Not just a wedge between Catholics and non-Catholics. Many Christians I’ve spoken to, who would be saved according to Jack, dislike his tracts and disagree with many parts of his message.
Of course. How many people are Independent Baptist, Mid-Trib (I think), paranoid about Catholics, KJO, Young-Earth literalist, believers in the utterly discredited conspiracy authors Rebecca Brown, John Todd, Alexander Hislop etc., afraid of rock music (and by extension European and much African folk music and blues, country and what-have-you), sure that ONLY Independent Baptists are really saved,
and fans of early action comic style complete with outrageous dialogue and motion lines? And probably much more.
He is deliberately wedging absurd paranoid ideas between everyone and almost everyone else in what looks like a real belief that only a small group who see it
precisely the way he does are real Christians and all the rest are rushling along the road to perdition right now?
It would be amusing if fearmongering worked like an insurance package. But it doesn’t. It works by making people wonder just a little about just parts of the stuff that they see, and eventually the fear takes on a life of its own and overrides all thought. When you were a child and someone told a scary story before lights-out and you lay there in the dark, wasn’t it hard to be really, totally sure that clicking sound far away wasn’t the monster’s toenails as he came to get you? Hard to sleep wasn’t it, even though you knew better? Because you were tired and wound up. Conspiracy theroists prey on those tired, overwrought moments normal people have, to work in just a little bit of doubt about just one odd thing, but that opens the gate to let in all kinds of fears and worries until the brain can’t keep it all straight. I’m studying coercive eprsuasion right now and it makes me angry. But I don’t think restricting speech is the answer. It wouldn’t work anyway. people who are in a fear-based thinking system don’t stop “warning” others just because it’s forbidden. They take all opposition as further evidence of the plot against them, and further proof they need to fight. That’s why I’m for more speech, not less. If someone says, “Isn’t it at all possible the moon is actually a spy station set up to watch you?” I believe in saying, “Anything is possible, but I take the massive evidence that the moon existed before I did as a sign that it is **more likely ** that it’s a natural satellite that has nothing to do with me. May I show you some art depicting the moon from before I was born?”
