“We are fool’s for Christ’s sake.” - 1 Corinthians 4:10

For some reason that verse came to mind as I read the following story:

US Christian Activist Held In North Korea After Illegally Crossing Border (AFP; Dec 27)

SEOUL: A US Christian human-rights activist who illegally entered North Korea on Christmas Day in a bid to promote better rights and conditions there has been detained, his colleague said Sunday.

Robert Park, 28, walked across the frozen Tumen River from China to the communist North on Friday as his fellow activists watched and videotaped his unauthorised entry, according to Park’s colleagues.

A US citizen of Korean ancestry, Park claimed he had seen a vision from God of North Korea’s liberation and redemption, his colleagues said, adding that he crossed the border shouting “I came here to proclaim God’s love”.

Park, from Tucson, Arizona, carried a letter calling for Pyongyang leader Kim Jong-Il to release political prisoners, shut concentration camps and take steps to improve rights and conditions, his colleagues said.

“Robert Park is out of contact now, but we got a tip-off that he is alive and being held by North Korean authorities for questioning,” one of Park’s colleagues told AFP Sunday on condition of anonymity….

Cho Sung-Rae, one of Park’s fellow activists in Seoul, Sunday released e-mail correspondence between Park and his parents in the United States.

“We are acting in faith — and God is leading,” Park wrote in an email to his Arizona-based parents sent shortly before he entered North Korea.

“Let’s honour his pure intention to follow God’s goodwill for His suffering people in North Korea,” Park’s parents wrote in an email to Cho.

Park’s letter, addressed to Kim Jong-Il and posted online on Saturday, called on North Korean leaders to repent and allow care teams to enter “to minister healing to those who have been tortured and traumatized.”…

You can learn more about Park and his gOd-inspired mission here and here.

I wish Park all the best.

Indeed, I wish we lived in a world where one good man armed with a letter could cross a border and bring down a brutal tyrant who’s responsible for the deaths of many thousands if not millions of people.

Alas, that’s not the sort of world we live in.

And – IMHO – it’s a pretty shitty gOd who sits back and does nothing to make it a better world except inspire men like Park to foolishly risk their lives tilting at windmills.

You know the gOd I’m talking about – right?

It’s the one who allegedly said “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (as I’ve discussed at some length here).

Ring a bell?

That gOd also allegedly promised “those who believe” that they could handle serpents and drink any deadly thing without being harmed (Mark 16:17-18).

Of course I believe that this gOd is nothing more than a delusion in search of a cure but that fact alone apparently can do very little to help Robert Park today.

If Park’s story can serve as a spur to others to recognize and abandon that delusion – or never to embrace it in the first place – well, it’ll still be a sad and unfortunate story, but at least it will have *some* redeeming value.

Which is more than I can say about these other stories that his reminded me of:

Man Attempts To Convert Lion To Christianity (Theist File #21; Nov 5, 2004)

TAIPEI (Reuters) – A man leaped into a lion’s den at the Taipei Zoo on Wednesday [Nov. 3] to try to convert the king of beasts to Christianity, but was bitten in the leg for his efforts.

“Jesus will save you!” the 46-year-old man shouted at two African lions lounging under a tree a few meters away.

“Come bite me!” he said with both hands raised, television footage showed.

One of the lions, a large male with a shaggy mane, bit the man in his right leg before zoo workers drove it off with water hoses and tranquilizer guns.

Newspapers said that the lions had been fed earlier in the day, otherwise the man might have been more seriously hurt … or worse.

Zoo’s Lion Kills Man Who Invoked God (Theist File #2089; June 14, 2006)

According to Yahoo News and Reuters, “KIEV: A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.

“‘The man shouted “God will save me, if he exists”, lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions,’ the official said. ‘A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery.’

“The incident, Sunday evening when the zoo was packed with visitors, was the first of its kind at the attraction. Lions and tigers are kept in an ‘animal island’ protected by thick concrete blocks.”

Let’s hope 2010 has a few fewer fools for Christ and a few more reasonable humanists.