The Kingdom Come

So, I was curious what would happen if I simply searched the word Christian in google. The hits returned, the wikipedia entry on Christian and secondly a wikipedia entry on a Christian wrestler oddly enough.

The advertising on the side returned Christian poems. The third in the list of hits was Early Christian Writings: New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, a great site I utilize a lot.

The top advertisement was for meeting Christian singles.

Further, there was a link to religioustolerance.org which obviously is going to be liberal, especially since as I clicked the link called, Brief summary of Christianity The main founders of the "Jesus movements" -- a.k.a. primitive Christianity it first displayed Roman Catholicism and Mormonism. Really?

The point is, imagine you're a non-Christian who wants to find out about Christianity and the first thing you come across is the wikipedia entry or this religioustolerance definition.

WIKIPEDIA CHRISTIAN

Let's take a closer look at the wikipedia entry since it is the first hit. It seems to be a fair presentation, which is one reason I like wikipedia most of the time. An entry that is developed by proponents and opponents tends to be fairly balanced.

The entry claims half of earth's Christians are Roman Catholic. The footnote was catholicnewagency.com so to attempt to verify this statistic I did more searches. Various other sources also said RC represents half of the Christians worldwide. This is important since many Protestants consider Roman Catholics to not be Christians.

I found it interesting that per this wikipedia entry, supposedly Colombia, Poland, and Mexico are the three countries where people most identify as Christian, yet at least Mexico and Colombia are either in moral chaos or have reputations as main drug suppliers. What does this mean?

I wonder if people looking for definitions on Christian will click the wikipedia link before they click the religioustolerance link? If I was a non-Christian and clicked the religioustolerance link first, I would probably not pursue an investigation of Christianity. This is important because we do this with all sorts of things on a daily basis. How many of us open yahoo to get to yahoo mail and read the quick headlines yahoo displays. We get our daily news, our political views from whoever puts out those little blurbs. Many of us won't follow the link further or look at other links to see if what the yahoo writer is saying is accurate or balanced.

In an age where information is easily accessible it is also easily manipulated and we often become so overwhelmed, we'll believe what we hear/read first or most often without further research. We need to be careful.