Worshipers pray with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, seen at center and on screen, at The Response, a daylong prayer and fast rally, Aug. 6, 2011, at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
Credit: AP/Pat Sullivan
Last week, from Oct. 6 to 9, the National Mall in Washington, D.C. was filled with tents, worship music and prayer for the “Awaken the Dawn”rally. The purpose of the event, according to organizer Lou Engle, was to “gather around Jesus,” to pray for the nation and its government. It ended with a day of prayer by Christian women.
This wasn’t the first such event. On April 9, 2016, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, tens of thousands of people gathered to pray for the supernatural transformation of America.
Five years earlier, in August of 2011, more than 30,000 people cheered wildly as the then U.S. presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry – now secretary of energy in the Trump administration – came to the center stage at “The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis”at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
It is a shame that the so called Christians today have not really studied Christianity from an objective perspective. When I studied Christianity under Professor Bart D. Ehrman from the North Carolina University at Chapel Hill, I gained many great scholarly insights about the religion. I also got insights from three of his scholarly books on the subject: “Misquoting Jesus”, and “Forged”, and “Jesus Interrupted”. What I learned, amongst other things, was that The books of the bible are not what they seem to be: some of the books of the Bible were forged and some were written by liars who wrote under the fraudulent names that made it seem like someone else had written them. These books which were selected by those theologians who wished to control people were not chosen because they represented the truth, but because they fit the framework they were putting together for their own reasons which were dubious at best, and fraudulent at worst. There were many other books which were overlooked because they did not fit the agenda of those who put the Christian bible together, and that agenda was not inclined to want the truth, just what fit their agenda of controlling people. Actually, Jesus, Paul, Mathew, and John represented fundamentally different religions. Things like the “Established Christian Doctrines” of the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity were inventions created long after the original writings were put together and added by much later theologions. If all Christians knew these facts, would they still put so much faith in the Bible? I doubt it! Professor Ehrman himself has openly become an agnostic, even though he is still regarded as a great teacher who has won many awards.
Ehrman is a great scholar of the Bible, and even more rare, unusually honest intellectually. But I have come to think the problem here is monotheism as a concept and not this or that incompetent interpretation.
The notion of an omnipotent deity with a personality is intrinsically incoherent, and because of this there has never been agreement about such a being. These ‘Christians’ worship something that were it human would be incarcerated for life as criminally insane. The more wonderful expressions among Christians seem to minimize personality and emphasize more mystical interpretations of deity that approach, or are in fact expressions of, a Godhead, or even monism.