Rhetoric | What Was God's Plan?

Rhetoric | What Was God's Plan?

What Was God’s Plan?

©  2021 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com  – Originally posted in rough-draft to Twitter on 12/2/2021

 

I hauled out the fake Christmas tree and put it together yesterday. We haven’t decorated it yet, but while I sit here in the pre-dawn darkness, meditating—it’s pretty lights, the only illumination in the room—my thoughts go to Christianity.

   Let’s assume, rhetorically, that the “Bible” is true, and when those first scrolls were being “inspired” about 4,000 (?) years ago, the spirit-author decided to reveal all knowledge to a solitary tribe. Considering the multiple thousands of tribes which circled the globe and spanned the great oceans at that time – why?  Moreover, why would he (male, being his self-described gender) complicate matters for that tribe by telling them that they were special and that the goyim (other nations) were to be strictly shunned and avoided? If you haven’t read the Old Testament, you should. The details of that continual brow-beating about the nearby “pagans” up to and including ordering that tribe to commit genocide against them (man, woman, child and beast) is never taught in Sunday School is it?  Maybe it was at some session, during the majority of my life, when I was absent. But it is a rather inconvenient foundation upon which to base the advent of a “Prince of Peace” isn’t it?

The goyim described in the early pages of the Bible worshipped gods who took the form of various  beasts, or worse: monstrous hybrids of man and beast.  Fast forward to the Christian Era in Judaea. A new “creation story” unfolds during a time of relatively rapid travel and communication.  Was that the plan? 

The promulgation of that story was pointed West into the heart of the Greco-Roman world where the gods, rather than being monstrous, physically, were conceived to have human shape (and all too human foibles as well.) That thrust toward the West was so successful that Christianity became the “state religion” for a major part of world’s greatest land-mass. 

Fast forward again, a few centuries, and the power of various governmental schisms within “Christianity” is being used to take word of the “Prince of Peace” to previously unknown corners of the globe, spreading the word at the point of the sword—again, to the point of genocide for uncooperative indigenous peoples. We are still rhetorically assuming this was truly an “inspired” plan. Or are we?