By Chris Ashton
Arizona Daily Wildcat
May 5, 1998

Maybe columnist wants to make Christians look bad

To the Editor:

First, let me make clear that I do not ridicule Rachel Alexander ("In Defense of Christianity," Apr. 28) because she is a Christian. I ridicule her because her claims are patently ridiculous. I say this up front in order to avoiding further feeding her martyr mentality. As if she is tired of atheists knocking on her door, people pushing Nietzsche on her in the streets, listening to Arizona Humanist's guest speaker Richard Dawkins out on the mall, tired of seeing "We Don't Trust In God" on our currency and in our courthouses, tired of "godless atheist" being a compliment and "good Christian" an insult, she has the audacity to claim vile persecution has been done to her. As a former Christian, I deeply sympathize with her plight.

Her claim that Christians are never portrayed positively in the media is baseless: movies like "Christy," "Sleepers," "Dead Man Walking," Sunday-morning religious shows, CBN, TBN, PBS, even shows like "Rescue 911" feature Christians praising God.

She quotes Nelson Glueck as saying that archeology has not contradicted the Bible, when indeed it has many times: no global flood, no tower of Babel, no Israel wandering in the wilderness and no fantastic miracles at the death of Jesus are found in history. Glueck's method, however, is to assume that "Godzilla destroyed Rome" is true simply because Rome existed.

She then makes the classic mistake of taking the number of manuscripts as proof of their internal claims, instead of proof that the Bible has been copied many times in the past 1700 years. Rachel, do yourself a favor and dump McDowell as quickly as possible. He is a joke, as anyone can see by researching his claims.

Alexander also suggests that Christianity has a monopoly on moral values, by equating its decline with her perceived "erosion of morality" in modern society. This is ludicrous. Correlation is not causation.

I stop here only because I run out of room. It would take a book to rectify the illogic Alexander has written in just one column. I can only hope that Alexander is not this mindless; perhaps, in fact, Alexander is part of her own plot to make Christians look bad.

Chris Ashton
Computer Engineering Sophomore