Today I came across two articles about Christianity that made me think and want to write blog posts. The first one is The Advice the Western Church Never Heeded. While I do not completely disagree with the collection of quotes here, some I find to be absurd like the first one about the scientist dissecting the bird. Unless this scientist is an idiot, very rare in my experience among scientists, he would not be studying the bird by dissection alone but get several and observe their behavior in addition to doing vivisection. As far as I know the point of vivisection is to not have your subject die, but to sew them up afterwards so what happened was an accident especially when searching for the source of its life. I hate when people make metaphors when they do not know what they are talking about. It undermines your aim. Talk about things you understand when making a metaphor. I mean that is a bit of hair splitting on my part but it really annoys me when people do that. Also the ostrich metaphor bothers me too it could not fly no matter how hard it tried, it is just too heavy and, if I remember correctly, lacks the hollow bones of its fellow avians. It simply does not need to fly because it runs any more than I do.
What do I agree with? I suppose the fact that American Christianity is saturated with materialism. Other than that I am not in agreement because the overall tone is anti-intellectual, anti-thought and anti-questioning. To use a metaphor myself, one I hope to execute better than the person being quoted on this blog. Your faith is like a muscle if you never use it, it will not be challenged it will atrophy and disappear. If you lift weights it will get bigger and stronger. Weight lifting is based of challenging and hurting the muscle to break it down in order to build it up better than before. The exercise of questioning your faith will break it down in small ways but it will make it stronger and more apt to take on greater challenges in the future. I for one lift weights. My progress has not been astounding in the past year but there has been a little progress. One year ago I did eight bicep curls with a 5kg weight, now I do 12 bicep curls with a 7.5kg weight. Soon I can move up a weight and will do a significantly lower number of reps with a 10kg weight (I have adjustable weights they do not alter in traditional increments of 1kg). Why do I do this? Well I really hate people falling over laughing when I flex.
Anyway, enough about my puny arms. I think the biggest problem in Christianity is the lack of questioning and encouragement to really figure out your own faith. If you rely on others to tell you what to believe unquestioningly in the best case scenario you miss the point of Jesus dying for us and giving us a direct line to God, in the worst case scenario you end up drinking some Kool-Aid with some outwardly happy people in matching track suits and die. Think about what you believe in and if a pastor says something you don’t understand, ask him or her, or look it up in the Bible yourself but most of all think about it yourself and pray about it. God gave you brain and he is not above answering your questions. If you don’t understand something in the Bible the same principle applies.
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