re: #121 EPR-radar

A Jonathan Edwards style sermon (e.g., like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God) on the subject of the Prosperity Gospel heresy would make for excellent reading. Even better would be video of a megachurch congregation as this bit of the good news is shared with them by a skillful preacher.

I don’t think it would impact at all.

These are not people with a hermeneutic such that they actually think about what stuff in the Bible means: they’ve been taught to accept that their leaders understand secret meanings, and that “meaning” is found via a searching for a line that sounds relevant—divination, basically. Indeed, many are incapable of separating the text from the interpreter—see how many people now treat Left Behind as “prophecy” as opposed to “fiction that is prophecy shaped.”

Their understanding of salvation is a magic formula—saying the right words, and that’s it. As such, they feel no sting from the concept that sinful acts condemn them: they have the ritual to expunge guilt via “forgiveness.”

Indeed, to their minds, they’re the Thomist righteous who will enjoy when the sinners are tormented…except they’re doing it while alive, and the “tormented” are also living men and women, suffering at the hands of other people.