Rant on.

Yesterday I was handed a Christian tract.  This upset me, as I had just had a pleasant conversation with the person who gave it to me, and although we briefly touched on religion, it was in an accepting, non-argumentative manner and I had the belief they were not the pushy religious types.  So I was disappointed when this thing was pushed into my hands anyway.

I did not have time to read it before I went to work.  When I got settled in at work, I looked it up online.  It was called Gunslinger, and it was the worst tract I have ever seen.  Most of these things are laughable–I did a rant once on how far off-base an anti-evolution one was–but this had no humor element whatsoever.

The gist of Gunslinger is that a man who has spent his life doing evil things–killing, robbing, probably raping and other violent things–gets to go to heaven because a preacher convinces him shortly before the end to accept Jesus as his savior, etc.  The lawman who brought the gunslinger to trial and oversaw his hanging goes to hell because he did not accept Jesus as his savior.

Pardon the language, but what kind of fucked up lesson is this?  Let me put this into more earthly terms.  Imagine a judge in a court somewhere who lets criminals go free if they call him “your honor” and recognize him as a judge, but jails people in his courtroom who (for whatever reason) do not.  That would be insane and it’s easy to see it would not be tolerated, but this is what this Gunslinger says is just fine when Jesus is the one who must be recognized.

I confess that I have not read a significant portion of the Bible.  However, what I have read has not shown me Jesus teaching anyone he should be treated divinely.  In fact, I always felt he wanted to be treated as human, or at least as an example of what a regular person should be.  His lessons seem more to be centered on loving one another.  Sure, he seemed willing to forgive sinners who truly regretted the evil things they did and who turned away from whatever terrible things they did in life, but I don’t know of any case where he forgave somebody just because they decided he (Jesus) was some sort of divine being.

I am not an easily offended person, but I found this bit of literature highly offensive.  “It’s okay to be evil as long as you call Jesus is divine, but not okay to be good if you don’t.”  I honestly can’t think of a worse lesson to be teaching.

Rant off.