I’d like to harken back for a moment to last week’s reference to Jaclyn Glenn and the many excellent points she makes in her YouTube messages (which are pro-atheism and anti-Christian). If I could summarize one of her main themes, this would be it: “The best argument against Christianity is Christians.” In my humble opinion, she nails it in those seven short words. If I could amend her argument slightly, I would say the best argument against Christianity is “Christians.” Those quotation marks are code for so-called Christians, for nominal Christians, for people who are Christians in name only. “Christians” seem to comprise the majority of Christians. This should come as no surprise: after all, the guy who started all this – uh, that would be Christ – said something like “the road to destruction is like a crowded superhighway, but the road to life is a narrow path few can find and fewer still ever travel.”
Judging the truth of Christianity or the existence of God by the actions of “Christians” is like… well, picture this: A pioneer of the early 1800s roams uncharted territory in the old west. He is a good and decent man, pious some say, but never aloof or superior. He is warm and likable. The moral principles he lives by are lofty, and he even writes a little book of them and sends it back east as he roams the west. It becomes a best-seller because people aspire to follow his precepts, yet few can manage to do so.
As he roams the vast landscape of the west, this devout man discovers a pristine lake that secretly sparkles in the shadow of majestic mountains. He promotes the lake as a spiritual place, a beautiful haven of serenity and peace, sort of a Walden West, where people can commune with and draw closer to the Creator. The lake is still named after him to this day, but as the decades have gone by the lake is now most well known for wild and licentious Spring Break revelries held there. The lake has become synonymous with drunken orgies and all kinds of brazen behavior the early explorer would be shocked by and would repudiate. Several episodes of Girls Gone Wild have even been filmed there. Bizarre cults call the campgrounds surrounding the lake their home base. Others try to follow the pioneer in the strictest style, going far beyond his guidelines. All the groups connected with the lake, whether they’re licentious or super-strict, claim they’re following the old pioneer.
As a result of all this, quite a few people say they no longer believe the pioneer of the 1800s could have discovered such a lake. Still others no longer believe he ever existed in the first place. He was just a legend of an earlier, simpler era and its quaint mythologies. The man’s historical reality becomes more and more clouded with every passing year. Others have their doubts, but still believe the man’s principles work sometimes, even if he was just a fable or legend.
My analogy may be flawed here and there, but it seems to accurately describe the fallacy of rejecting the value of Christian principles – or even the existence of God – based on the actions of others. If you were selling a painting by Van Gogh that was locked away in a vault and you had to paint a depiction of the work for the prospective buyer, would your less than stellar effort in any way reduce the value of the masterpiece?
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