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Attempted Religious Conversion under a Starry Sky
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Setting up a telescope along a busy sidewalk can create controversy. Naturally people wonder what you are doing and whether they can take a look through your instrument. We invite them to come on over and look at the moon and Jupiter in our scopes. Will was there, and so was Ehren. We were down at Canal Park, taking shelter behind the pilot house, as it was a cool and windy evening on Saturday August 9th.
It was our second night of sidewalk astronomy. Friday night was a great success with about 200 people passing by and looking through our instruments. One fellow even handed me some money. I refused to take it. Then I noticed that it was a million dollar bill! I thanked him, but later realized it wasn’t real. It was when I got back home that I read the small print on the back of the bill. It foretold of my casting into hell and brimstone if I did not follow the righteous path of the Lord and join the Living Waters Church.
Earlier that evening, I noticed Will was showing Jupiter to a couple of curious fellows from a group of Hispanic people. They then stopped by my telescope and enjoyed a look at the moon. They marveled at the view. They wanted to know more information. One fellow said that he had a telescope of his own, but he did not know how to use it. Another fellow who was traveling with the group said that he was originally from Bemidji. He found it awesome to look at the moons craters. He said that each crater must have been the handiwork of God.
I told them about the scale of those craters. That one edge of the crater would be in Duluth and the other rim in the Twin Cities. I showed them the dark mare, the dark patches on the moon. I said they were 3 billion year old lava flows. I told them about the distance to the moon, that it is 235,000 miles away and how the sun was nearly 4 times greater in circumference than the earth to moon distance. I also told him that if our sun was a one inch ball, and if the nearest star were also a one inch ball, it would be in Chicago. He marveled at the amazing distance. He told his lady friend and had me repeat the story to her.
They both started telling me how Gods hands had created every stone and everything in all the universe. That it was God who had made the moon and the sun. This was fine. I have no problem with saying that. Nature and God seem to be one and the same.
Then the word HE started to come up. She said that HE made the stars and HE made the moon, and that HE was calling out for me to join him.
I was told stories of conversion. How this man from Bemidji was lost to drugs and porn. He was a goner. Then she came along and she touched his heart and brought him into the light of Jesus. She said it was Jesus’s heart that actually saves each person. She told me that I was a decent person, a good man, with so much going for me, I knew astronomy and something about the universe, but I did not have the love of Jesus in my heart. She touched her hand to my chest and said, “Oh Lord give this good man the love of Jesus in his heart.” She asked me to repeat some things. I did not. She also told me to read Matthew 18:12 and Collosians 1:7.
She introduced me to the others whom she had converted in the past months. There was a man from Mexico, a woman from Honduras, and another man from Central America. They all had been converted by this woman.
I told her she had special talents and was like a guru. She did not like that. They were her followers, and she said it was because of Jesus that this occurred.
I shifted our talk back to astronomy and to the vast distances to nearby stars. How we humans have trouble understanding these mammoth voids. Then she said that HIS handiwork is everywhere in the universe. I said, “Even if Jesus ascended to heaven 2000 years ago, he is still only as far as our local group of stars nearby the sun. Even if he is moving at the speed of light, he isn’t even close to the center of the galaxy, which is 25,000 light years away.” This challenged my guests. They told me only the heart of Jesus could help mankind from the soon to be coming judgement day.
I listened to their argument about the coming judgement day. A future day when all will face the judge if they do not convert now. She said that only those whose heart is with Jesus will pass the gates. “Oh, you mean the pearly gates?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “I think that is just an archaic description of the Milky Way,” I said. She said that only Christians will survive this tumult. I asked her what about all the other worlds religions, how will they survive this torment? She said they are all wandering lost, as if blind. This got my dander up.
I gently explained to them that our planet earth as seen from space would be only a tiny blue dot. We would see that it has no borders, no divisions, only man made artificial barriers. We all live on one planet. Nobody comes from anywhere else. There is no separation. Those are only illusions that humans have created. People get stuck on their religion and become intolerant.
Now she was getting a little more aggressive. She said that on that day when the Lord comes down from heaven, people who are not with him will be destroyed.
I said the great prophets and people today pray upwards. They believe that heaven is up there. But what is really up there? Perception is different than reality. There is no heaven up above us. There are only clouds and thinning air and then space. Astronauts have been up there. Telescopes and spacecraft have gone as far as the Ort Cloud. They have not found any likeness to a heavenly realm. There is no Wal Mart, no McDonalds in space. There is no ladder, nor safety net, nor refuge, nor any habitable place for humans to live in space, without artificial means. Space is 450 degrees below zero. It is an absolute vacuum and we would die there in a short time from severe radiation. Space is more like hell than it is heaven!
This did not sit well with her. She wanted one last try to convert me. She put her hand on my chest and said that Jesus was what I needed to bring my life around and to save me from the end of the world.
That raised another disagreement with me that I had to let her know. I told her that talking like that is a real big problem. “You see,” I said, “if we go around thinking that the world has to come to an end in order for the Lord to return, then we are guilty of destroying the earth. We humans have a way of self perpetuating things. We cannot continue to think that way. We have only one earth, there is no other place to go. There is no heaven that we can move to, that is an old misunderstanding from Biblical times. They did not know what the earth was. They thought is was flat and had corners and had an unmovable foundation. They did not know that it was round, nor that it turned, nor that it went around the sun. This destructive earth thinking is based on complete misunderstandings and it is going to get us human beings into a lot of trouble if we do not change it. We humans must face the reality, that the earth is all that we have and we must take good care of it.
She turned and walked away and so did the others. They all left me alone. They moved over and began to talk to another person. They asked if he had found Jesus and if he would give his life to the Lord. Then they gathered into a circle and they held hands and they prayed. I thought they prayed for me, as I heard my name uttered, or were they praying for him?
Now one might think, oh how wonderful that they gather in a circle and lock arms to shoulders and pray. In an odd way, it looked to me to be a form of brainwashing, of people preying on the meek, on spreading the unfortunate misunderstanding of our universe via the methodology of ancient hegemony. |
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