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Naturally you are very suspicious, believing that the salesman may be trying to scam you. When he notices your skepticism, the salesman pulls out a thick brochure and hands it to you, saying that it contains the answers to any questions you might have, and that it will explain how he is able to offer you such a fantastic deal. You take the brochure, expecting to see glossy photographs of the car and a fancy sales pitch, but all you find are pages and pages of dense technical information about the car and even more pages of barely decipherable legalese describing the terms of the deal. Undeterred, you decide it’s worth investigating further since it does sound like a great deal, so you take a deep breath and turn to page one of the brochure.
But just then, another salesman jumps out from behind the curtain. He eyes the first salesman warily before he turns your way and says that he too has a wonderful deal for you—for a mere $100,000, he will sell you a brand new, top-of-the-range Ferrari luxury sports car (worth a cool half-million dollars). You scratch your head, confused. Doesn’t he mean a Mercedes Benz luxury sports car? No, it’s definitely a Ferrari, he replies, handing you his brochure. You ask if there are two cars behind the curtain. He says no, there’s just one car. You flick through the first few pages of his brochure, and find it’s exactly the same as the first one you were given. Now you are really confused. You tell them that you cannot take their offers seriously if they can’t even agree upon something as fundamental as the make of the car, especially since the brochures are identical and the vehicle is right there, behind the curtain.
Ah, they say, it’s not quite as easy as that. There’s a large hanger door behind the curtain, and the car is located behind the door which is bolted shut, so they haven’t actually seen the car for themselves. However, they assure you that they have spent many hours studying the brochure from cover to cover, and they can promise you that the deal is genuine, even if they can’t agree on the exact make and model of the sports car.
Against your better judgement you decide to give them the benefit of the doubt. But then a young man walks up and a third salesman jumps out from behind the curtain and intercepts him before he can wander off. Curious to see what this third salesman has to say, you take a step closer and listen to the conversation. The young man is being offered the same half-million dollar deal but, to your surprise, you find that he’s not being offered a luxury sports car, but a 50-foot yacht. You catch a glimpse of the brochure the salesman is passing to the young man and notice that the title is different and the cover is red instead of blue.
You turn back to the first two salesmen and ask them why you should believe that their deal isn’t a scam if none of them can agree on what it is they’re selling. They nod their heads sympathetically, saying that they can see how you might be finding it all very difficult to follow, but they are adamant that the third salesman has it completely wrong. They assure you that the deal is definitely for a luxury sports car, and now they insist that it doesn’t really matter what exact model of car it is—either way it’s a wonderful offer that you can’t possibly refuse.
You are being swayed by the persuasiveness of their sales pitch, and they look at you in anticipation as you appear ready to sign along the dotted line. But then you spot a large group of people walking along the street towards the curtain, and you decide to wait and see what happens when they arrive. Sure enough, many more salesmen jump out from behind the curtain to greet them. By now the sales pitch is familiar to you, but from the snippets of conversation you hear, it’s clear that no two salesmen are selling the same thing. Most of the salesmen are talking about various models of luxury sports cars, but you can hear other salesmen selling boats, trucks, planes, even houses.
By now, you have had enough of this nonsense and confusion, and insist to the two salesmen in front of you that the only way you will agree to sign up for either deal is if you can see the luxury sports car for yourself. But they shake their heads and tell you that no one is allowed to see the car before they agree to the deal. They claim that’s not a problem because everything you need to make up your mind about the deal is right there in the brochure. It is simply unreasonable of you to insist on seeing the vehicle before the deal is made.
But you are still not convinced, so you hand the brochures back to the salesmen and prepare to leave. Looking very concerned, the first salesman ask you to wait a moment. He says there is something else you should know before you reject the offer. In an ominous tone, he tells you that if you decline the deal, masked men will come for you in the middle of the night and drag you away to a locked, windowless cell, where you will be beaten within an inch of your life every day for a whole year.
You burst out laughing, but you quickly realize that the salesman is deadly serious. You demand to know what sort of insane company would force prospective customers into a taking a deal under threat of such barbaric torture. The salesman just shrugs, saying that no one is forcing you to take the deal. When you grow angry, he explains that doesn’t make the rules and that it’s all clearly laid out in the brochure at the bottom of page 42. Shocked, you protest that you haven’t signed or agreed to anything yet, but the salesman directs you to page 54 of the brochure which explains how, as soon as you approached the curtain, you were irrevocably bound by the rules as laid out in great detail by the legalese at the back of the brochure.
You turn away in utter disbelief and notice a young woman walking by, her attention taken by the iPod in her hand as she searches through her playlist. As you anticipate, another salesman jumps out from behind the curtain and approaches her, but she is still distracted by her iPod and fails to notice him. She walks off and vanishes into the distance.
You turn back to the salesman and ask—even her?
The salesman nods soberly.
# # #
If the details of this little tale sound familiar, you are on the right track. Stay tuned for the next part in this continuing series on the problems with salvation.
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8 Responses to The Problem With Salvation #2:
The Deal Of A Lifetime?
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Hi, Dreamer.
An interesting analogy, to be sure. In the interest of accuracy I thought I would make a few suggestions:
1. In the last section about the bad circumstances for those who reject the author, you limit it to people who _walk up to the booth_ instead of everyone everywhere. The difference is crucial since, weighing the difference between buying a bargain-priced sports car and getting tortured, the most ethical option would be not to offer the deal at all. But if the bad consequences happen to everyone who doesn’t take the deal (whether they hear about it or not), the salesmen can be highly motivated from a kind of pure regard for your safety – both in trying to persuade you to take the deal but also in offering it in the first place.
2. I take it the long technical brochure is meant to be a stand in for a sacred text of some kind. While it is true that some religious texts could be roughly analogous to a brochure/technical manual, many are not. Characterizing a book full of poetry and narrative (like the Vedas or Koran, for example) as though it were an instruction manual is not very instructive. It injects superficiality into your analogy.
3. In the analogy, the people walking past the booth all seem to be happy enough without a luxury sports car/yacht/house. The offer is, mostly, superfluous. It is right for the person to be skeptical, even if they saw behind the curtain. My own transportation needs being so modest, I doubt I would take the Ferrari, even at $100k, unless I intended to sell it immediately afterward. But making a decision (even a momentous one) based on imperfect evidence can happen in many other ways as well. If I’m hiking and start to slide toward a precipice, I will follow my guide’s instructions even if I just met her. Heck, I would do what she said even if I thought there was only a slightly lower chance of her trying to kill me. The odds are much greater, and in a way, that helps motivate me to take the advice of the person trying to help me. Examples like these are everywhere, though. If I do not have the resources to defend myself in court, I will _still_ take the legal counsel of a court-appointed attorney, even if I suspect that he just wants to get the case off his list so he can get paid.
But other than those minor points, this was an interesting read. I look forward to further installments.
dreamer,
thanks for the story. i enjoy your writing. it is truly a shame when a christian is trying to sell something. a term that is floated around in christian circles but sometimes wholly unheeded is “sharing the gospel.” which would mean that one would have to have some gospel to be able to share it.
to maybe add a more biblical model to your story, what if a good friend of yours came along and said, “hey, I just got a new car and I love it!” and a bunch of his friends came along and were actually driving their new cars. and instead of working off a brochure, they were actually comparing the brochure with the actual product because they were experiencing the product.
you are right in your story that a large majority of prostelatizing (sp?) Christians are not experiencing the Christ of the Bible. Paul said, “I count it all (having worldly status and success) as dung to the all surpassing greatness of knowing Christ and Him crucified.” He obviously had something that your typical American Christian is completely naive of. I just want to personally apologize for the hypocracy that you have experienced within the church and ask for your forgiveness. I am at least one person out there that doesn’t want to “sell” a product that I am not personally sold on and experiencing.
thanks for the fresh insights.
Hey Russ, thank you very much for you thoughtful critique. A few comments in response:
1. I was using the young women who walks on by without noticing the salesman as the metaphor for “those who haven’t heard”. Not a perfect analogy, I grant you, but the idea is that she passes on by with no idea that there is an offer available to her.
2. Yes, the brochure is supposed to be the sacred texts. I was thinking mainly of the Bible, but also of the Koran (along with the hadiths, if you like). I would dispute your assertion that these texts should not considered to be instruction manuals—the Religious Right would argue very forcefully that that is *exactly* what they are. Yes, the texts have much within them that is poetry and narrative, but the millions of theologians around the world are doing more than literary criticism when they study their texts.
3. I agree that the overall analogy isn’t a perfect one. Being able to buy the car on the cheap and then sell it again for a profit the next day is one hole (though I guess you could equate that to the many superficial conversions that don’t stick). Also, given that when you are “saved” you don’t immediately get any tangible reward, so if I were to extend the analogy beyond the moment of sale, the customer would find out that they don’t actually gain possession of the sports car until some undefined point in the future! But given that likely opens up more issues with the metaphor, perhaps that’s a step too far.
My main thrust was to illustrate the irrationality of doctrine of salvation. You’re buying into something completely sight unseen, something that no two salespeople can agree upon the details of, and something you only have unreliable second or third hand evidence for.
Of course, all this mess and confusion could be avoided if God just presented you with his sales pitch himself once you’re dead, and I hope to go into that in more detail in a future post.
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
RD.
Hi Justin. Thank you for your compliment on my writing.
I think you may have missed some of the point of my analogy concerning the sports car. I agree that some people do turn their lives around in some way after being “saved,” and benefit from the new community they find themselves in. (One of the things I miss about not being a Christian any more is the social aspect of belonging to a church congregation, for example.) But the main thrust of the article isn’t that some people are presenting a false or twisted version of some underlying truth about salvation, it’s to illustrate that it is all smoke and mirrors. There is no way to get at the underlying truth, even if it exists in the first place.
As I said at the end of comment #3, there is a simple solution to all this confusion. God could simply present you with his sales pitch, first hand, after you die. That way, whether you were brought up in a devout Muslim family in deepest Saudi Arabia, or raised by an abusive Baptist pastor, or were an aborigine living in the time before Captain Cook landed in Australia, it wouldn’t matter. You would be given a fair and equal chance to accept God’s offer of salvation, with all the facts available to you.
If you believe in something like that, then I have no quarrel with you. I don’t happen to believe in any form of heavenly salvation, since I don’t believe in god, but I’m certainly not out to deliberately try and destroy the faith of others.
If you aren’t out to “deliberately try and destroy the faith of others,” but you just described how ridiculous faith is, then what exactly was your deeper, more noble purpose for writing this? Christians propagate their message out of love, Muslims out of duty, Mormons out of ambition. Why do you propagate your message?
I heard a preacher say that there are only 2 interpretations of the Bible. The right one, and the wrong one. It looks like all of your salesmen were taught the wrong interpretation. That brochure was missing some pages I suppose.
Grab the full “data sheet” aka, Bible and you’ll find that you can turn the Honda you currently own INTO the Ferrari with a few tweaks.
Good story, btw
I don’t know why I believe in God. The idea of eternal damnation is so horrible to me. But the idea that all of the people who spent their lives being abused, of children raped and murdered, of people cheated and ruined by the rich, all the aborted babies and lonely people-all these people who have known suffering- well, the idea that they never go to heaven is just unbearable to me. So I’m torn between two things that break my heart. To put it bluntly, we’re screwed either way. The nights awake because there is no meaning, no purpose, and any purpose we can create is impossible to fulfill? The knowledge that every moment is fleeting, and no one will remember our lives, know our thoughts, that our bones will moulder forgotten after only a generation or two? It is too much.
I have my own horrible metaphor, using Justin’s example:
That I know I’m in a sports car, but it’s one only I can see, no one else can see it. So horribly, I have to prove that my invisible sportscar is there to get people to avoid a beating they also don’t believe in, and no one will believe me. I feel like Cassandra. I feel exactly like Cassandra.
I have nothing but good will towards you, man, take care of yourself.
Hanna, we create purpose everyday by living and enjoying the life that we are blessed to have. It’s a decision ‘you’ make whether you choose to believe in God or not. Unfortunately far too many people aren’t living fulfilling lives because they are waiting for the promise of heaven, after they’ve finished ‘living’. Or they are afraid to live because they fear being tortured when they die. Its rather sad. The question is, what do you really believe in? And within your belief what is your ‘living’ responsibility a the most personal level?