Several years ago I went antelope hunting in Wyoming with a friend who was a Mormon. At night we’d sit around the campfire and discuss various things and invariably we got around to discussing religion.
I’d studied the Mormon’s founder Joseph Smith a little, and asked my buddy about his 34 some odd marriages including ten women under the age of twenty. (Four were nineteen, three were seventeen, one was sixteen, and two were fourteen) which in my mind made him a sex pervert and pedophile guilty of rape. I also asked him about Smith’s claim of finding golden tablets (that somehow mysteriously disappeared and no one but him ever saw). He claimed they were written to the new world, (the Americas). He declared he was the guy God had chosen to translate them. I related some of the craziest notions that Smith had said and written during his life.
Then I questioned that the Bible states in Revelation: “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book. He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming quickly.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus . . . ”
I asked, “Did God make a mistake when He left out the part about adding the Book of Mormon? According to this scripture old Joe would never see heaven???”
Then finally with a smirk on my face I smugly asked him about the way that Smith and his brother died in a shootout in a jail and summed it up by asking how he could possibly believe in a religion whose founder was such an obvious “Jim Jones style charlatan” who’d perverted God’s word in order to justify his own aberrant sexual lifestyle and narcissism.
My buddy coldly looked at me and calmly said that people can get killed over deriding someone else’s belief system. I was young and fiery in those days and I can assure you that I was not the least bit worried about being killed by him and it was not going to keep me up at night, but I did immediately feel bad about belittling him for his belief system that he held dear. I told him just that and we changed the subject and didn’t discuss religion for the rest of the trip.
To be candid I was not really interested in proselytizing him, rather I was just needling him and deriding his faith system. Shame on me for this black sin! If I would have asked questions and got him to thinking where he genuinely sought answers, I might have had a chance of introducing him to the truth of Jesus.
This incident came to mind when I saw Sony get hacked and attacked over the raunchy film about Kim Jong-Un. I did not see the movie but a friend told me it was laced with cursing and ended by blowing up Kim Jong-Un’s head.
Hollywood – Ughhh!
So now some cartoonists and editors have been murdered for among other things depicting Mohammed taking a bath in blood; another depicts a spoof cover of Closer magazine with an image of a bearded “Madame Mohammed” showing her breasts. Then there were the two images that show rear views of a naked Prophet Mohammed as if posing for an X-rated movie. The most extreme drawing shows a Muslim man – (not the Prophet himself) – threatened with anal sex, (which by the way was a sex act that many report was approved by Mohammed).
Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, described the drawings as a “disgraceful and hateful, useless and stupid provocation” but he urged the faithful not to react “like animals of Pavlov to . . . each insult”.
This same cartoonist group has mocked all religions including depicting the pope on multiple occasions, but perhaps the most famous is the 2010 image of Pope Benedict XVI performing communion and holding a condom above his head saying “This is my body”.
While I believe strongly in free speech I also believe in decency. Here in the United States a so-called artist put a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it art. We taxpayers paid for that idiocy through the NEA. Not long ago they made a movie about Jesus and depicted Him as a homosexual, and another portrayed him as having sex with Mary Magdalene.
I love my God more than life itself and honestly it makes my blood boil and my flesh wants to give these clowns’ heads the taste of a baseball bat as I try to knock one right after another out of the park. The Holy Spirit holds me back.
I intensely dislike the rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist church. They carry anti-Semitic signs around and signs that say “God hates fags”. They disrupt military funerals and stomp on the American flag. Their ideology is extreme and they are a hate group. Imagine them protesting at your fallen military hero son’s funeral. They deliberately provoke people who are grieving and it would not surprise me if someone put a bullet in one of their heads for it.
I’ve been to many Baptists churches and never once saw anything remotely akin to these nuts and their ideology. Unfortunately when someone sees all of this happening under the Baptist name they lump them all together, (especially secular folks with no religious background). I don’t believe the fanatical Muslim Jihadists represent the entire Muslim world, but their sins are so egregious that some want to lump them altogether and “kill ‘em all and let God sort them out”. Jesus said to hate the sin, but love the sinner, but sometimes it is awful hard to follow this command as instructed.
So should we change our free speech laws as the Democrats in the Senate tried last year?
The problem with curtailing free speech is who gets to decide what we can or cannot say and hear. Many in our current administration would make it a hate crime today to read the Bible’s references to homosexuality being an abomination if they only had the votes. Over time they would also put anyone who disagrees with them in jail like Hitler did. Unfortunately unless we want to live in a closed society like Iran, North Korea, or Cuba we have to take the good with the bad on the issue of free speech, but we can encourage people to be decent and civil.
Jesus told us the solution to our dilemma. “’YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’” . . .
But alas not enough in this world follow it. Paul noted this and described it better than I can below. As for me I’m trying to let my light shine, but it seems I experience a power shortage now and then when I see what is going on in this fallen world. It’s a good thing my Holy Spirt generator kicks in when I begin to dim too much.
Have a great weekend and go to Honey Lake Church this Sunday. Remember to bring someone who is hurting to hear Jenn Harris. You won’t be sorry!
James 3:4
Look at the ships also, though they are so great and are driven by strong winds, are still directed by a very small rudder wherever the inclination of the pilot desires. So also the tongue is a small part of the body, and yet it boasts of great things. See how great a forest is set aflame by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, the very world of iniquity; the tongue is set among our members as that which defiles the entire body, and sets on fire the course of our life, and is set on fire by hell . . .
January 9, 2015 – Click here to listen