What I don't like about Christianity Part 1: The Old Testament

I have been feeling rather angry, depressed and disappointed lately so I have decided to vent some of that by writing about all the things I do not like about Christianity. Yes my disappointment has to do with Christianity and Christians but instead of getting into that I want to discuss the Old Testament.

I really do not like the Old Testament. I don't like it in the same way that I do not like brussels sprouts. They are one of the few vegetables I hate. I mean I like the idea of them they are like tiny cabbages and I want to eat them by peeling off the little leafs one by one. The only thing stopping me is the taste. It is really horrible. My brother actually loves brussels sprouts so I know this dislike is not universal by any means. It is merely my opinion. No reading weird stuff into this and saying I am implying no one should eat brussels sprouts or they are a bad thing, no one should infer anything like that about the Old Testament either.

I was not always a disliker of the writings of the Old Testament. I used to enjoy the fun stories a lot as a kid. I did have some trouble reconciling it with the New Testament but I compartmentalized it in my head and no problem. As I got older I started to understand the Old Testament better and being able to reconcile it with the New Testament in my own way. Also as I did this my dislike of it grew. I have no idea why this is. I have no real reason to dislike the book just people's interpretations of it and the way they try to defend it.

What do I think the old testament is? This would be a good question to answer at this point. It is the chronicle of the Jewish people. It is their story. Christianity was an outgrowth or Judaism and therefore the main influence on the New Testament. It was heavily cited by Jesus and others in it. That is the simple answer that I can articulate with no problem. The long answer that I have a harder time putting into words is: What does it mean to me? Part of my acceptance of the apparent contradictions of the book and understanding them was phasing the Old Testament out in importance. Just like the New Covenant is greater than the Old, the New Testament is greater. I see the Old Testament as incomplete. It is attempting to state the same thing as the New Testament without Jesus and failing at it. Instead of Jesus it uses the law and gets tangled up in it and spans twice the pages of the New and fails to make the point. The New Testament, however, has Jesus and makes the point already in the Gospel of Mathew.

What I mean is I find references to salvation, or hints of it all over the Psalms. They are the one book of the Old Testament that lets its hair down and forgets about the rules and merely revels on the greatness of God. Rest of the time it is all about the rules, how we should follow the rules and stories about people trying to follow the rules and usually failing at it.

There was one story that bothered me as a child. I cannot find the exact location because I cannot figure out what words to use exactly. It took place while Moses was leading the people of Israel to the promised land. They attacked a town and no one was supposed to keep any loot for themselves. God told Moses someone had kept some loot so they threw lots to determine the tribe then on down until they got down to the nuclear family unit and the culprit. He confesses and gives back the item he had taken. Then in true Old Testament style he gets killed and so does his entire family unit, his kids wife and, if I remember, pack animals.

This was really hard to swallow. When my mother read it to me as a child out of her grown up Bible I really shocked and confused me but I tried not to think about it. As a little child it seemed so wrong, so contradictory of the God I believed in. With the faith of a child I shut the entire story out off my mind and separated that cruel petty unforgiving God from the one I believed in. Still it stayed with me and as I got older until I had to think about it and wonder at it. I had to either accept it as a story of my God or reject it.

It was at this time I considered the Old Testament as a whole and I considered weather or not to reject the whole thing because it seemed to me this was not the God I wanted to believe in. I have always had very well defined ideas of right and wrong, sure they have evolved over time and have incorporated a lot more gray area but they are still very well defined. The God of the Old Testament seemed to me to be so cruel, petty and xenophobic. This God did not seem to give a hoot about the rest of the people he created just his chosen people. F those pagans. Lets not even try to make them one of the Chosen people He loves. They can just go die in a fire set by the Chosen.

So you can see what a dilemma I had. The image of the Old Testament god contradicted so fiercely with the truth God had set in my heart from birth about what I saw as my God. What to do? I was able to reason away the problems I had with bits of the New Testament a lot easier. In the end I realized something. The Old Testament was given to us to show what a world with out grace was like. I personally think they could have done it in a fewer pages but it seems to make the point very well. Only a very few people are capable of even being good enough to communicate with God personally and no one is perfect and transgressors get destroyed instead of forgiven. As the Psalms hint, salvation was still there but much harder to find and not available to everyone. When Jesus came he fulfilled the law and swept it aside and we no longer had to be tangled up in it to attain salvation. We can just go to Him and be forgiven. The message of salvation is so clear when seen through the lens of Jesus and an impossible jungle of confusion and fear when seen through the lens of the law. The law can only show us our sin it cannot save us. Jesus can save us and remove the sin that the law showed us.

This is my opinion on the subject and I guess I don't like the Old Testament because to me it is a scary vision on a world where grace is so rare and the Law so abundant. I know I am incapable of being good. Even with grace I fail daily, no hourly, and the thought of not having forgiveness and understanding for this fills me with dread. This is why I hate it when people quote the Old Testament or try to defend the law so profusely as to make it seem like it is a good thing instead of a failed method only conceived to show us how woefully deficient we are. In my opinion, if you cannot make you point using the New Testament you are making the wrong point. If there are no relevant scripture in the New Testament it is simply irrelevant. Also if Jesus did not speak about it it obviously was not the point. The rest of the New testament after Jesus's death was written to answer questions people of the time had and they were written by biased flawed men about their biased flawed opinions. I am not saying they are not worthwhile and useful, I merely am saying I do not hold them nearly in the same esteem as the words of Jesus. If I can understand all that Jesus said, or nearly all, and attempt to live based on that I think I am in good shape. I have decided to focus on Jesus and his words because they are more than adequate. They are perfect and the rest is just periphery.

Undocumented Aliens Like Me

I have been feeling exceptionally unaccomplished this week. I usually feel unaccomplished but this week has been worse. The only reason I really have to get up in the morning is to make sure my son does not get bored and destroy something and I guess I should feed him and all. The problem is that I really can do nothing. I cannot get a job. I cannot go to school. I can not pursue my dreams. Now with my husband having no job I can no longer pursue my hobby of martial arts. The only thing that makes me feel accomplished is working out. I run and try to beat the number of push ups I can do. I am up to seven regular push ups now, I can do 25 wuss ups. I can only work out in the evening because we cannot use the AC, not enough money.

This blog is not really about how depressed I am feeling lately and how I have drank three nights this past week, when usually when I drink two nights in a week I feel absolutely alcoholic. What this is really about is undocumented immigrants in the united states. I happen to be one, and every time I mention it I am worried I will piss someone off later and have them use it to hurt me or it gets read by a minute man. It is not something I really hide but it is not something I usually broadcast. When asked by strangers I usually just say I do not have a work permit or a green card yet. Usually it is not a problem because I am white and married to an American citizen. People just assume that if I am not a citizen that I am at least a permanent resident. After all you automatically become a citizen if you marry a citizen or it is free.

I started to think about this about a week two ago (time has lost all meaning to me). I went to a gathering of the yearly meeting that my monthly meeting belongs to (that is Quakerese for I went to the weekend conference of the governing body that my church belongs to and they discussed church business and had workshops and classes). I had a great time. I got to go with out paying and met lots of great people and learned new things. My pastor taught a workshop on a hot button issue in Quaker past and that issue was slavery. Everyone remembers quakers as great crusaders against the institution even risking their lives and property participating in the underground railroad. That is true, but just part of the truth. Meetings at large were very slow to accept the social activism of freedom and many activists were ejected from their meetings for their beliefs. Now all Quakers see them as great heroes. We have many hot button issues today and this workshop was followed by a discussion on one of those. It was on undocumented immigrants. There were quests from Iglesia de los Amigos, I believe their name was. Children who went to the meeting but had no fathers because they had been deported but they remained because they were citizens. Women who had lost their husbands to deportation. It was heartbreaking.

Many people ask me what I think of all these other illegals, after finding out I am undocumented, leaching on the country. I tell them while the United States has the right to control their borders human beings have the right to try to make a better life for themselves and their families. They do not leach off the country they pay taxes and are usually law abiding, other than being undocumented, and do not want to be here undocumented. They all want to have visas, they wanted to get visas before coming here and wanted to enter legally through a check point in a car seat like a human being instead of in the back of a van packed in tighter than the slaves on their way here from Africa crushing people beneath them to death and being crushed by those above them. We are human beings forced into this. Some people may say that we chose to come here. I did not, my parents chose for me. They did not poverty and the cries of their hungry children did. It was death or pay a crooked uncaring human trafficker to take them over the border because they could never have afforded a visa making $12 a week. This is awful. The United Stated is over run by people that often get taken advantage of by crooked people. They get hired, work hard and never get paid and they have no one to turn to. Women get raped and are to afraid to go to the police because they are scared of getting deported. I have actually heard men say, "If you are going to rape a woman make sure she is an illegal alien, they wont go to the police." America's immigration laws are an absolute failure like the war on drugs. They don't work and they will never work no matter how high of a wall they build on the border, how many border guards they hire or how many states adopt Arizona's policy.

I am a law abiding person and I hate being trapped the way I am. I have no life other than being a wife and a mother. Not that those two things are not good and honorable. I just have no choice. I cannot even choose to return to Finland because I do not want to go to jail. My husband and son speak no Finnish and I have not lived there for almost 20 years. I would have hard time fitting in. I want to be a police officer and I love the policies and methods of the Finnish police force but I would have no chance of passing the written portion of the test to get into the school because of my poor Finnish. In the mean time I am trapped here because I love my family, don't want to go to jail or live off the Finnish government because of my low education level. By the time I get a green card I will be in my thirties and if I want to be a police officer I have to be a citizen and I wont be there probably until I am 40, that may be way too late to start in my chosen field. I live with a lot of frustration and a lack of accomplishment. I find I cannot self motivate to do much of anything right now. I hope I will feel better soon.

The Neighbourhood Snitch

It seems as if I have become the neighborhood snitch. I keep relaying information to the leasing office about things that I feel like are of interest to them and would improve life for us and just feel like it is the right thing to do. Not to even mention the times I have called the police for fear someone might get hurt.

This comes from an innate desire to do the right thing no matter what others think. I never regret doing something just how I did it. This leads me to call the police when a neighbor is having a loud argument I fear might turn physical. I failed to do it on two occasions in the past and regretted it. I pick up worms out of puddles so they don't drown. I report to the leasing office when someone is tossing bottles in to our little forested area, I worry about them breaking and the kids and animals getting hurt. I told them I saw a prostitute being picked up in the complex. I lived next door to a brothel before and will not put up with it.

Sometimes I wonder if I am just being a busy body. I told the office a few weeks ago that a little boy had broken a small window with a rock. His mother did not care so she was not going to tell them. Was that busy bodying? I guess it was. Still, I did nothing I would not do for myself. Had my son broken the window, I would have told them and made arrangements to pay for it. It is only fair. I think I have not crossed the like but I am getting very close to being that little kid who tattles on other kids about stuff they were not even involved in, or perhaps I have crossed the line.

I am thinking more carefully about how I go about doing what I perceive to be the right thing. I have hurt people and caused things to happen that should not have. I have let other people bully me into doing things I should not have.

When I was in college some evil fire and brimstone street preachers came to OU. They called every passing student a whore or a whore monger and said all homosexuals were evil and an abomination in the site of God. I thought they were terribly hateful and offensive. Someone stole a briefcase and a sign just out of spite. Not that they did not deserve it. They were horrible. I still did not think that was right. Vigilante justice and giving other people punishments we think they deserve just is not right. I saw that some of my dorm mates had stolen the sign, not the briefcase but the sign. I went and told the preachers I knew where their sign was and would get it back for them. I was going to go and talk to the boy who had stolen it and ask him to give it to me so I could return it. That was the plan but unfortunately I was still a little girl and much more manipulatable and intimidatable by authority figures. He bullied me into telling him where the sign was. I did not tell him who had it. I sent this horrible mean person to bully and yell at my neighbours. I was filled with guilt and shame. I had allowed him to intimidate me into doing a wrong in my quest to do what I perceived was the right thing. I was too ashamed to look at my dorm mate (he was coincidentally gay) who had taken the poster in the eye again. I avoided him and probably made everything worse. I was just so ashamed of myself.

I am always afraid of doing this but I do not let that stop me. I try to do the right thing no matter what but I am always conscious of how I should do it. What would be the right way. For example, when my neighbours smoke weed in their bathroom it is as if they smoke it in ours, there is an insulation problem between the two bathrooms. If they do it again I will not go to the police or the office or anything that tately, I will tape a sealed envelope on their door respectfully explaining that I really do not care if they smoke weed in their bathroom but I do care when it smells like they are smoking it in our bathroom. I will ask them respectfully to refrain from this and if they can I can refrain from telling anyone about it.

I guess all this ultimately stems from my poor social skills and belief in rules. Sure some rules are wrong and need to be changed but unless a rule is outright immoral, not just flawed, it should be followed until it is changed through the proper channels. Otherwise society would slide into chaos and we would screw each other over so much that we would lose our humanity. I do not believe in anarchy.