Notice: This page represents a project in development, and perhaps a very slow development at that; and does not yet represent a settled opinion as of 4/12/03. It is more a musing and wondering at this stage. For more current essays see Wesley and/or Romans.

You and I may disagree in the premises of my logic here, but rest assured that we follow the same Lord and if we differ then only in our expression of that Lord, and not a wit of the spirit E plurius unum should not be the motto of the United States, but only an imperative.

I am interested in the evagelization of the Islamics and of the Mormans. I have absolutely no interest in either one of them in terms of any appeal. And a recent idea in this regard seemed quite novel and impressive to me and somehow, I thought, it might be meaningful to some member of these two cults.* I give it to you in my own words and for you to do with as the spirit may move you. Freely have I been given, and so freely do I give, and let the Lord pick and chose among our good intentions as to which are to bear what fruit.

[* I use this term advisedly. According to Kant, any religion which were not a moral religion is a cult. To be a moral religion the most fundamental of all of its possible imperatives is this one: act in accordance with the moral law, which is precisely what Kant understood with the Christians and their Golden Rule as the supreme rule [the one given first and the only one given alone. It is not without interest that this same Kant, the one who proved we could not prove the existence of God declared in unambiguous terms, that the Christian religion was "the only moral religion in the history of mankind".]

My scheme is this: I will awaken doubt in the historical truth of two entirely different and entirely opposed claims which follow an identical pattern. This awakening occurs in this way: to any of the dogmatical claims of the cult with regard to its story we will present an equally domatical claim and show that it has equal reason to be appealing.

I preface my details in a declaration of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In perfect faith I declare my ability to use the work of the devil for the purposes of the Lord. It is in this vein that I make appearl to two great non-christians, Goebbels of Nazi fame and Plato of uptopian fame. I do not declare them works of the devil, but merely, even if they are, they can be used by me for the purposes of the Lord. I now exemplify this faith.

Three principles I want to keep in mind.
1. Goebbels (Nazi propaganda leader): any lie if big enough and told enough will be believed. There is very much truth in that as you can see by the number of kids believing in Santa Claus and in two opposing religions, one therefore of which must be a fraud.
2. Plato: in order to get a utopia started it is necessary to tell the people that there is a God and that this God has ordered all people to institue this system. I speculate that in his soujours in Egypt Plato may have heard tales of the neighboring Jews of a liberator who came down from the mountain with stone tablets which he declared had physically been written by God himself. Again, this is my speculation and is not critical to the discussion at hand.
3. A joke: a Mormon and a Jewhovah's Witness talk with each other about religion for a while, and each walks away from the other saying, "That guy must be nuts!"

Another point. All the critique to be utilized in regard to the Islamics through the revelation of the Mormon story will also be applied to the Christian story, but this will be done later and for reasons that will be clear. But the same disinterested observaqtion will also take witness of the Christian story.

[I remind the reader, that I think this could be an effective way to awaken people from their "dogmatic slumber" with regard to religion is to tell them the story of another religion which is quite different and which has just as much justification of the story heretofore accepted without question. This readies the mind to accept a question and doubt to the extend to being willing to listen to the story that the Christian evalgelist is now telling.

Let's examine these stories in terms of the story of their revelation. And so we are not considering now the truth of their stories, but only of how they were relayed to us, and especially to the first believers.

Mohammed goes up to a cave and comes out of the cave and receites word for word what he has just heard given by an angel of God. This is what he tells people. And his wife, who knows him best and who is known as a very honest woman, reports that she believes the story and before you know it people are writing down what this man reports when he returns from his periods in the cave. The actual announcements themselves are said by Mohammed to be of God and they all together indicate a certain order for the world which will make life endurable for all people without exception and are rather easy to follow, e.g., wrap the women up so that the men will not be tempted to take what does not belong to them. It is a powerful system which promises an order and a total lack of fear except for the fear of God who alone will reward and punish and indeed in accordance with the obedience which is exhibited for what he has commanded through the person telling this story, namely Mohammed.

The Mormon story is now of this wise. A young American by the name of Joseph Smith reports that he prayed for divine guidance and was given divinely given golden plates with an unreadable language and that further he was given special glasses so that he could translate these plates and he produced what he called the translation that he had made. The golden plates were peeked at in a way that was sufficient for five witness to swear to die in hell if they had not seen golden plates with something like writing on them. Now the story that comes from the plates show that Joseph Smith has a final revelation for earth, given by the hand of God himself (like Moses getting the actual writing of God in the stone tablets). According to this revelation, men are to prepare themselves for becoming Gods by marrying many women and having many children and to practice being a God by doing what this book contained (with some reference to the Christians bible). And the way that you can tell that you are one of the ones who has been selected to become a God is if you have a warm feeling when you hear the Mormon story. If you feel that you are to immediately join the Smith Church and prepare to become a God. If you feel this and don't then you have rejected God and he utterly rejects you. There is no hope for one who rejects the sign of God.

Now obviously one of these two stories is fradulent, but we impartial bystanders can not tell which is false. Indeed not even the adherents can tell, for they follow in faith that their story is true. One is and we cannot tell from this evidence.

But consider that for a moment. If one is fradulent and we cannot tellwhich one, that means that either COULD be false, and so it could be that both are false.

Now since we are Christian evangelist, we want to establish that there is no reason to think that both Mohammed and Smith were not good people and were perhaps using the techniques suggested by Plato and Goebbels, a well intended lie, in order to convey some sort of utopia on earth. Both Mohammed conceived of utopias which have proven quite durable and quite able to bring order to a world and to reduce fear from the horror of total lawlessness (which all persons fear). And just as Plato conceived of a utopia (a fact) and just as Shakespeare conceived of entire histories and coherent fantasies, it is quite possible that Mohammed and Smith both were genuses who conceived of a world and give expression to its "revelation" in a very comprehensive and emphatic way. The fact of genius is rare but geniuses, evil and good, do arise from time to time among us. Mohammed and Smith could both have been well intended men who want to bring about an order to the world which would be endurable and beneficial to all people. And in the case of Mohammed alone there is also the possibility that he actually hallucinated and gave vivid expression to his own thinking and hoping and planing, all intended toward the establishment of a utopia.

One thing is certain, Smith and Mohammed both exhibit traits of genius and decency, and so one them could very likely have dreamed the whole story up and fosted it onto guillable people who found the lifestyle very practical and rewarding.

And so we are not here in anyway questioning the good intentions of either Mohammed or Smith but merely whether one (or both) were lying for our own good. The evidence is mixed on the good that acrued to each of the story tellers. One of them was set upon by a nominally and frightened Christian mob and killed. I don't know if he forsaw that, or whether he saw himself as a powerful leader of a large group of fanatics, or what.

We shall consider the matter as a detective might when trying to find the truth about something. For if he can prove that one story is fradulent, then he is already making progress, even if only negative, for he is narrowing the field. The way he will procede is to see if either can be considered as fraudulent, for if one can, and one cannot, easily be proven to be fraudulent,that narrows the search for the true religion, if there be any such thing (for we are acting the role of impartial detectives).

It would be easiest for Mohammed to be fradulent for he acts entirely alone. The only real possibility for a conspiracy is if his wife openly condoned and supported and furthered his fraud. Smith's story is more difficult in that there must be at least five people in a conspiracy (which is always more difficult to keep going and straight the more people are involved with varying interests). It is of course not beyond reason to think that they five might have been hoodwinked in someway in order that we don't have to think they were part of a conspiracy. Generally, as impartial bystanders, we would tend to bet less on the Islamic story than the Morman story, but not be willing to bet much on either one since it is easy to imagine how a fraud might have been perpetrated in both cases.

Our conclusion: either or both could be fraudulent if we assume that each had the puck of Hitler and the genius of Shakespeare, and both were remarkable with forceful personalities.

Now let us turn our attention and critique upon the Christian story and see how it fares. It certainly was not a loner here with regard to a revelation, for although one man is the central character, it is both his words and his actions which are authoritative with regard to the story and these were not dictated by him at all, but by several people who had witnessed his words and actions and who reported them. And so it seems that a conspiracy is definitely necessary in the case of the Christian story.

The evidence against such an understanding is paradoxical and creative. The internal authority of the utterances of Mohammed is based in great part in the beautify and coherence and unity of his dictation, the Quoran (suggesting the genius of Shakespeare). The Morman book is likewise coherent and unified even if the language lacks something in beauty (and here Mohammed has the upper hand, for you normally would think that God or his angel could express themselves very beautifully and so therefore would do so). The Christian story is written in great varity of styles and linguistic and literaty skill, and so in this regard bespeak much more the expression of humans than of a God. And even more daming inn this regard is that face that the reports of the man, Jesus, conflict with each other in detrails (although not with regard to the presentation of the character of the man). And so what is perhaps a failing in terms of expression, the variaty of style and the conflict in facts would strongly indicate that we were not dealing with a conspiracy. But then this calls either for a consistent hallucination among different people (which may have been also the case with the witnesses to Smith's golden plates), or else we must think that the reports refer to some utter truth.

Now, as I turn more and more to evangelism in this address, I would like to present some historical evidence for the truth of the characters of the Christian story.

For purposes then of analygous verificationn of the Christian story I would turn to the life of St. Francis and cut out anything about miracles and would point out how this man actually lived in an historical time with good reporting in the identical way that is said was lived by this Jesus. In otherwords: Francis proves the spirit of Jesus as an historical faith and for which reason there is enormous credence given to the impartial bystander for the New Testament story.

[In much the same way, by the way, the faith of Joan of Arc in her voices was historically acceptable evidence of the experience which is reported also of Mary in the New Testament. We cannot overstress these "replications" of the Spirit of God working in the world. We find evidences in the lives of the saints around us and even more or less in ourselves.]

In this way we can overcome, by analogy, suggestions that the characters reported on could not have existed.

Now as a final step I invite all readers to heed the words of Immanuel Kant, philosophy's great God-slayer, who cannot be faulted for the genius of his mind and his objectivity with regard to religion, namely that the Christian faith is the only moral religion in the history of the world.

And so all the stories promise very much. The Christian alone is not easily conceived of as fraudulent. And since the Christian religion is uniquely the world's only moral religion, every thinking man who wishes to serve God will of the necessity of his own thinking will become a Christian.