Godless God-lovers

I'm getting so jaded about organized religion.

It's not that I don't like church, or think that it's not important. Corporal worship is still a great experience and gathering with other believers is key to any relationship with God.

It's just, man, God-lovers seem to be getting more stupid and close-minded by the day.

I wonder if it's always been this way.

I grew up in the church. Sunday school, bible study, Sunday worship, communion service, Women's Day, Usher's Day, I attended them all many times. Church and church people were a central part of my early development, and my faith has been a bedrock in my life for as long as I can remember. Sure, I resented attending worship when I was younger, but when the travails of life descended upon me, I appreciated the religious foundation my parents had established.

Now, I'm looking back over that time and wondering how much hateful stuff I was indoctrinated with while I was learning to serve the Lord.

Check out this story and this one. Now both of them involve the Catholic church, which has some crazy rules that are different from most other churches, but they are still indicative of a general attitude among church people.

That attitude can be summed up simply: get with the program or get the fuck out.

That makes me sad.

Like many traditional Christians I am troubled by what I see as a lack of morality and faith in the world today. Contrary to what some liberals fear, religious people are not staging a takeover, and the world is in fact moving further and further away from the traditional forms of most faiths. Truthfully, I do not see this as a good move because I believe the basic tenets of most religions promote goodwill and love towards your fellow man, and I shudder to think what the world would be like if we all lived by our own definitions of what is right and wrong.

Yet, I understand why these changes are occurring.

Many faiths, particularly my own Christianity, have become more and more dogmatic and political while also becoming less concerned with the primary concerns outlined for Christians in the Bible. This doesn't mean all church people aren't active in their communities, as a Katrina survivor I saw first hand the amount of good religious people can do, but it does mean that too often we don't do the right stuff when it comes to those that don't share our beliefs.

There is no excuse for the backlash among many white evangelicals towards other believers who supported Barack Obama. There is no biblical justification for the obscene amount of energy the church spends on discussing gay marriage and abortion, while topics like divorce and fornication are ignored. We are not loving our neighbors as we love ourselves and it shows. I'm tired of Christians hiding behind the trite explanation that we are a "peculiar people" and that the world "hated Jesus too."

Jesus was hated because he spoke against injustice and sought substantive moral change. Church people in America are hated because we seem to be patterning our lives after the Pharisees, a strict adherence to the letter of the law, but not to its Spirit.

I brought up my early childhood because when I look back these days I realize that often church people encouraged a casual disregard for those with different viewpoints and celebrated a stifling of intellectual curiosity.

I remember sitting in Sunday School one day and having an argument with my teacher about how God could give humans free will, but still know what we were going to do all the time. I had to be between 10 and 12 at the time, but I had already honed my logical debate skills to a fine edge. I argued that if God knew I was going steal some candy before I was born, how did I have free will when it came to stealing the candy? If my life was already laid out, wasn't I just following his plan?

You would have thought I had asked them to explain the mystery of the Trinity. Three or four teachers tried to deflate my argument, failed and then the Sunday School superintendent took an L. He basically brushed aside the question and said we shouldn't spend too much time pondering those types of things and we should just accept that God is all powerful and all-knowing while we have free will. And that was it.

(Later, I would think about this question some more. I decided that God may be aware of my future plans, but I am not. Consequently, when I make decisions, I make them in the moment and devoid of any control by God. Therefore, I can have free will even though my path in life is already set. It worked for me.)

That experience taught me something about church; it doesn't pay to be too different in the House of God. Don't ask too many questions, don't challenge too many accepted dogmas. Given my nature, I've always struggled with these guidelines, but that doesn't change the fact that they are real. And even more real is the truth that if a believer keeps on challenging the status quo, he or she might just be told their faith is fake and they are on their way to hell.

This mindset is crippling the church. I'm not in favor of the wholesale acceptance that characterizes many liberal churches, (I still believe fornication, adultery, lying and homosexuality are sins) but I do think the church has to encourage its members to really think about how the Bible works in the real world. We cannot continue to cling to banal biblical sayings, while we condemn everyone who disagrees with us.

We cannot win souls if we're concentrating all our efforts on stamping out any hint of non-conformity. We truly express God's will when we recognize the reality of free will, and encourage people to live according to God's will through a mixture of love and discipline. Our choice is not between liberalism gone wild and rigid conservatism. Our choice is between being beacons of pragmatic, realistic acceptance or being unthinking, hateful bastards.

Between being church people or Christians.








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