The Christian Paradox Analysis
Karolina Wróbel
Academic Writing II
In his essay „The Christian Paradox”, Bill McKibben points out the hypocrisy of how Americans perceive religiousness and Christianity. The author achieves that through comparing the teachings of the Holy Bible with incontestable data, mostly statistics. He provides a fascinating inside into the state of devotion in the United States—people of America have wandered off the path dictated by Jesus, and even deformed it for their own purposes, while still claiming their devotion to God—which makes for a powerful point in a discourse on the state of Christianity in the country with such a long history of achieving success through hard work.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “God helps those who help themselves”, a quote which McKibben uses in the very first paragraph of his essay as a verbatim example of where lies the error in the American definition of Christian faith; according to statistics, 75 per cents of them actually believes that one can find this sentence in the Bible. However, Franklin, admittedly a very important and inspiring figure in the history of the United States, was no evangelist; even though, as a philosopher, he did in fact …show more content…
He was inspired to write this essay by his work with religious environmentalists – they were trying to convince politicians that the Bible actually works in support of taking better care of the habitat. He writes that then it had occurred to him that there in fact exist countries, where people have a tendency to help others, to share; countries that offer its’ citizens free medical health care, even at the cost of significantly higher tax rate. As an example of that, he uses Norway and Sweden – both atheist countries and comes to a bitter conclusion that perhaps those countries are more Christian than the “Christian Nation”—the United
Academic Writing II
In his essay „The Christian Paradox”, Bill McKibben points out the hypocrisy of how Americans perceive religiousness and Christianity. The author achieves that through comparing the teachings of the Holy Bible with incontestable data, mostly statistics. He provides a fascinating inside into the state of devotion in the United States—people of America have wandered off the path dictated by Jesus, and even deformed it for their own purposes, while still claiming their devotion to God—which makes for a powerful point in a discourse on the state of Christianity in the country with such a long history of achieving success through hard work.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “God helps those who help themselves”, a quote which McKibben uses in the very first paragraph of his essay as a verbatim example of where lies the error in the American definition of Christian faith; according to statistics, 75 per cents of them actually believes that one can find this sentence in the Bible. However, Franklin, admittedly a very important and inspiring figure in the history of the United States, was no evangelist; even though, as a philosopher, he did in fact …show more content…
He was inspired to write this essay by his work with religious environmentalists – they were trying to convince politicians that the Bible actually works in support of taking better care of the habitat. He writes that then it had occurred to him that there in fact exist countries, where people have a tendency to help others, to share; countries that offer its’ citizens free medical health care, even at the cost of significantly higher tax rate. As an example of that, he uses Norway and Sweden – both atheist countries and comes to a bitter conclusion that perhaps those countries are more Christian than the “Christian Nation”—the United