Prophets of Lies

The common misunderstanding of the words “prophet” or “prophecy” is that they connote “predictors of the future.” Often the prophets did do that, and often they were right, but sometimes they were wrong. Jeremiah was wrong about the Egyptians, for instance. The true vocation of prophets is to proclaim a biblical perspective on what is going on in any society or culture at any given time. That is to say, they attempt to declare what they believe is God’s unique judgment on the behavior and values of peoples in their own settings and circumstances. Those are the issues which most concern prophets, whether they are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or religiously unaffiliated.

Blood Crying From the Ground

It is both a sad and tragic fact that citizens of the United States of America may be more prone to use violence against one another than the citizens of almost all other nations which have ever existed. That shameful feature is largely explained by how our nation came into being. Astonishingly, we defeated the strongest empire then in existence in an armed revolution against Great Britain in order to gain our independence. One of the main reasons behind that victory is likely that the citizen-soldiers of the thirteen colonies were better marksmen than the professional Redcoats. Americans had become quite proficient at killing both Indians and game animals with their guns in order to secure the land and their living. Our forebears were so good at what they did that within less than a century of winning the revolution they had created the third-largest geographical nation on earth, and much of that rapid expansion occurred by means of violence.

Jonah: The Darkness from Disobeying God

God wanted Jonah to go to the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh and rail against it for the sins of the Ninevites. Jonah refused to do it, and set sail on a ship headed for Spain. God sent a great storm against the ship, the narrative says, and in order to keep from capsizing, the sailors threw Jonah overboard. They did so at his own bidding, however, and not because of their terror. I realize these details may be as hard to swallow as it was for the whale to swallow Jonah, but we must move on to Chapter Two, which describes the situation in which Jonah found himself, after literarily being sucked into the alimentary system of the largest creature in saltwater or on land.

Jonah: The Schlimazel

There is nothing else in the entire Bible that is like the prophecy of Jonah. It is simply a whale of a tale. It is short, consisting of only four chapters. Old Testament scholars speculate that it was written sometime after the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, which occurred in the sixth century BCE. It is a fictional story, not intended to be perceived as factual, although countless biblical literalists believe it to be factual. It would be like supposing that Gulliver’s Travels or Pilgrim’s Progress are historical accounts.

The Immorality of Anti-Abortion LAWS

The Bible says nothing anywhere about abortion. Probably women tried abortions in biblical times, but not like they are performed today in hospitals or clinics. They likely jumped several feet out of trees or off large rocks or by another, similarly dangerous method. Afterwards, if they survived, either they knew that the pregnancy was or wasn’t over. Back then, miscarriages and abortions were totally a private matter, and had almost no social ramifications at all.

Guns: A Peculiarly American Obsession

In the USA, over a hundred people a day are killed by firearms. That’s close to a thousand per week. It is over 40,000 per year. Three-fourths of all murders involve guns. Six out of every ten firearms deaths are because of suicide. Killing oneself by a gun is considered a surefire way of self-annihilation (pun sadly but deliberately intended.) And because there are so many guns available to almost everyone in this country, is it any wonder that we have one of the highest (but not the highest) rates of suicide?

Was Easter Inevitable?

How could this have happened? Jesus was so peace-loving, so charismatic, so spiritually powerful! There was no one who encountered him who was not profoundly affected by him! He could not be dead! Not him; not Jesus! If he was dead, how could they ever live without him? He had turned each of them from being no one in particular to someone very special! Because he was so completely alive, they had become completely alive! And now he was gone!