Sharing With The Class

I will try to keep the focus of this blog on (hopefully) intelligent entertainment most of the time. However, I will occasionally go off on a serious tangent, and this is one of those times. Humor-seekers, skip to the next post. Anyone interested in talking about one of the taboo twos (religion and politics), read on.

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The reason I believe in Christianity is that it is the only religion (to my knowledge) that has the idea of grace as a core principle; grace here meaning acceptance of your faults as long as you believe in the existence of God/Jesus and want to follow them in a journey for truth and a life spent adhering to truth. Many of the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity align with my own, which is another reason. But grace is the key one.

Grace is a part of unconditional love, which I view as one of the three purposes to life (searching for contentment and pursuing shallow pleasures being the others).

However, I don’t like going to church because it seems the focus is on all the small things, the details. I’m not very interested in hashing out all the ticky-tack rules about what you should and should not do. Issues like “is watching an R-rated movie ok for your children? Is it ok for you?” feel too specific and elementary for me. I hold the idea that almost all of these “theological detail” decisions should be made on an individual basis.

To use the example of an R-rated movie: I don’t think that viewing a sin is in itself a sin. Committing a sin is a sin, obviously, but just watching something isn’t sinful. If watching something evil turns you in that direction instead of leading you to learn about that evil and how to avoid it, then it’s a bad idea for that person to watch an R-rated movie. If you find yourself learning from something like the Saw series and thinking introspectively about your own morals, then it’s perfectly ok, and even healthy for that person to watch R-rated movies.

At this point in my life, I’m focused on learning from experiences and from analyzing anything/anyone worth the attention. Church feels like going back to kindergarten and arguing about elementary things that are of the utmost importance to honest church-goers but are now underpinnings not worth arguing about for me.

It's not that I am in denial that there is the possibility that I am wrong; far from it. I think doubt is a healthy and necessary thing. But there are certain things I am quite sure about, and other things that I would much rather talk about and try to figure out than "will cussing send you to Hell?" I already cuss and I don't plan on stopping, so lets just move on to something more difficult, people.

And that’s just dealing with the truly honest Christians that go to church; the number of people who go there merely for a spiritual high or because they think they’re obligated to go is quite high. I’m not interested in the least in being around those people.

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I’ll end on a humorous note. If someone characterized Christianity as this, what would you say in reply?

Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.