Mao, Wow
Just finished a biography of Mao Tse-Tung called Mao:The Unknown Story. It caught my eye after reading The Heavenly Man. I wanted to learn some more about China. It was interesting to read the amazon reviews after the fact. People seem upset that the author left out some info on Mao that might not be as condemning. However, no one is saying she needs to shave off a few million deaths here or there. Has anyone in history been responsible for more than 70 million deaths? Last spring, related to my WW2 reading, I picked up a biography on Stalin, Stalin and His Hangmen : The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. At least he could try to blame 20 million deaths of his people on fighting the Nazi army. Mao's and Stalin's strength was the ability to manage people without conscience. The ends always justified the means. They blackmailed their cronies. They terrorized their legions. They turned on their "friends" in a heartbeat. They took selfishness all the way down its slippery slope.
The amazing thing about Jesus is he never misses the people for the crowds. The woman who bled for 12 years until she touched the hem of his cloak got to tell him her whole story despite the huge crowd and the urgent need to heal a little girl. Jesus never treats us as cogs in the machine. He calls us by name. He knows the total number of hairs on each of our heads. It is so awful when a leader in the church makes a sheep feel worthless because she's not contributing to the goal. We weren't recruited to win a game. The game's been won. We've been called to the victory party. We've been called by name. Importantly, those guys will never be at the celebration. They have their reward.
This makes me want to write about hell another time. Can any Universalist imagine welcoming Mao or Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot (Cambodia) or Kim (North Korea) into heaven? Can any adherent of conditional immortality put a timeline on when their suffering will end and their souls be extiguished?
The amazing thing about Jesus is he never misses the people for the crowds. The woman who bled for 12 years until she touched the hem of his cloak got to tell him her whole story despite the huge crowd and the urgent need to heal a little girl. Jesus never treats us as cogs in the machine. He calls us by name. He knows the total number of hairs on each of our heads. It is so awful when a leader in the church makes a sheep feel worthless because she's not contributing to the goal. We weren't recruited to win a game. The game's been won. We've been called to the victory party. We've been called by name. Importantly, those guys will never be at the celebration. They have their reward.
This makes me want to write about hell another time. Can any Universalist imagine welcoming Mao or Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot (Cambodia) or Kim (North Korea) into heaven? Can any adherent of conditional immortality put a timeline on when their suffering will end and their souls be extiguished?
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