Extreme Tourists Encounter Extreme Superstition

Bart Willruth, a former team member at DC (look him up), sent me an essay to publish below. Looks like he's read my book. Enjoy

By Bart Willruth

AFP Newswire today reports “Extreme tourists set off to walk through Africa.” French nationals Enora Nedelec and Guillaume Combot are on a walking tour through Africa from Cape Town to Khartoum. They are staying away from the cities and plan to exist on $2.00 per day, living as much as possible like the inhabitants they encounter in the remote wilderness of the continent.

In some areas of Sub Saharan Africa, the locals had never seen a white person. The travelers report that in one remote village they were suspected of being ghosts and were required to eat something to prove that they were authentically human. (This could have been dangerous. This is the part of Africa where those suspected of being witches are still burned, evil spirits cause disasters, and children are sacrificed for luck and love).

These villagers, in order to believe in the existence of ghosts and believing that they knew the proper method for testing, exhibited a superstitious and pre-enlightenment mindset reminiscent of the most ignorant backwaters of the ancient world. No rational, educated, and critical thinker would ever accept the word of people such as these as credible witnesses to incredible “events” or claims of miracles. The entirety of their worldview disqualifies them from accurately representing such events, whether they claimed to be direct eyewitness or simply passing on word-of-mouth hearsay testimony.

Yet many who are unwilling to apply the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF) through analogy are willing to uncritically accept the testimony of individuals in an ancient narrative which isn’t just similar, but is exactly representative of the same mindset with an identical circumstance. This should be embarrassing:

“Jesus himself stood among them. But they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a ghost. And he said to them, ‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me, and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And while they still disbelieved and were in wonder, he said to them, ‘Do you have anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.” Luke 24:36-43.

The same supposition: a ghost appeared among them
The same test: feed it to prove that it isn’t a ghost
The same result: successfully consuming food satisfied the question

The African story and the gospel story have direct correspondence. Logically, A is A. Applying the OTF should open the Gospel writer to the same scrutiny and dismissal as that which should be accorded to the superstitious villagers. Those with this mindset cannot be accorded credibility when making extraordinary, miracle claims. Of course the persistent believer could be consistent and affirm that ghosts do exist in our world today and that whenever we suspect this to be the case we should feed the suspected ghost to clear up the question.