Editor,
Wasn't that Pat Robertson I saw in front of the SUB on Wednesday? He may not have looked like Robertson, but he sure sounded like him. I guess the guy with the banner spouting off about how everyone was going to hell was the campus evangelist Matt Bourgault, and his message was all too familiar. You can hear hours of the same hate-filled drivel by tuning in to the Christian Broadcasting Network and watching Robertson's "The 700 Club" or a large number of other televangelists, for that matter.
What follows are some quotes from Robertson and Randall Terry, an anti-abortion activist. Their words can easily be interchanged with Bourgault's. Remember, Pat Robertson is the Christian extremist who recently wanted the American government to assassinate Venezuela's president.
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." - Robertson, 1992 fund-raising letter.
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love the people who hold false opinions, but I don't have to be nice to them." - Robertson, The 700 Club, Jan. 14, 1991.
"I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good ... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty. We are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." - Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue.
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People like Bourgault, Robertson and Terry are the reason that non-Christians have such a negative opinion of Christianity, and many Christians would agree. With hundreds of different sects of Christianity, how is someone who is outside of the belief system to decide which is truly Christian and which is not? Indeed, how is someone inside of the belief system to decide?
One of the main problems is that people for the last 2,000 years have been interpreting the teachings of Christ and attaching their own doctrines to his teachings, but Christ didn't teach any particular doctrine.
The disconnect between Christ's teachings and modern Christianity start with the Bible itself. Most biblical scholars believe the Gospels were written toward the end of the first century or beginning of the second, which means these books were written by men who never saw Christ or heard him speak.
The first books of the Bible were probably the letters of Paul to the new Christian churches, so Paul was the first man to indoctrinate a message that he never heard firsthand.
So, we have a man with a message who had to relate that message within the context of that culture and within the confines of the language. That message became oral teachings passed from person to person for up to 80 years. Those oral teachings become written word by men who had never met Christ; the written text then gets translated from Greek - not the original language the message was spoken in, which was Aramaic - to English and other languages. No wonder there is so much division within Christianity.
Daniel Baldwin
UNM student
