Are Christians dangerous?

NOTE: Since I moved my blog from MSN to Blogspot, I have archived here some of the popular posts on my old MSN blog. Here is a post from October 23, 2005:


Are Christians dangerous?
In my Sunday sermon today, I dealt with four popular ideas of our politically correct culture that are in direct conflict with biblically correct Christianity. They are:
1) There is no absolute truth.
2) Therefore, all religions have the truth.
3) It is narrow-minded to claim there is only one way to God.
4) All religious fanatics are dangerous.
In today's blog, I want to deal briefly with the fourth idea above, and in future blogs share thoughts about the others.
The fourth idea is that all people who believe they have the one way to God are religious fanatics, and such people are dangerous, and may do something violent like fly planes into buildings or another holocaust. While it is true some religious fanatics are dangerous, the fact is that a Bible-believing Christian who claims Christ is the only way to God, is not dangerous at all. For one thing, if he believes the Bible, he believes in loving one another, loving his enemies, living at peace with others and all the other things the Bible teaches about how to treat people. What's more, if you check real-life experience, you find millions of conservative, evangelical Christians are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who are helping others, not hurting them. Peter Perl of the Washington Post discovered this in a recent trip that he made, rooming with an evangelical Christian. He was amazed to find that this conservative Christian was not the violent, Bible-thumping person he expected.
Gilbert K. Chesterton in his classic book, Heretics, made an important point about this. He said that the real danger is not the committed believer, but the person who has no convictions about what he believes at all. Such a person will find that when an idea does hit him, "it will fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller." In other words, because he has not decided what he believes, he leaves himself open to being overwhelmed by some false belief teaching and going wild with it.
So the most dangerous person is not a committed person of faith, but a person with no faith at all!