Comparative Religion Slaughterhouse of the Mind
A young college woman sits down at her desk on the first day of a course on comparative religion. She thinks it’s a good deal. She gets college credit for a casual review of her own Christian faith and gets to learn about other world religions.
The professor enters the room fashionably late. He’s casually dressed in frumpy clothes and his hair is in a thin gray ponytail that’s so tight it stretches all the wrinkles out of his face. What follows in that first class and throughout the rest of the semester is a battle for the souls of the students in the class.
The professor’s secular, atheistic, materialist bias is revealed from the first time he opens his mouth. He nevertheless gives all religions a modicum of respect except for traditional Christianity for which he reveals unvarnished disdain.
The professor, when dealing with the Christian faith, attacks it in a manner commonly used in comparative religion classes in college. His bright shining lie is the claim that in the early centuries of Christian history there were several “Christianities,” each with their own sacred texts, competing with each other on a more or less equal basis to become the dominant mainstream branch.
(Incidentally, the murder mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code, promoted the view that a feminist Gnostic sect had the greater claim to be the true Christian faith.) The truth is far different. The truth is that traditional apostolic Christianity, which is the Christianity of the New Testament, was the mainstream form of Christianity from the very earliest days of the church.
The Gnostic sects are very different from traditional Christianity and are by no means on an equal