Franklin Graham is telling his flock that God showed
up on Election Day and that is why Donald Trump won. God wanted him to be His man, His
"Cyrus", to lead this country.
(See Isaiah 45.5) His flock
believes that and praises God with joyful song... and vitriolic condemnation of
those godless, atheistic progressives who voted against him. Objective analysis? That's liberal egghead talk meant to divert
one's attention from the real issue of God making America a great Christian
nation again. Judgment of its
verity? Well, Franklin Graham said it
and he has the mind and heart of God. And
if you doubt it, well, you're a doubting Thomas and unless you fall on your
knees and intone "My Lord and my God!" you will languish in unbelief.
That's in John 20.28.
But the next verse is where we have the Biblical
condemnation of thinking critically: John 20.29: "Jesus
saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed
are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."
Believing without seeing is a
blessing. Believing it when you see it,
that's critical thinking. So if
you're a critical thinker, you're at best a backslidden Christian and at worst
a godless atheist. So critical thinking
has no place in Christianity.
But wait! There
is a long, long history of critically thinking Christian apologists dating from
Paul himself, through Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to C S Lewis, Alister
McGrath, and others still alive today.
Are these guys "godless atheists"? Apologetics is a systematic set of reasoned
arguments in justification of a religious doctrine or a scientific theory. Read the Epistles of St Paul, St Augustine's City of God, St Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, C S Lewis's Mere Christianity, and/or Alister
McGrath's trilogy A Scientific Theology. Critical thinking itself is really not
godless or even progressive. But listening
to evangelicals today, you'd think it is.
There is a video of Gina Rodriguez's interview
with President Obama that was taped November 3, 2016 in which she says,
"Many of the millennials, dreamers, undocumented, citizens -- I call them
"citizens" because they contribute to this country -- are fearful of
voting. So if I vote, will Immigration
know where I live? Will they come for my
family and deport us?"
Obama answers, "Not true. And the reason is, first of all, when you
vote, you are a citizen yourself. And
there is not a situation where the voting rolls are somehow transferred over
and people start investigating..."
It was clumsily worded, but critical thinking
will let you know that the President of the United States would not on
television encourage "illegals" to vote. What he was saying was, first of all, if you
are voting, then that is proof you are a citizen, and citizens will not be deported. Then he went on to say that your voting
record is totally confidential and no one is going to give all the addresses of
all the Latina and Latino citizens to Immigration to come and hunt down your
possibly undocumented friends and family.
Critical thinking will let you realize that if
you're undocumented, you can't even register to vote, let alone actually
vote. You need proof of citizenship to
register. You need to be registered to
vote.
On the other hand, if you want to smear President
Obama and rile up your conservative Christian followers, you'll skip the
critical thinking part, hope your audience doesn't know how to use it, and
claim that the President made this shocking statement that illegals can safely
vote without being followed up on and deported.
Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have
believed. Blessed are they who just take
Franklin Graham's word for it and don't analyze or evaluate.
.jpg)