Sarah St. John thinks she’s written an original book. It’s called, Is This The Best God Can Do?. She was talking about this book on the radio yesterday with Michael Medvid. Growing disillusioned with Christianity, Miss John has embraced a kind of combination between Christianity and Hinduism.
This, of course, is an impossible thing for any thinking person to do but generally when religion is the subject, people assume that all thought can go out the window. They figure it’s only about blind faith anyway and they have very emotional, non-rational reasons for making their choices. This does not have to be the case. If God truly exists, He is a genuine being, an authentic entity, and very involved with reality.
Miss John admits that her mother’s death threw her into a faith crisis. She could not believe that her unsaved mother went to hell after dying, so she decided to stop calling herself a Christian in the classical, exclusive sense of the term. I am sympathetic to the woman’s predicament. No one wants to believe that a loved one is in hell. Let me say for the record that neither Miss John nor anyone else needs to assume that they know the eternal destiny of a family member. Who can say what may have transpired between her mother and God in those moments of crossing from time into eternity? God looks at the heart. There is even a verse in Acts 17 that says God takes sincere ignorance into account. I personally think this means people are not necessarily rejected simply for not having become a Christian. It may depend on their reasons for the rejection. Jesus died for our sins whether we are aware or not. Pushing Jesus away deliberately because we’d rather live a life of sin certainly creates a problem on judgment day. But supposing one was sincerely misinformed or led astray and turned off by church going hypocrites? Perhaps God will take that into consideration. It sad that Miss John did not consider this before discarding Christianity.
At the same time, Miss John evidently had little if any problem with the doctrine of hell until it became personal. For this reason, her changed position becomes just a tad bit disingenuous. We cannot cherry pick our doctrines. If in fact there is a hell, then the place will continue to exist whether we like it or not. And if there is a hell, everyone going there is either a father, mother, sister, brother, son, daughter, husband, wife, or relative. The rules do not change simply because we are related.
This leads to the crux of the problem: We should not be asking ourselves which religion we like. We should be asking ourselves which religion is true. That did not seem to be a concern for Sarah St. John. Neither did the contradiction of mixed religions occur to her. She enthusiastically admitted to accepting the Hindu belief that God is everything. He is all of nature, trees, mountains, rain and He is also all people and all animals. He is the stars and rocks and dust…everything. This idea cannot possibly co-exist with the Biblical definition of God: A thinking, feeling, sentient being who created the entire universe. According to Christianity, God made the tree. According to Hinduism, God is the tree. We cannot have it both ways.
Miss John also accepts the Hindu idea of reincarnation. She believes people keep returning and keep evolving. She talked about the changes in technology as evidence that we are evolving. Actually, the change in technology proves no such thing. The people who invented the rocket ships were not smarter than the ones who invented the wheel. It’s just that the latter had thousands of years of accumulated information to work off of. Besides, we certainly aren’t evolving morally. The worst atrocities ever committed against man (such as the Holocaust) were committed in the twentieth century. The terrorist acts of the twenty first century are not far behind. So where is this evolution? And again, this feature of Hinduism also contradicts the Bible. Jesus taught that we would resurrect after we die as the same person and that in heaven we will remain that person for all of eternity.
Now then, saying two religions contradict simply means that at least one of them is not true. They can very well both be false. Providing evidence for Christianity goes beyond the scope of today’s blong entry. But I have many articles on the subject and have written a whole book about Christian evidence. (See my website link at the bottom)
As for now, a good start toward critiquing Pantheism (the philosophy behind the Hindu, “God is everything” idea) would be to ask how evil men like Hitler or Stalin were a part of God. Remember, the phrase, “God is everything” sounds great while talking about cute fuzzy creatures frolicking in the forest. But “everything” is a very big word.
In any event, I know Miss John is sincere and she sounds like a very nice lady, but she really isn’t proposing anything new. The combination of religions isn’t exactly an earth shattering idea. I’ve been hearing about this mixture of religions for years. It comes up in almost every conversation I engage in and there are whole religions based on the idea of mixing several faiths together such as the Unitarians and the Ba’hai faith. Actually, syncretistic religion took place as far back as Biblical times. God condemned it. He called it idol worship.
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