It Puzzles Me.

        So, as I was leafing through the “lifestyle” section of the local paper looking for my daily Sudoku, Jumble, and the Saturday Stumper (usually a really nasty crossword puzzle), my eye caught a column, apparently from beyond the grave, with the author listed as Billy Graham.

        I have long believed that the only dead person whose work remains good enough to reprint in the newspaper is the late Charles Shultz.  Peanuts typically carried far more rational and moral messages than anything the mercenary Mr. Graham ever spewed. (Warning! That was an opinion).

        Today's retread was a column entitled “The Only Road to Heaven goes Through Jesus.”  Processing that statement is revelatory when one attempts to process the tremendously un-Christian attitudes of many of the current crop of Evangelicals who would inflict their ethos and dogmatic beliefs on the entire body politic. It should be noted that this includes a large number of beliefs which are not derived from any philosophy attributed to Jesus.    

        The clear implication begins with the assurance that only Christians (and by implication that only those who are true fundamentalists will have any continued existence in any sense after death. Considering the Pat Robertsons, Rick Santorums, Ann Coulters, and Ted Cruzes, that might well be a plus. It also consigns all the rest of the world’s devout worshippers to someplace else. 

       In Graham World, the list of those not worthy of heaven would include, Einstein, The Dalai Lama, Socrates, Pat Tillman, Katherine Hepburn, Thomas Jefferson, and (probably for the best), Mark Twain. It’s a real shame, too, because I’d pay well to see Dylan Roof, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gayce, Christians all, explain their murderous actions to Elie Wiesel and Mohandas Gandhi, who as a Jew and a Hindu, don’t have a chance of eternal life. Really sounds childishly ridiculous in that context doesn’t it?