Aeromexico Hijacking
Jose Flores, a Christian pastor from Bolivia, used a fake bomb to hijack an Aeromexico flight on September 9th, demanding to speak to president Felipe Calderon. Why was it so important for him to speak to the president?
Flores, 44, has said he was acting on a divine revelation and wanted to warn Calderon of an earthquake that would occur in 2012. That year has been widely mentioned on the Internet as the date for potentially catastrophic events, based on astronomical alignments and purported ancient prophesies.
“I am never going to regret it,” Flores told Milenio Television Friday. “My intention was to do good, to announce, without regard to my life or liberty, that we should join together and pray for the earthquake not to occur.”
“I am happy because I know this is God’s” work, he said as he was transferred to prison.
The operative theory here seems to be that God has foreknowledge of an impending earthquake and wants to prevent it. So God told Jose Flores to tell Felipe Calderon to tell the all people of Mexico to… ask God to prevent the earthquake. Apparently God likes seeing people beg.
It’s not clear whether God or Flores originated the idea to hijack an airplane, but the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost did allegedly participate in the hijacking. Police who stormed the airplane could not locate the divine trio, however.
Ok, so Jose Flores is crazy. And it’s not really fair to assign moral blame to other Christians for what he did. That said, the very insanity of the entire incident raises an important epistemic question for all the non-airplane-hijacking Christians out there: Why exactly do you think that the divine revelations which you receive (or which other people received and wrote down to form the Bible) are any more reliable than Flores’s revelations?
I think it’s also important to ask why this man is insane. Insanity can come from bad philosophy, so let’s not ascribe his actions simply to some biological cause that made him act irrationally. Is it possible that this man took his Christianity so seriously, applied the most irrational aspects of it to his “thinking,” that he came to these conclusions and actions? Yes.
Irrational ideas, if taken literally and followed consistently, can lead to mad actions. Don’t let Christianity — i.e., supernaturalism and mysticism — off the hook so easily.