Jesus— The Pathetic Communicator

Whenever I venture out into foreign nations, particularly those third-world countries with non-Christian religions, I am always struck by one supremely evident reality. When describing the Christian God, He or She or It, or whatever the hell the father figure is supposed to be, is without doubt a perfectly terrible communicator. If we accept the basic belief of Christianity— that one can attain everlasting life in Heaven only by accepting Jesus Christ as a Savior, then that belief (if true) would be the most important single fact in the life of every human being on the planet. One would think that a loving and fair God would make sure that every human had access to the complete information about the importance of this fact so that every person would be on a level playing field when it came time to save their soul. Alas, such is not the case.

The majority of earth’s people have never heard of the Bible’s teachings, and they think of the Scripture itself (if they think of it at all) as just another famous book— like Moby Dick. Christian fundamentalists still think that their missionaries are getting the word out, but the truth is that most Christian missionaries went out of business when the British Empire went out of business back in the late 1940s. At that time, the global population was less than 2 billion. Since then, the population has increased to nearly 7 billion with almost all of the 5 billion new humans being born into Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu cultures. These are the people who could care less what the Gospels have to say, if they bother to care at all, because they’ve been ignored and condemned to hell by lousy communication from a small-time Savior who doesn’t know how to conduct salvation on a scale as large as five billion people.

You’d think that if God is so almighty that he could create the heavens and the earth, he might be able to accomplish what the most basic public relations professional does every day. He might be able to communicate effectively with a wide audience on a topic of great individual importance. Instead, this supposedly almighty God communicates his all-important game plan with a single parochial publication and a relatively small staff of self-anointed prophets and imperfect teachers, thus insuring that most of his flock will remain ignorant about their own eternal fate until the day they die and it’s too late. My personal belief is that Christian evangelical fundamentalists absolutely like it this way. This little system makes them feel special in their belief that they will be saved, while almost everyone else goes to hell. It’s really all about feeling special.