Wednesday, 05 September 2007

• Currently Reading The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare By G. K. Chesterton see related

  Fantasie-Impromptu for (striving after) Winds

  America, as everyone knows who has been here for a while, is a very religious nation.  Even the atheists I've talked to are proud of how well (in their opinions) they know their Bible.
  
  But according to some research reported in this month's issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, 10 percent of Americans believe--
  
  

  Wait.  Let's put that in some context.
  
  "10 percent of Americans" means (assuming the law of averages holds true) over 30 million people believe this.
  
  That means that, statistically speaking, for every ten people you pass on the street, one of them would say this is true.
  
  Now back to the report:
  

  
  10 percent of Americans believe Noah's wife was Joan of Arc.
  
  

  (Pause.)
  

  
  Does this mean that people in this great nation of ours are becoming more and more Biblically illiterate (not to mention ignorant of history)?
  
  Draw your own conclusions:
  
  In the same research, only half of the people surveyed could name even one of the four gospels.
  
  Only one in three knew who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. 
  
  

  (Hint: it wasn't Billy Graham.)
  

  
  Less than half could name the first book of the Bible.
  
  

  Evangelical Christians fared only slightly better than the norm on these questions, by the way.
  

  
  On a more positive note, 3 out of 4 people were quite confident that a certain famous phrase is found in the Bible.
  
  On a more negative note, the phrase in question was, "God helps those who help themselves."
  
  

  Actually, of course, that doesn't occur in the Bible at all but was coined by Benjamin Franklin. 
  
  He's also the one who identified the American form of government as "A republic, if you can keep it."
  
  (We don't seem to be doing very well at that either:  Only one in three of the respondents could identify even one of the rights protected by the First Amendment.)
  

  
  I would venture to suspect that an even smaller percentage of Americans knows that they seem to be fulfilling the Biblical words of the prophet Amos:
  

        "The days are coming," declares the Sovereign LORD,
         "when I will send a famine through the land—
         not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
         but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.

         Men will stagger from sea to sea
         and wander from north to east,
         searching for the word of the LORD,
         but they will not find it."

  --Amos 8:10-11
  

  
  

  It's a tragedy whenever someone starves to death.
  
  It's an even bigger tragedy when they starve to death in the middle of a grocery store. 
  
  

  It's not like the Word of God is all that hard to find in America.  My dad once met a man from China who had never even seen a physical Bible.  "It's probably because I come from a small town," the man explained, "only six million people."  But that's a different story.
  

  
  The prophet Isaiah described a similar kind of famine:
  
  

  And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, "Read this," he says, "I cannot, for it is sealed." And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, "Read this," he says, "I cannot read."
  
  

  (Ever hear someone refusing to read the Bible because "it's too complicated"?
  Ever gotten even more discouraged when that person is a theological scholar?)
  

  
  

  And the Lord said:
  "Because this people draw near with their mouth
     and honor me with their lips,
     while their hearts are far from me,
  and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men,
  therefore...
  

  (Aha, God is going to judge them for being such hypocrites?)
  (No, actually a bit more exciting:)
  

  
  

  ...behold, I will again
     do wonderful things with this people,
     with wonder upon wonder;
  and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish,
     and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden."
  
  

  Isaiah 29:11-14
  
  

  That's encouraging: 
  
  Whenever it seems that knowledge of God's word is lost, and faith in God becomes a matter of rote, God steps in and shows up the philosophers of religion. 
  
  God shows how wonderful He is, and what wonderful things He can do.
  
  That silences those who think that His wonderful word can't be understood.
  
  If you don't think the Bible is worth trying to understand, just talk to someone whose life has been changed by it.
  
  If your life hasn't ever been changed by it, just give God a chance.
  
  God helps those who (admit they need) help themselves.
  

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