killed in broad daylight by the hundreds of
thousands. What was that for? For not accepting Jesus, either? Hmm.
Who do these fundamentalists think I am? Some kind of dodo?
Two decades after that speech, India is doing very well. The reason
for the economic progress of the country is the move from a very
staid socialism to a more dynamic, market -driven economy and the
relaxation of restrictions on foreign investment. That, coupled with
a strong IT base, has moved the country out of poverty. And the
country is still predominantly Hindu with a strong Muslim minority.
And Japan, a Shinto-Buddhist country, may have suffered a setback in
the 1990ies, but it was then and still is the world’s second largest
economy. How come that preacher did not mention that in his sermon,
and why didn’t anyone in the audience question him about that?
Today, many African and Latin American countries who are devoutly
Christian- Guatemala, El Salvador, Kenya, etc. are still mired in
poverty and corruption. And the long suffering regions of Sudan where
so many people have been dying of starvation – did you see the horrid
pictures of people eating leaves from the trees?-are mostly
Christian. So, what gives, preacher?
I respect, and see good in any religion, and if there is Heaven, I
believe that good and upright people will go there regardless of what
they believe in. I also believe that people who work hard and are
honest in their dealings with others will prosper, no matter what
their religion is. And that misfortune can befall any group
regardless of their faith. However, those Christian fanatics who
claim that the sufferings- political, economic or otherwise, of
others are due to the fact that they did not convert to these
preachers’ particular religion make me mad. Not only they are totally
disrespectful of the distress of others, but they display morbid
ignorance of world history and politics.
However, the thing that angers me the most is that they take me, or
any reader or listener, for a fool because those who can actually
fall for their outrageous claims must be, in fact, complete fools.
ticle.asp?articleID=15465