Essay:The Bible, the comic book of the ancient near east
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The Way of the Master[edit]
I came upon the idea for this essay from watching Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron's Way of the the Master television program.[1] I took particular issue with one of their confrontation tactics.[2] Kirk was harrassing a girl in a mall. One of his questions was along the line of; "Do you think you're smarter than god?" I consider this underhanded as he was obviously putting the girl on the spot by playing on the her (erroneous) belief that religion sits in a place where it shouldn't be denigrated.
She reacted as Cameron had hoped she would react and continued with his spiel. At this point my mind wandered onto the subject of this essay. I thought to myself that; "I wasn't smarter than Reed Richards.[3]" Having thought that, I wondered what difference it made. I wasn't "smarter" than a fictional character. But, what did that mean? It seemed to be to be the equivalent of the basic arithmetic definition of divide by zero - meaningless. Ergo, Cameron's tactic was meaningless. Comparing oneself to a fictional character is a divide by zero.
Where's all the cool stuff?[edit]
If comics have taught us anything it is that people are going to show off any cool powers that they might get. Certainly there will be people who willl have the where-with-all to keep these abilities secret, but they will definately be in the minority.
The point to this is that the Bible is replete with people having (perhaps not cool, but) unusual abilities. Just as in today's comics they had little concern for using those abilities quite openly in public. If the Bible is the truth, then where are these people? Shouldn't we be living a comic book?
Upcoming[edit]
This is a work in progress.
Coming up...
Moses, Man of Steel. Man of Steel, Moses.