It never fails to amaze me how, time and again, conservative Christians will, in the name of “the Judeo-Christian tradition,” “Christianity,” “faith,” or even the Bible itself, repudiate things that the Bible in fact says, and says in places quite clearly.
The most recent case in point is Steve Kellmeyer who says that Islam is popular because in Islam, God can change his mind, whereas according to Kellmeyer, “With Judeo-Christianity, no such possibility exists. God will never change His mind because God does not change” (HT John Pieret).
This is of course directly at odds with explicit statements in the Bible, such as those found in Exodus 32:14, 2 Samuel 24:16, Amos 7:3–6, 1 Chronicles 21:15, and Jeremiah 26:19. How many times does something have to be stated in the Bible before it is considered part of the “clear teaching of Scripture”?
This would not be particularly disturbing, were it not for the fact that conservative Christians claim to be upholding “what the Bible teaches,” and when they make this claim, they themselves believe it and others also believe it. Yet time and again it has been shown that, at least a significant part of the time, the whole system works based on the assumption that contemporary conservative American Christian values are “what the Bible teaches.” And at least some of the time, that is simply not the case.
And so I thought I’d share this ironic example of a conservative Christian who rejects Islam because of what he perceives to be a characteristic of God in that tradition. That characteristic, unbeknownst to Kellmeyer, is a prominent feature in the Biblical depiction of God as well.
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