I recently finished reading a very profound novel called The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver. It's written from the perspective of the wife and four daughters of a fanatical southern baptist preacher who drags them into the heart of the Congo, just before the so-called Congolese "Independence", to try to convert the savages and save their souls, only to find that it's a completely fruitless exercise in the context of the Congolese world (as in many...). The book makes many statements about the absurdity of dogmatic beliefs.
Anyways, here's a small excerpt I hope she won't mind me sharing - The simple realisation of one of the daughters in the book (who happens to be a cripple twin):
"According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance into heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw. At age five I raised my good left hand in Sunday school and used a month's ration of words to point out this problem to Miss Betty Nagy. Getting born within earshot of a preacher, I reasoned, is entirely up to chance. Would Our Lord be such a hit-or-miss kind of Saviour as that? Would he really condemn some children to eternal suffering just for the accident of a heathen birth, and reward others for a privilege they did not earn?"
Great question - would love a Christian perspective on this one...
