i grew up in southern california where i was surrounded by christians. my grandparents are methodists, my parents went to church with them but weren't super into it, i was baptized methodist, and have vague memories of sunday school from a really early age. even then, i think my brother and i found a way of playing alone without listening to all the church stuff around us. my parents stopped taking us regularly to church when i was still pretty young and then we only had to go for christmas because it was important to my grandparents. for years we either brought video games to play, or played with the little flashlights that took the place of the candles (and pretended to be in star wars), or we wrote notes on whatever paper we could find instead of listening to whatever the dude in front had to say. the singing part was fun, except i didn't know any of the words or how to find the songs in the book.
i had heard the sort of general stories about christmas over the years but only had a vague idea of what it was for a long time. i think i was a teenager when i was in church, passing notes with my cousin when i asked her to explain the whole thing. i was dumbfounded. it made no sense to me. i couldn't understand why anyone would believe that. the more i heard about stories from the Bible, the more confused i was as to how anyone could believe these stories to be historical fact. to me they made more sense as fables: morals to be learned from interesting and exaggerated stories, but not fact to be taken seriously. who would believe that?
i guess you could say that my parents have become sort of mystics. they don't take doctrine too seriously, or follow it at all, and they feel their personal experience with God is way more important to their spirituality. my mom has told me about a spiritual experience she has when she was 19. since it is her experience, i won't be the one to tell it. but the overall feeling of the experience was the overwhelming realization that God is unconditional love. that's it. she realized there was no need to go to church every weekend and worry too much about what the bible or any other religion had to say on the matter. and as a kid i remember her telling me that all i needed to know was that God was unconditional love. since i felt that from my parents, i knew what that was and had no need to delve any deeper into it.
my parents raised me without this idea of heaven and hell to keep me from doing "bad" things. they taught me their ethical views and realized that learning from my mistakes was more important than scaring me into behaving correctly. i don't believe in heaven and hell and, therefore, the idea of "sin" makes no sense to me. we all make mistakes and we all have to opportunity to learn from them to become better people. why punish ourselves with guilt over past mistakes if we have learned from them? this is the main reason why i could never be a Christian. according to Stephen Prothero, in Christianity the problem with the human condition is "sin" and the answer that Christianity provides is "salvation." since i don't see the mistakes i make in life as sins, i could never need salvation.
the book God Is Not One goes into a lot of detail on Christianity, and so much of it is confusing to me. i literally wrote a bunch of question marks in the book next to several paragraphs because i just don't get it. lets go all the way back to the 10 commandments. i remember reading them on some weird christian jewelry my mom had tucked away from her childhood and wondering what the hell it was talking about. if you wanna understand my point of view on the subject, you just gotta watch this:
the story of Jesus baffles me too. i get that he was a guy with some good ideas who became a spiritual leader. but the details make no sense. ok, you like him a lot, i guess it makes sense that he is "the son of God" or something along those lines. but the story just sounds like one exaggeration after another. and i have never understood the whole crucified for your sins thing. the book says that He was a "savior whose suffering and death paid the price of human sin and offered us salvation." what the hell does that mean? if there's a train of thought there, i can't follow it. so this nice guy was killed by Romans who disagreed with him. how does that lead to the whole sin and salvation thing? obviously i haven't read up too much on this. but that has largely to do with instantly becoming confused and bewildered when i try.
and other things confuse me too. the whole garden of eden/apple thing is just strange. why give them fruit they aren't supposed to eat in the first place? and how can eating an apple be bad if it keeps the doctor away? and then the whole apocalypse/jesus returning thing doesn't make any sense to me either. in the book it says, "But the workings of God in human history will not be fully revealed until Jesus returns and the dead are called out of their graves and separated along with the living into the saved (who go to heaven) and the damned (who go to hell)." first of all, this sounds slightly zombie-ish. and then this idea that they aren't separated till He returns to earth. does that mean that everyone who has died so far is just hanging out, waiting to go to either heaven or hell? because i thought they said it was pretty instant, this heaven or hell thing. and where are they waiting, literally in their graves? what about all those people who were cremated and whose ash was blown into the wind? it just doesn't make any sense to me.
i will never fully understand Christianity. i will never understand the vampire-like practice of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. i will never understand the guilt that so many Catholics have for so many little things. i will never understand how anyone could ever be a Mormon. and i will never understand why christians want to be surrounded by the most depressing religious art i have ever seen. i think there are many aspects of the religion that are very positive and good for those who desire to follow it. but i will never be one of them. i guess Jesus is not my homeboy.
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