Okay. I get it. Many people aren’t capable of considering any ideas about religion that aren’t the ones already programmed into them, and are programmed to speak scornfully about any ideas that aren’t theirs. I probably fall under that umbrella.
I genuinely gave Christianity a chance. I read sizable chunks of the bible. I tried to wrap my head around the concepts. I see that there is in fact a implementation – not the majority one – of Christianity that isn’t particularly evil. It still isn’t my religion.
I decided I’m not going to debate it any more. Hopefully that will help me move on, because thinking about it all the time isn’t doing me or anyone else any good. There are better and more positive things for me to spend my energy on.
I do have a couple of criticisms that I feel the need to mention, though.
1) Many Christians speak of how, if there was no God, there would be no reason for being good and not evil. People, this is pathetic. If you’re only being good because you’re afraid of the superuser, you must have a awful lot of trouble respecting yourself. I’m not good because I think God will come stomp on me, I’m good because I want to be.
2) Many Christians speak of God’s “divine plan”. I’m here to say that if the universe is running on a plan, the planning entity is more than a little bit evil. Look around – all life lives at the expense of other life, people and kittens starve to death all the time, there’s a host of horrible and painful diseases, and we all get to go through a horribly painful process as our bodies shut down.. one could come up with a whole lot of criticism to the Divine Plan theory – I’m pretty sure *I* could design a much better universe – at least for life on earth – given infinite time. What we’ve got here, by all indications, isn’t so much a plan as a whole bunch of ‘we hacked it together, added some duct tape, and this is what worked’.
3) The only scenereo that makes sense to me is that we all, aggregated together, form God. As in, there’s not this superuser out there in left field running things – *we* are running things. When we pretend we aren’t, bad things are going to happen. One of the things that makes me angry about Christianity is that the Christians aren’t taking responsibility for their actions. They are claiming, for example, that it is ‘God’s Will’ that people die of AIDS or in stupid wars over resources or whatever rather than admitting that they, the Christians, are partially responsable *. I could go on a long list here – for example, I suspect many Christians feel more okay about recent wars because they’re making war on non-Christian nations – but I hope that if you don’t take anything else away from this long and meandering blog post, you take away this: ultimately, comforting as it might be to abdicate your responsability as Part Of God, you can’t. Your actions directly impact the other people in this world.
4) I’m not so sure that preaching uninhibited forgiveness of sins is a good thing. I’m still working my way through this one, but I think that while it’s a good idea for everyone’s mental health for them to forgive each other, it’s not such a good thing if said forgiveness means none of us ever grow and we all keep hurting each other in the same ways over and over and over again.
5) Parents: Don’t force your kids to go to church. It’s brainwashing, and it’s wrong, and I wish it were illegal. Churches should have a non-brainwashing area for minors who happen to be nonbelievers to hang out in while their parents get their sermons. This ought to be legally required, but would anyone like to talk about the odds of *that* happening?
6) God: Feel free to email me. Or call. Or write. Or send smoke signals. However, given that voices popping into one’s head are a sign of mental illness, expect me to be somewhat skeptical and require you to do a fair amount of authenticating before I believe you. Also, just because you’re more powerful than me, doesn’t mean you’re better than me. I could probably be convinced that this whole huge mess is in fact a brilliant strategy that will ultimately lead to everyone’s wishes coming true and sex on a stick for a nickel- but you may have to talk for a while. I also completely understand if you don’t feel the need to convince me, or have better and bigger things to do. But I do hope that if you torment me for eternity for not believing what you want me to – despite having made me so that I won’t – you’ll at least have the decency to feel guilty about it.
Hopefully that wraps up the religion topic for a few years. It’s been fun, but, really, there are some things that are just unknowable – and people pretending to know them anyway and then being all snooty about how wrong my opinions are – using the same old tired arguments, and openly ignoring my answers and challenges to their tired arguments – really piss me off.
Grateful *that’s* over – I hope –
Sheer
* = at least, by quantum causaility. If you deny funding to sexual health organizations because they support gay rights or abortions or whatever acts the Christians have decided are immoral, and people die of aids because the lack of funding means that no condoms were given out, then I’d say the Christians are responsable.
