In her most recent column, Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post writes of the foolish Franklin Graham:
As thousands prayed across the nation Thursday in celebration of the National Day of Prayer, the Rev. Franklin Graham held his own vigil in the Pentagon parking lot.
Oh well, it doesn’t matter where one prays, right? All prayers lead to heaven. Or do they?
Not if you’re Graham, who lost his place at the Pentagon altar after he mocked other religions, specifically Islam and Hinduism. A plea to President Obama to reinstate him apparently fell on pitiless ears.
Graham’s offense was expressing his belief that only Christians have God’s ear, that Islam is evil, and that Muslims and Hindus don’t pray to the same God he does.
“No elephant with 100 arms can do anything for me,” Graham said in a USA Today interview, referring to one of the five main Hindu deities. “None of their 9,000 gods is going to lead me to salvation. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and it’s all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better.”
Does it seem odd to anyone else that Graham believes in an almighty and all powerful God who can’t figure out whom people are speaking to when they pray? This is a God who created human beings, but is unable to comprehend all of the personal, familial, cutural and historical quirks that shape our very provisional understanding of divinity. This is a God so fussy, not to mention insecure, that he or she doesn’t open the letters we send unless the address on the envelope is precisely correct. This is a God willing, one might say determined, to turn his or her back on much of creation primarily due to wounded vanity.
Remind you of anyone?