Aiki - I think you're onto something there. I guess I'm hanging around here because I'm looking to forgive Christianity as a whole. I understand intellectually that people tend to insert their own beliefs (right or wrong) into their religions. They love to create some sort of Divine approval for whatever cultural norms they embrace. Don't like short skirts? Here's a bible verse to back you up! Don't think women should wear jeans? Here's a bible verse to back you up! Don't beleive the races should mix? Here's a bible verse to back you up! Want to wear jeans? Here's a bible verse to back you up! Think God loves racial intermarraige? Here's a bible verse! Gay? Here's a few passages? Homophobic? Here's a few other passages. Separation of Church and state? Here's a verse. Want God in the whitehouse? Here's another. It's a tailor made god for a consumer society.
As recent generations have moved farther and farther from a thorough knowledge of the Bible, more and more of what you describe above has occurred. This isn't the fault of the Bible, or how its written, however, but the fault of those who have neglected to study the Scriptures so that they might "rightly divide it" for themselves and discern whether or not another has rightly divided it. If the average Christian in the pew was a dedicated and careful student of the Word of God, the warping and twisting of Scripture that goes on today would occur far less frequently and, when it did occur, would be quickly recognized and rejected as unbiblical.
How many denominations are there for this very reason? Christians can't agree to disagree or explore the questions hand in hand. They have to be right! EVERYONE seems so much more concerned with whether or not God agrees with their personal viewpoints than with serving an independent being.
I think this is something of an over-generalization. Many of the evangelical Christian denominations in my area hold to the same basic doctrinal and theological tenets. Denominational distinctions exist sometimes due to nothing more than heritage. Many of the Baptist churches in the city where I live were founded by Swedish immigrants; Mennonite churches here were founded by German immigrants. In any event, Alliance, Baptists, Mennonites, Nazarenes, E-Free, Lutherans, Presbyterians - all hold to essentially the same Christian worldview.
I know personally many Christians who do "agree to disagree" and still call one another brothers and sisters in Christ. I wonder, though, at your charge that Christians "have to be right." Do you believe the things you've written are wrong? Do you think you are in error concerning what you believe? If not, are you not guilty of the very thing about which you criticize Christians?
It's gotten to the point that many seem to think it's their providence to create God's own personal kingdom of heaven on earth - what Christ said he DID NOT come to do - in the form of Christian legistlation, Christian Presidents, and Christian Education. Because let's face it. Nobody wants Creationism taught in schools. You want GENESIS creation taught in schools. If other forms of creationism from other religions get taught I don't want to be twenty miles from the uproar.
Christ did come to change people and in so doing he changes the world. What's wrong with a Christian president? How is such a president inferior to, say, an atheist president, or a Buddhist one? And what is "Christian legislation" exactly? What other form of legislation is superior to it (as opposed to merely different)?
Nobody wants Creationism taught in schools? Obviously somebody does or you wouldn't be talking about the prospect. And how is the idea that everything came from nothing a better alternative than that a Creator made everything? I'm not sure you understand well what Creationism offers. It is not an abandonment of science but rather a different interpretation of the facts that science offers up than the naturalistic one. How is this a bad thing?
You ban gay marraige as though what two people who do not believe the same things as you does infringes on your own beliefs. But it's deeper than that and most are too willfully uneducated to understand what's really going on in their hearts and minds.
Actually, I have studied the matter of homosexuality fairly carefully and know that it is not genetic but rather the result of various relational, social, and moral influences. I don't have a problem with two people of the same gender loving one another deeply; I just object to their having sex with each other. Why, when homosexuality is ultimately a choice, should I give a homosexual the same rights that I would someone who is born black, or asian, or with some physical disability? I don't do this for someone who prefers chicken to beef, or the color red to the color blue; mere preference is not an appropriate basis upon which to confer upon someone special rights and protection, which is exactly what the homosexual community is pressing for.
The BNP party in the UK wants to enact a governmental policy which actively discourages the mixing of races. Why? Because they're think the purity of the white race and culture needs protection. There is actually some sort of fear that if two people they don't even know, or even their offspring, marry inter-racially it threatens their OWN place in the country. There is even a sense that it threatens their own identity in their country.
Does it? If most of Europe becomes Muslim, what do you think the culture will reflect? If it becomes mostly asian, what norms will entrench in the culture? Caucasian ones? (Don't mistake me here: I am not endorsing anything the BNP party espouses; I know virtually nothing about the party.)
Isn't that in a nutshell what Christians in America are terrified of too? That a more liberal america changes your identity, affects who you are? You are who you choose to be, and that's all anyone else wants as well. You can't legistlate Christ, or your version of him, into the hearts of people.
I am not legislating my faith upon others.
A more liberal America is a kind of cultural "identity" and that identity is at odds with the Christian faith. Why should Christians not be able to do as you are doing here and make assertions about what is right and wrong and vie for representation within the culture? Essentially, you are doing the very thing you accuse Christians of doing: Asserting a worldview. Your objection to things Christian shows the same kind of intolerance toward them as you claim they show toward you. Why is it okay for you to be intolerant but for Christians it is not?
When they are faced with other people who embrace other possibilities it makes one wonder - How can they be whole if I'm whole? How can they be right if I'm right? How can they know god if you know god? How can they be happy if I'm happy?
People can be happy for a variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with religion. People can even feel quite "whole" apart from a belief in God or gods. But the matter of who is right is something altogether different. Truth is not defined by happiness or a feeling of wholeness. Truth by its very nature is exclusivistic. When religious ideas collide and contradict it is irrational to simply say that "all roads lead to the top of the mountain." Someone is wrong, or maybe everyone is wrong, but beliefs that oppose one another, that contradict one another, cannot all be right. If I believe I am right and have coherent, rational reasons for thinking that I am, then it is perfectly appropriate to say so. As soon as I do this, though, I necessarily rule out a host of other contradictory beliefs. It is not arrogant or intolerant to do so, merely rational.
Then the mind slams shut. Because, particularly in evangelical christianity, they can't be whole, they can't be right, they can't be happy. Not really happy. Not like you. They must have lots and lots of short comings.
Oh? How do you know this?
The mind really has no choice but to tell you these things in defence of your sense of self. Otherwise you risk openning yourself up to culture shock, and a rewriting of your understandings, even your understandings of self.
Again, how do you know this? Are you just projecting your own experience on everyone else?
And make no mistake. Culture shock sucks. It hurts alot like hell. Maybe you look a little closer at the other people, the people who don't live and think like you and must not know god like you. they look happy enough. they don't seem to be evil. That feels unsettling.
No, it doesn't. I am not the least unsettled that people feel happy and content without faith in the God of the Bible.
Oh wait! that unsettled feeling must be a demon or satan trying to get into your heart! Oh yay! for joy! You were right after all. time to start praying for them! Then form a picket line and write protest letters. If that doesn't work throw flaming rocks through their windows as warriors for christ!
Whoa! Easy there! You're making some pretty wild leaps now. What's wrong with praying for someone? And what's wrong with writing letters and picketing what you think is wrong? And how do you leap from peaceful protesting to violent action? I know many, many Christians who have protested abortion, homosexuality, etc., but would never dream of exerting their point of view violently upon another.
Where is the death to self? Where is the willingness to maybe, just maybe, not have the whole answer?
Who said knowing some things are right means you "have the whole answer"? In fact, the apostle Paul wrote that we only know "in part" while we live on this globe.
The ability to self-lessly consider, prayerfully, that maybe the interpretations you were raised in aren't the only valid ones or even the right ones?
How do you know whether or not I have carefully considered my worldview?
Instead of selflessness there is vicious self-defense. Defence of race. Defence of religion. Defence of denomination. Instead of love there is hate. There is anger. There is offence. There's even slander! It's all the same bigotry.
The strength of your bitterness and feeling of offense does not make you right. You are oozing anger, hate, offense, and bigotry; you are vigorously defending your point of view and attacking mine. Where is your love?
It's not about god. It's about culture. It's about being secure in the knowledge that your interpretation of the universe is all there is so that your inner world remains intact.
How do you know this? My faith is about truth and living according to it. I have good reason to believe the things I do completely separately from what my culture urges me to believe. In fact, my culture runs completely contrary to my faith. So what of your assertion above, then? In my case, at least, it is quite in error. If it can be mistaken in my case, it can be in others, too.
Self isn't dead. It's on a freaking shrine! It's decorated with gold and jewels and payed honour on a daily basis. It's petted and preened until that golden feeling of security in your own correctness is felt.
Your saying so doesn't make it so. And what part of you are you indulging as you vent so fiercely upon me? Your words don't ring of selflessness, I can tell you.
Jesus Christ has stopped being the Person represented the Bible and has become an idol carved in the image of Self and self-proclaimed 'Little-Christs' have done it and are still doing it. It's not cool. It's hurting people. Nobody but me sees it. And it kills me.
Maybe nobody else sees it because it isn't them you're seeing but yourself.
If Christianity exists at all it's as a unique, man-made, fragmented religion formed through varied political climates and cultures and sharing too few of my own interpretations of the Bible (having actually, prayerfull and meditatively, read it more than a few times) for me to consider myself a part of it.
Well, if these are your reasons for rejecting Christianity, I can see why you would. Unfortunately, nothing you've just described above about Christianity is actually true of it.
Peace.
ABBA'S FOOL,
