- Jun 7, 2017
- 1
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- 35
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Pantheist
- Marital Status
- Single
What I distrust about christianity is that people insist that Jesus Christ has changed their life and that they have a personal relationship with him.
Perhaps you might have beat an addiction or made a lifestyle change, but you are still the same darn person. The only thing that changed is that now when you do something wrong you ask God for forgiveness and this ritual has become comforting to you. Whereas before your conversion you just had to live with what you did.
You have a relationship with Jesus? In what sense? In order to have a relationship with someone they have to actually talk back to you. You say he talks to you, but instead of hearing an audible voice you have to sit and wait for that tingly feeling. I know it well. You go into a quiet room and pray about your problems until either you calm down or your subconscious provides a solution (either an immediate solution or a ‘prophecy’ about the outcome of your problematic circumstance). If your subconscious provides you with a solution that pans out or a prediction that comes true, you assign that aspect of your mind not to yourself but to God. If it provides a solution that doesn’t work or a prediction that doesn’t come to pass, then you assign it to yourself and not to God. And this still, small voice gets split into two separate, but oddly indistinguishable voices. Well indistinguishable that is, until after the fact! Heaven forbid you are forced to admit that you’ve been putting masks on your conscience to avoid accepting that your sole internal source of judgement is prone to error.
Why would God want to offer his children something so spoiling as certainty?!? The writers of the New and Old Testaments all claim divine intervention, audible voices, visible signs, unambiguous miracles and even a doubting Thomas was allowed to touch the flesh of Christ, but you, you have to sweat it out. Sinner! You’re not good enough, but those old, dead guys were! They were surely better, holier than you. Back, in the good ole days! I guess modern times are just too sinful for miracles like the ones purported to take place in the book of Acts. These ‘saints’, or desert hermits, have only fragments of alleged writings to defend their virtue. Writings which supposedly imbue inerrant truth, even though they’ve been translated from dead languages (more or less), archived, compiled and most likely altered by……… dead people that you’ve never met.
But why should I care what you believe, right??! Well you see, if half the world believes in something silly, it makes the other half of the world feel just a little more isolated and excluded. Believe me I wish I could enthusiastically join in your game, and in my early years I did. I went all in, I “loved” God, I prayed, worshipped, repented, believed with all my heart, read the Bible in its’ entirety multiple times. Funny thing about belief is that the more you expose it to cold, objective rationality it has a funny way of dissolving into nothing. So when I inevitably lost my silly beliefs, I also lost my faith. My faith in my existential security, and my faith in people, particularly believers. How could they not see the contradiction, OR worse, what was it that they see in these beliefs that I can’t see no matter how hard I try? Am I just too sinful, too doubting to be given reassurance by God? If I ask I shall receive, but when I ask for a reason to believe, I still receive nothing. You feel that your religion does good things for you, maybe the people at your church are kind and helpful, maybe it feels relaxing to pray and sing songs that you already know all the words to. What you don’t realize is that your religion excludes people like me even if I stand and sing and pray in the midst of all the other believers. It excludes me on the principle that I’ll never be able to fit in with you unless I fake it and pretend to feel something I don’t. It leaves behind a different sort of still, small voice. One that says that you are better than me because I must be too unworthy, that I have gone too far astray to be loved by this God of yours. My heart is open, my ears are listening, but my faith is gone, chased away by insincere religious cliche.
Perhaps you might have beat an addiction or made a lifestyle change, but you are still the same darn person. The only thing that changed is that now when you do something wrong you ask God for forgiveness and this ritual has become comforting to you. Whereas before your conversion you just had to live with what you did.
You have a relationship with Jesus? In what sense? In order to have a relationship with someone they have to actually talk back to you. You say he talks to you, but instead of hearing an audible voice you have to sit and wait for that tingly feeling. I know it well. You go into a quiet room and pray about your problems until either you calm down or your subconscious provides a solution (either an immediate solution or a ‘prophecy’ about the outcome of your problematic circumstance). If your subconscious provides you with a solution that pans out or a prediction that comes true, you assign that aspect of your mind not to yourself but to God. If it provides a solution that doesn’t work or a prediction that doesn’t come to pass, then you assign it to yourself and not to God. And this still, small voice gets split into two separate, but oddly indistinguishable voices. Well indistinguishable that is, until after the fact! Heaven forbid you are forced to admit that you’ve been putting masks on your conscience to avoid accepting that your sole internal source of judgement is prone to error.
Why would God want to offer his children something so spoiling as certainty?!? The writers of the New and Old Testaments all claim divine intervention, audible voices, visible signs, unambiguous miracles and even a doubting Thomas was allowed to touch the flesh of Christ, but you, you have to sweat it out. Sinner! You’re not good enough, but those old, dead guys were! They were surely better, holier than you. Back, in the good ole days! I guess modern times are just too sinful for miracles like the ones purported to take place in the book of Acts. These ‘saints’, or desert hermits, have only fragments of alleged writings to defend their virtue. Writings which supposedly imbue inerrant truth, even though they’ve been translated from dead languages (more or less), archived, compiled and most likely altered by……… dead people that you’ve never met.
But why should I care what you believe, right??! Well you see, if half the world believes in something silly, it makes the other half of the world feel just a little more isolated and excluded. Believe me I wish I could enthusiastically join in your game, and in my early years I did. I went all in, I “loved” God, I prayed, worshipped, repented, believed with all my heart, read the Bible in its’ entirety multiple times. Funny thing about belief is that the more you expose it to cold, objective rationality it has a funny way of dissolving into nothing. So when I inevitably lost my silly beliefs, I also lost my faith. My faith in my existential security, and my faith in people, particularly believers. How could they not see the contradiction, OR worse, what was it that they see in these beliefs that I can’t see no matter how hard I try? Am I just too sinful, too doubting to be given reassurance by God? If I ask I shall receive, but when I ask for a reason to believe, I still receive nothing. You feel that your religion does good things for you, maybe the people at your church are kind and helpful, maybe it feels relaxing to pray and sing songs that you already know all the words to. What you don’t realize is that your religion excludes people like me even if I stand and sing and pray in the midst of all the other believers. It excludes me on the principle that I’ll never be able to fit in with you unless I fake it and pretend to feel something I don’t. It leaves behind a different sort of still, small voice. One that says that you are better than me because I must be too unworthy, that I have gone too far astray to be loved by this God of yours. My heart is open, my ears are listening, but my faith is gone, chased away by insincere religious cliche.
