"IF WE CAN'T PROTECT THE EARTH, WE WILL $%&# AVENGE IT!" - Tony Stark
I am a hard-core sci-fi fan so I loved watching the long-awaited "Avengers" movie with superheroes fighting the bad guys as well as the movie "Battleship." Both of these movies had good stories, lots of humor, and both were about aliens trying to destroy or annihilate mankind. Sci-fi fans who like big action scenes, great special effects, and aliens from another world won't be disappointed.
When it comes to Christian ethics, we have moved in the movies from 'kill or be killed' to 'exterminate or be exterminated' so what are Christians to do? Is the basic premise of survival of the fittest? The strongest or most technologically advanced wins in the end? Not only are we not sure how to think about Islam or Jihadists but what are we to think about the troubling paasages in the Bible that tells God's people to utterly destroy another race and show them no pity?
American Christians think vengeance is more our perogative today than God's. If someone starts a fight, we will finish it! Someone messes with our country, we will mess with you back ten times worse! How any of this is supposed to be following the Jesus of Scripture much less the martyred lived of the earliest Christians is beyond me. Some Christians are so intimidated by angry atheists that they either want to ignore the troubling texts in the Bible or perform their own kind of "textual cleansing." Or worse, Christians want to blame the worst parts of the Bible on the Jewish race while they give themselves a pass.
We tend to forget that the Older Testament of the Bible is the Bible that Jesus read and preached. Nor was the message simply one of God's people was to exercise God's wrath on others so that they could receive a manifest destiny. It was more a message of "If we do not recognize God's will in time, we may be next in line for God's wrath and removal." Even Peter spoke in the newer testament that judgment starts with God's house (God's people). Something Christians should not take lightly or casually today.
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