Apathy Online

Today, I was talk­ing with a Chris­t­ian coworker, and men­tioned that some Chris­tians refuse to stand for a judge because they view all humans as equals. My coworker seemed per­plexed by the idea, thought it was silly, and barely avoided stat­ing that peo­ple who try to bring such beliefs into a court set­ting should be arrested. His rea­son­ing was that it was merely show­ing respect for the judge and has noth­ing to do with wor­ship. I do not nec­es­sar­ily believe that my coworker is wrong in stand­ing for a judge, should he be in a posi­tion to stand before one. How­ever, he does not believe in giv­ing oth­ers the abil­ity to live by their con­vic­tions, includ­ing other Chris­tians. While I believe it is a mat­ter between the a per­son and God, I view such Quakers/Christians/etc. that live their con­vic­tions as heroes. These are peo­ple who are will­ing to risk impris­on­ment for abid­ing by their con­science. As a for­mer pas­tor of mine pointed out, Cae­sar does not own your con­science, God does.

There is a rea­son why this both­ered me. I was try­ing to probe my cowork­ers beliefs (pri­mar­ily because he will dis­cuss ‘reli­gion’ or Christ with every other coworker but me, except to invite me to his church, but also because of my curios­ity). I have been try­ing to see what kind of a Chris­t­ian he was, and if he had good rea­sons for his beliefs. Per­haps my con­clu­sion is unfair, but he seems to be a typ­i­cal ‘con­ser­v­a­tive’ type: he con­fuses faith in Christ with an unques­tion­ing accep­tance of every­thing taught to him in a Chris­t­ian set­ting. Unfor­tu­nately, it seems as if the major­ity of Chris­tians I meet are this way.

What kind of Chris­tians are we if we believe this way? Of what value is our faith? We can quote scrip­ture ver­ba­tim, but our only under­stand­ing is what has been taught to us. Peo­ple ask us how to get to Heaven, and we imme­di­ately spit out an answer, with­out know­ing if it is true. It was just taught to us. Frankly, I am not cer­tain if most Chris­tians even know why they believe what they believe. At all. A cab dri­ver pointed this out to me years ago when he asked me some ques­tions about my faith. Since then, I have tried very hard to make sure my beliefs are con­sis­tent and true. (Does any­one remem­ber read­ing Philip­pi­ans 2:12?) Some do not really care to do this, and get their con­sis­tent and true beliefs on Sundays.

Mod­ern Chris­tian­ity seem to be no bet­ter than the other the­o­ries of life or reli­gions it derides. It rests sim­ply on a teach­ing that has been passed down from mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions of teach­ers in a game of gen­er­a­tional tele­phone with the cur­rent teach­ing being incred­i­bly far from the truth it once showed, and there is no desire to go to the begin­ning and rework our beliefs as nec­es­sary. We say to our­selves that “This is what we were taught, and any devi­a­tion from it is heresy.” Some­one raises an objec­tion to our beliefs and instead of hav­ing an answer or research­ing the ques­tion, we cite prob­lems with the ques­tioner. Did we not read from the Bible that we pro­claim to be true with­out know­ing why that we should study (2 Tim 2:15)? We are offended by Chris­tians in jail, for­get­ting in the Bible, per­se­cu­tion is nor­mal. For­get­ting God’s com­mand­ments, we try to force oth­ers to live the way we want. We advo­cate theft in Christ’s name. We serve some­one other than the Jesus in the Bible, and oth­ers know this. They mock us, not to per­se­cute us, but because our brand of chris­tian­ity deserves mock­ing. They are offended by us, because we offend them, and not because the core of our belief itself is offen­sive. We even have rules just like the reli­gious lead­ers Jesus crit­i­cized, but we have very intri­cate rea­sons for why our rules are not like theirs. We com­plain of peo­ple pick­ing and choos­ing what parts of the Bible they believe, but it may bet­ter to do that with a con­sis­tent belief than to man­date that every­thing be included for the sole rea­son of a vote long ago while tak­ing what we man­date as included and twist­ing and per­vert­ing it in ways the orig­i­nal authors/Author did not intend. There is a lot wrong with our chris­tian­ity! It’s not Christian!

To be fair, people’s beliefs change over time, and I too was once a zombie-christian: eat­ing the brains of other chris­tians to sus­tain me. Per­haps I am still that way to a degree (I’ve changed, hon­est!). Maybe this is a rant more about myself than a plea for oth­ers to con­sider them­selves. I could fill the rest of this spot with Philip­pi­ans 2:12, but I doubt it would help; I’ve read pas­sages hun­dreds of times before under­stand­ing them, and hun­dreds of times more before real­iz­ing I was abid­ing solely by a teach­ing rather than what the pas­sage plainly said. Per­haps it’s worth scrap­ping our ideas and rebuild­ing them from scratch?
And the ques­tion now is “what do I believe?” I believe that there is a Cre­ator. I believe that He came down in the form of Christ to show us how to live. I believe that he took the pun­ish­ment of the world when He died on the cross because he loved us, and to show us what love truly is: not killing or oppress­ing oth­ers because they don’t believe like you, but sac­ri­fic­ing your­self for oth­ers out of love for them. I believe that when Jesus stated that the great­est com­mand­ments were to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neigh­bor as your­self, that He meant it. I believe all scrip­ture should be inter­preted in light of these two verses.

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Last year, some Chris­tians I know became infu­ri­ated at my refusal to sup­port a mar­riage amend­ment that made their def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage “the law.” I had a few rea­sons, the main one being that gov­ern­ment has no busi­ness in defin­ing mar­riage. The other rea­son was that, if we kept push­ing such laws, then a homo­sex­ual def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage will be pushed to be “the law” and likely succeed.

The Chris­t­ian Coali­tion is now pan­ick­ing; Ver­mont and New Hamp­shire are enter­tain­ing leg­is­la­tion to make a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage “the law.” The over­turn­ing of the Defen­sive Mar­riage Act is gain­ing sup­port. The actions of the aggres­sors are hav­ing unin­tended con­se­quences. When do I get to say “I told you so?”

When did Jesus sup­port aggres­sion to force His views on the the phar­isees and oth­ers who did not agree with Him, and even wanted to kill Him? And here we are, claim­ing to fol­low Christ, forc­ing, by law, our def­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage. It is sick and wrong. We are hyp­ocrites for doing so. The Christian’s job is to spread the Gospel and teach oth­ers the truth, not put a gun to our neigh­bors head and force them to abide by our beliefs, which may not even be biblical!

Now that I live in NH, I will oppose the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of mar­riage just like I did the mar­riage bans. I am doing it because God is the author­ity on mar­riage, and not gov­ern­ment, not because I have some sick goal of forc­ing peo­ple to believe my ideas of marriage.

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Many peo­ple teach that the main pur­pose in going to church is to hear “what God says through the preacher.” Because that is church, they can stay home and watch church on TV. This morn­ing, I real­ized that they were very wrong.

If you are lucky, you may hear a decent ser­mon on TV (Try Cross­road Bap­tist for a good one), but the ser­mon does not make church. I believe that church, the event, in its sim­plest form is the fel­low­ship of believ­ers. It is not the music that moves your mind into a sug­ges­tive state, it is not the tithe, it is not sit­ting in a pew and it is not the preacher. It is not even all of these. With­out fel­low­ship, the church might as well be just an indoc­tri­na­tion center.

This morn­ing, watch­ing Chuck Bald­win from New Hamp­shire, I real­ized that I have not been in a church with actual fel­low­ship for a long time. Watch­ing a ser­mon on the inter­net does not count.

Thank­fully, I got in touch with a pas­tor in the area, and may meet with him next week. God is good.

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