It’s been a while. My last post was about the proliferation of bullshit in the lead up to the mid-term elections. I mentioned in that post that Christianity as it is most popularly practiced here has its own share of nonsense. I am going to address some of that here. The reason for the title will become apparent later on.
First a bit of background so you know something about my perspective. I was brought up in a Catholic household. The main message I got from that is that God is mostly like another abusive parent, demanding things that make little sense and punishing you when you don’t comply. Back then the Church required fasting on Fridays which didn’t mean not eating, it meant not eating meat. Fish for dinner and peanut butter and jelly or cheese sandwiches for lunch. Not that much of a hardship.
I asked my Dad , “So if I eat a bologna sandwich on Friday and I’m not sorry, I go to hell, right?
“Yes”
“And why is this?”
“Because the Pope says so”
Sure. I was a precocious child and wasn’t very old when this stuff stopped making sense. I was also an avid reader and intensely interested in science and engineering, always driven to understand how things work. Religion didn’t seem to have anything to offer me besides more rules and more threats. None of the people I talked to about it had any reason for their belief other than blind faith or fear of punishment.
In my early teens I threw God out the window onto the pile of discarded childhood myths, on top of Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy. Serious people didn’t believe this stuff and I was a serious person. I was also seriously misinformed although I didn’t know it at the time.
Fast forward about 25 years and I am a desperate alcoholic trying to find a way out of the hell I wandered into. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking your loved ones with addictions are choosing this life because they think it’s fun. The fun flame blows out pretty quickly and then it’s just chemical imprisonment. All roads to recovery seem to point to 12 step programs and those are all based on the same things. It boils down to: There is a God. You’re not it. If you reach out to whatever concept of a God your damaged brain can manage, that God will spring you from this prison.
It worked. I got introduced to God and not told what I had to believe. This God told me I didn’t have to believe anything anyone had every told me about Him and He would still be there for me. He (I am using masculine pronouns because it is convention. God is immaterial and has no gender.) loved me without conditions and I never felt any threats. God doesn’t have to punish us for our sins. The consequences of them are painful enough on their own.
Three years after this I became convinced that the resurrection of Jesus really happened and I became a Christian. A follower of Christ, not a member of a religious denomination. Seventeen years after that a Jesuit priest in an interview I listened to convinced me that I needed to be a member of a Christian community so I joined a church. The pastor of that church was a wonderful Godly man and I loved him and the church. A little less than three years later he succumbed to cancer and that’s when things began to change. Little by little, organized religion started taking the God that loved me unconditionally away from me and replacing Him with bad parent God.
Ten years of this stuff had me feeling discouraged and a bit disconnected. A woman in one of my 12 step meetings asked me for some help understanding a book she was reading about spirituality and the 12 steps by a Franciscan priest named Richard Rohr. I read the book and that opened the door for me. I wasn’t imprisoned like addiction but I was stuck in a gated community of Evangelical orthodoxy that didn’t feel like spiritual home. I still love the people at my church but my beliefs are becoming less constrained. I read more books by Fr. Rohr and started another one on contemplation by Thomas Merton. I corresponded with a friend and pastor from my previous church, expecting to be chastised, but wanting his opinion. I turned out he was on a similar path and suggested some more reading. It was pretty exciting finding that my thinking and experience of God were shared by others.
If you are a devout Evangelical that doesn’t want to hear anything other than what you were brought up to believe, you should probably stop here. Anything further is going to sound like heresy.
When I am trying to separate the real from the unreal in Christian teaching I start with what God is. Anything inconsistent with what or who God is, is probably a human fabrication or add on.
God is all powerful. He created the universe. Every bit of it. Time, space, matter, you, me. He holds everything in existence from moment to moment with His will. It stands from this that, since he is responsible for all creation, He can alter that creation in any way. When he does, we usually call it a miracle.
God is omnipresent. This means he is everywhere, any time. He is not a being in a place and time. He is being itself and permeates the universe. God became creation as much as he created it.
God is omniscient, all knowing. Because he is everywhere, at any time, there is no knowledge that He doesn’t have.
This flows from the others and is central to my personal theology. God is love. Because an all knowing, all powerful, everywhere, all the time God created this universe and us, he cares for all of it. To love is to will the good of another and God wills the good of his creation.
1 John chapter 4:
“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.”
OK, I am going to start with the Bible because I know most Christians will pull out Bible verses to show me that I am wrong about some of the things below. I don’t think the Bible is what many of us have been told that it is, and sections of it have been used to justify everything from child abuse to slavery, to genocide. My definition of biblical inerrancy is this: That the writers of the books in the Bible were not telling lies. The Bible is a collection of writings by many authors, some unknown, from different places and in different times. Their places, times, and personalities filtered their experiences just like ours do. They were having experiences with God and recording them so we would have a reference point to start our journey. Not so we would inhabit their journey and go no further. It is not a science book. Some of it is mythology, some of it is history, some of it is a mixture. The final selection of what books would be included in the Christian Bible was done by a meeting of religious leaders in the fifth century when Christianity was the official state religion of a dictatorship. Were those bishops not influence by the empire they belonged to that could extinguish their lives at any moment? Did they not like the political power they accessed through the emperor? To believe in what is currently taught about inerrancy, you have to believe that every writer was merely a stenographer writing down God’s words, and that God was dictating the conferences assembled by Popes and emperors, and that after God had told those councils what books need to be in the Bible, 1000 years later he told the reformers what 7 books to take out. When was God mistaken? Or were people mistaken? If so, which time?
Here is where it gets scary for most people. We’ve been told this is all or nothing. Either the Bible is a word for word transcription of God’s speech or it’s nothing at all. That’s illogical and unreasonable. The Encyclopedia Britannica isn’t perfect but that doesn’t make it useless. The Bible is full of wisdom handed down to us from religious giants of their time, but when they tell us things that aren’t consistent with what God is, then they can be mistaken, just like us.
Everyone cherry picks the Bible. Because there are so many points of view, it’s easy to find verses that make you right and someone else wrong. Someone else can do the same thing to make you look wrong. There are over 2500 Protestant denominations. All of them are quite sure they are the ones with the correct interpretation of their inerrant Bible. Surely you can see what’s wrong with this picture.
Some people will tell me that God is perfectly capable of arranging for his perfect word to be in our Bible. This is true but there isn’t much evidence that he did. No unbiased person would read the Bible and conclude that it had a single author. It contradicts itself all over the place. We’ve been told it can’t contradict itself so we tie the meaning in knots to force agreement and we call it hermeneutics, using a big word so we won’t be questioned when we make things up out of thin air and claim it’s God’s word. Some things simply can’t be reconciled. A God that orders genocide and then tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love our enemies isn’t being consistent. All powerful and all knowing isn’t inconsistent. Someone got it wrong. Was it an ancient Jewish prophet or Jesus. I’m a Christian. I’m following Jesus. We can experience God directly. The Bible is not God. Studying the Bible is valuable, but it doesn’t substitute for God. Fr. Rohr said in a seminar that Catholics put a priest between people and God and Protestants put a book. Even if you believe the Bible was dictated to people it’s incomplete. God is too big to be contained in a book.
I’m not going to cover everything that I think we are getting wrong, that’s a book not an essay. And we get a lot wrong. I’m sure I’m wrong about some things. The Bible is a story about people getting the message wrong, over and over and over. It seems certain that what the mainstream religions say about God has fundamental errors. Let’s look at a few things that make little sense to me.
To be a good Christian is to hold the correct set of beliefs about the Bible, God, salvation, end times, etc.
This is wrong on the face of it. Jesus told his disciples to follow him. No theology test. Follow me. If you love me you will do as I say. Most of the early Christians couldn’t read and the printing press had not been invented so they likely had no scriptures to study. Love God, love people, follow Jesus. That’s not the entirety of spiritual experience but that’s what it takes to be a Christian. Some of what we are told we must believe is, to anyone with an inquiring mind and a soft heart, not believable. As I have said before, the test for salvation isn’t our ability to believe the preposterous without evidence.
This is a Calvinist belief, and quite popular. Non-Calvinist denominations take a similar view of humanity minus predestination. All humans repulse God because of our sin and this demands eternal punishment (I’ll cover this bit later). Some of us are saved either by God randomly choosing us (Calvin) or by us waking up and choosing Jesus.
This is inconsistent with all powerful, all knowing, and love. God knew how everything would turn out at the moment of creation. We are not a surprise. We are exactly what he created. The only sin-free thing in the universe is God. We have imperfect reasoning, imperfect knowledge, and only see God’s will “through a glass, darkly”. It was ordained from the beginning that we would sin. Did God created us so he could condemn us? How is that consistent with love? With being created “in His image”? It isn’t. God knows we aren’t perfect, loves us anyway and stands ready to help us be better whenever we ask.
Everyone that sins and doesn’t repent or is a member of the wrong religion will be tortured forever in hell.
This is wildly inconsistent with any notion of love. First let’s talk about being tortured forever in hell. Our very imperfect human justice system at least attempts to match punishments with crimes. Driving over the speed limit does not incur the same penalty as premeditated murder. We know this intuitively because a sense of justice has been written in our hearts by God. We are expected to believe that in God’s perfect justice system there is only one punishment. Torture without end. Worse than the death penalty. Any sin not repented whether it’s looking at the SI swimsuit edition with lust in our hearts or mass murder incurs the same penalty. We all know this is ridiculous. It’s a human revenge fantasy. Ask any parent what their child would have to do to cause them to condemn them to torture for the rest of their lives, forget eternity. The answer is: Nothing. Yet a parent’s love is not as big as the love of God. Not as all encompassing or as unconditional. I’ve seen people live miserable lives followed by miserable deaths from multiple crippling diseases. I’m supposed to believe that our loving God then says to them. “You think that was bad, wait till you see what I have waiting for you”? If you think that’s love, you don’t know what love is. Most Christians seem to be much more upset about “undeserving” folks going to heaven than about billions of people being tortured forever in hell. This says something about us. Projecting that cruelty on to God is the real heresy. Some say, “It’s not torture, it’s permanent separation from God.” Once again parents, what would your child have to do for you to disown them forever with no chance of reconciliation? Nothing? Is your love bigger than God’s?
Now we have the question of other religions. The same thing applies. God loves humanity. All of it. He wants to reconcile all of creation to Himself. We are told that His only method of doing that was to become incarnate in a small corner of the world and trust us, the human beings who have a long history of getting the message wrong and just generally screwing up, to save everyone else? Condemning most of the world for centuries due to our lack of mobility and thereafter because people had the misfortune of being born in a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist household and faithfully followed the examples of their parents and teachers? Once again, if you think this is love, you don’t know what love is. It’s true that the Bible quotes Jesus as saying that no one comes to the father except through him. This doesn’t have to mean that only Christians can come to God. I think it means that Jesus is the way and the guide and when we call out to God anywhere, no matter who we are, he answers. I have seen this in action. Countless drug addicts and alcoholics miraculously saved from destruction by calling out to the “God of their understanding”. It never mattered what they believed at the time. Now you might say that God loved them enough to save them from addiction but not enough to save them from eternal torture. If you think that’s love, you don’t know what love is. As C.S. Lewis wrote in “Mere Christianity”, “We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.” A recent sermon implied that Roman Catholics aren’t saved and therefore condemned because they believe in the “wrong Jesus”. Seriously? For 1000 years most Christians were condemned to hell forever because the reformation hadn’t happened yet? I don’t fully understand how intelligent educated men can believe such things.
You can’t be a Christian if you’re a Democrat or its west coast corollary you can’t be a Christian if you’re a Republican.
More nonsense. Vote for whoever you think you should. Neither party is following Christ. A real disciple should have trouble signing up as a member of either political party. Both push policies that are antithetical to following Christ. When you vote, you have to weigh the good and the bad and vote your conscience.
You can’t be a Christian if you’re gay or transexual.
Get real. Did you read about the people Jesus hung out with? Yes, the Old Testament says that gay sex is an abomination. So is eating the wrong type of animal, usury (unfair lending practices that prey on the poor i.e pawn shops and payday lenders that I see everywhere), eating shellfish, bearing false witness, and causing strife. Your favorite politician is most likely an Old Testament abomination. Paul talks a bit about it too but gay Christians will argue that he was talking about the sort of libertinism and sexual exploitation that was common in Rome and not about to people in a committed relationship, which was unknown at that time. Jesus was asked by some contemporary Donald Trumps if serial divorce was ok. Jesus lectured them on marriage and people today take it as a condemnation of gay marriage and a hard rule that no one can get divorced. Sheesh. I can’t say. I don’t know. God is love. God loves us even though we are sinners. Many of us do things that are not what Jesus would do and don’t think we are sinning. Even if gay sex is a sin, God forgives, otherwise we are all going to hell. I know someone who was kicked out of church because he is gay. The Jesus I know would have thrown the preacher out, or at least gave him a good talking to. Here is an admonishment from Jesus in Matthew chapter 23:
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.”
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.”
The kingdom of heaven that Jesus was referring to was right then, not the afterlife. The Kingdom of God is here. We can live in it. It hasn’t been perfected yet but we can choose to live in God’s reality and we damn sure shouldn’t be locking the doors to keep others out. If you think that’s love, you don’t know what love is.
I was saved from certain destruction by a loving and merciful God. A God whose mercy and love knows no bounds. A God that knew that words were insufficient to explain that me and led me to an art museum to show me an image of it. I am trying to be like that. Not doing it very well, but that’s the goal. I’m not going to let the modern Pharisees make me into a child of hell. Make no mistake. The Pharisees, the law enforcers, the guardians of the doors to heaven are still largely in charge. Preaching from pulpits.
Love, love, love, love, love. Love is the answer to nearly every question.
If it doesn’t come from Grace or love, it’s not from God.
Don’t say it.
Don’t do it.
Don’t believe it.
