Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Jack Chick's views are not as fringe as you might think

Most non-Christians love to laugh at Jack Chick's tracts, and how utterly detached from actual society he seems to be (especially given that he is an American and lives in the United States.) It can be hard to believe that anybody would think like him about our society.

For someone who has never belonged to a Christian denomination of that kind, the views he has of our society may feel completely crazy and fringe, but he is not the only one who believes these thing. There are many Christian denominations, especially many of the so-called charismatic ones, where many members do indeed believe most of those things. In other words, they really do believe that the vast majority of people, even in the US, are hard-core militant atheists who hate God and are really aggressive about it, who are basically possessed by demons (often literally), and even mentioning religion to them hits a berserk button. They honestly believe that Christians are widely discriminated against and persecuted, and that even mentioning God or the Bible could end up badly (but that doesn't stop them from doing so, of course, because they are true believers and would gladly become martyrs for their cause). They constantly tell between themselves stories about how Christians are persecuted, imprisoned and even killed in other countries, etc. They also believe, like Jack Chick, that most people have never even heard of Jesus or the Bible, and that preaching the gospel to them is like a magical incantation that either converts them on the spot, or enrages them into demonic furor.

These people live in some kind of strange societal bubble, where they more or less subconsciously shut off their own perception of the real world. They pretend that the world they see and live in is something that it isn't. They basically deny their own senses and experiences, and want to believe something that just isn't there. Mind you, most of these people are not living in some secluded cult isolated from the outside world. Most of these people are everyday citizens, working and living like everybody else, interacting with people like everybody else, seeing the society that surrounds them every day... and yet, they still believe those things, against all evidence and personal experience.

It's hard to believe this unless you have been one, but it's true.

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