I mean no disrespect, but after reading your post, all I can think is that you have missed the point of faith. In my experience, you cannot rationalize God, you just have to believe. It sounds simple, but it is not always easy.
Religion, philosophy, theology, and my general views on how the world works are so entwined that it is difficult to discuss any related topic while maintaining an ordered narrative. This is my fifth attempt to write this essay and I am strictly holding myself back from bringing in highly involved topics like free will, the difference between faith and fact, self-congratulatory disrespect, monochromatic thinking, the role of the church, general social theory, and a point by point dissection of my personal theology. Hopefully this restraint will result in an essay that is both coherent and relatively brief
( ... )
When asked what the chief commandment in the Bible was, Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-40). This isn’t a solitary moment of charitable feeling either. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor , and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). You can think you’re the best Christian on earth, follow all the rules, and never do anything wrong, but if you don’t have love you have missed the point
( ... )
9) Another factor I've seen has similar roots, the Christian (particularly fundamentalist) tendency to preach the inherent superiority of individual decisions or convictions tends to instill a sense of superiority and elitism in the second generation. This tends to have two main troubling outcomes, 1) there is commonly an eventual inability to relate to peers, to make friends outside one's comfort zone or cultural demographic, largely due to a combination of the lack of shared experiences and the inability to just be comfortable with people who don't live up to all your expectations. 2) I can't tell you how many Christian young men I've known who were raised to 'be better' who complain that they always work hard to do the right thing and that it both gets them nothing and that people who don't ever seem to try to be good seem to get everything they want. I can't help but feel that in preaching the superiority of homeschooling/Christianity/fundamentalism/etc. that we have missed instilling some fundamental understanding in our youth.
( ... )
8 ) The black and white nature of our views on faith and the world is problematic. There's this idea that anything Christian is automatically good, that if a famous theologian gets in trouble for tax evasion or a pastor for sleeping with an underage girl that it's either people in the world looking to drag down a man of God or Satan trying to destroy their ministry. I'm sorry, but that is the wrong reaction. Yes, everybody makes mistakes, but actions have consequences. If you are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars as your salary for being a pastor you have enough money to hire a decent accountant. No one made a person commit statutory rape or cheat on their wife, it was a choice which people must be held accountable for. God can forgive because he sees the true state of the heart, man however has to look at a person's record and make an informed decision about an individual's trustworthiness. A pastor who abuses his power should be expelled from leadership every time because he made his choice and broke the trust of the
( ... )
6) http://marc5solas.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/top-10-reasons-our-kids-leave-church/ This is a response to Point 5: Community - the author states young people see "their faith as something they “do” in community, they soon find that they can experience this “life change” and “life improvement” in “community” in many different contexts. Mix this with a subjective, pragmatic faith and the 100th pizza party at the local big-box church doesn’t compete against the easier, more naturally appealing choices in other “communities
( ... )
4) On a related note, I have never seen single mothers, gay people, or anyone who was just a little bit different treated so badly as I have seen them treated in church. Judgmentalism is the besetting sin of the church, it is the main reason most people abandon Christianity entirely. This point I am absolutely passionate about because I've known too many people who didn't fit the mold, geeks who were judged and condemned for playing D&D (which I'm sorry, if you can separate fantasy from reality is generally harmless), friends who were told they were going to hell for being gay, girls treated like pariahs for getting pregnant in their teens, or worse, blamed for being raped because they weren't home where they should have been, and I get so mad because I know them now and they're wonderful people who completely abandoned their faith because of the way Christians treated them. I talk about my faith with them, and they're fine with my faith, but for their own part they want nothing to do with Christianity. They're atheist, agnostic, or
( ... )
2) I've sat in a lot of pews listening to pastors manipulate the bible to preach their agenda rather than Gods' and I've been down that road too many times. Because we're trying to learn we assume that our pastors have learned more, understand more, have more revealed to them an so we second guess our own judgment. I know better now, I've been hurt, misled too many times. I attend the Episcopal church sporadically. I'm a charismatic at heart so I find the services boring, but the only charismatic church in town has theology I disagree with enough that I've walked out so mad I was crying more than once. The Episcopal church tends to require at least a masters in theology for it's priests, which means the theology is sound enough I can relax. Because that's the thing, every time I sit in a new church I am tense, on guard, constantly listening for skewed theology or a misused bible verse because I don't trust Christians anymore. I don't trust them not to use the bible to manipulate, judge, or hurt me. I go to the Episcopal church,
( ... )
1) Your God vs. mine: I'm not a resentful person by nature. Despite the fact that I have many problems with aspects of my religious upbringing there is only one thing that I genuinely resent. See through my teen years I struggled with God, with the inflexibility of the law and the concept of God that I had grown up knowing - the one who demanded unquestioning obedience, complete sacrifice of self (which often translates to loss of individuality), and the knowledge that my own inability to unquestioningly agree with what my spiritual elders told me meant that I would never really fit in with the 'good christian' ideal - in my own mental idiom, I would never be a good 'Grace girl'. I struggled with the concepts of predestination, omnipotence, and the generally accepted idea that a God who was 'willing that none should perish,' who in his omnipotence could see the length and breath of existence, would still create a world in which he knew the vast majority of his creation was already doomed to hell. I went to church, I prayed, and in my
( ... )
I wrote that essay, and several others about 2 years ago. I get the if rationality breaks your faith you didn't really get the point argument. I said it to several friends myself years ago, and they were kind enough to not be offended. The thing I wish I'd known, is it's pretty condescending and presumes your viewpoint and comfort level with the church are and should be held universally, that they're unimpeachable. If you are comfortable with your level of faith that's great. This post is not really meant to deconvert any one, it's just a catalogue of my own journey. No matter how passionate I once was I no longer find the bible itself creates a supportable belief system. And maybe in ten years I'll look back and go "I can't believe I thought that". In high school I firmly believed that the South should have been allowed to succeed, that states rights was the core issue of the Civil War, and that slavery really wasn't that bad. Ten years and a lot of REAL history classes later, I'm pretty horrified by my views from that time. Life is
( ... )
Wow. I read all of your comments and found that I agree with almost everything you wrote.
Please don't think I was being condescending. That was not my intention at all and I am truly sorry if I came across that way. I truly debated on weather to comment or not and wrote/rewrote my comment several times to try to get it as benign as possible. You said you don't talk about your faith online much and I don't either, for many of the same reasons you listed. The internet is pretty awesome when you find, such as I have in your posts, someone who has basically written what you think. It it not so awesome because it doesn't allow a tone of voice to come through and written language has it's limitations. Or in this case, I have limitations.
No judgement here, just a lot of nodding in agreement.
Also, nothing wrong with a good pun now and then. *g*
Hey, I've stuck my foot in my mouth more than once online. It's that damned lack of tone, it makes it both easier and harder to converse online. No offense taken, it's a hard line to walk between saying and not saying anything and whether or not it can help. And I'm glad someone appreciates my old take on religion. I put a lot of work into building a workable theology for myself, I hate to see it go to waste.
(stopping now, because every other sentence I try to tack on gets really zen/hippyish and I just can't take myself that seriously).
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Please don't think I was being condescending. That was not my intention at all and I am truly sorry if I came across that way. I truly debated on weather to comment or not and wrote/rewrote my comment several times to try to get it as benign as possible. You said you don't talk about your faith online much and I don't either, for many of the same reasons you listed. The internet is pretty awesome when you find, such as I have in your posts, someone who has basically written what you think. It it not so awesome because it doesn't allow a tone of voice to come through and written language has it's limitations. Or in this case, I have limitations.
No judgement here, just a lot of nodding in agreement.
Also, nothing wrong with a good pun now and then. *g*
Reply
(stopping now, because every other sentence I try to tack on gets really zen/hippyish and I just can't take myself that seriously).
Reply
Leave a comment