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Is Being “Christian” Bad?
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…I definately don’t think so!
I’ve been surfing around for about 30 minutes on the internet searching for homeschool information - and I ran into an Ex-Christian website. Much of the testimonies I read on there involve people denouncing a higher spiritual being (”God” or “Elohim”) solely based on their experiences with other humans.
One person completely abandoned a faith in any god because of things she was told were “right” by her one pastor and social circle of friends over a 9 year period.
How can this be?
How can people let their soul beliefs and eternal consequences be hung on the thread of other human actions?
For example, the person I mentioned above was told by her particular church friends that child corporal punishment (spaking) was “ordained by God” - and so she and her husband started hitting her kids, making her life miserable. She also made the statement that a “personal relationship with God” cannot exist because you have to do what your Christian friends are telling you to do.
WHAT? I would venture to guess that her circle of friends may have harped too much on the one line of “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” to the exclusion of back-up parallel scripture of what the verse truly means. Or maybe they had a flawed misunderstanding of the former Law of Moses, which was so strict that the New Testament writers even declared it “impossible to keep fully” (which is why we NEED Jesus’ saving grace instead). If she would have read deeper into doctrine and scripture, and searched out truth for herself (instead of succumbing to peer pressure), she may have learned the deeper meaning of what her own friends seemed to have misunderstood. Discipline, correction, training, and the teaching of wisdom is at the heart of rearing children - NOT blindly hitting or physically abusing.
And as for a personal relationship with God - it definately can exist. BUT, just like all relationships, it takes dilligence, effort, study, conversing, thought, perserverence, and TIME to evolve. Instead of taking up responsibility for her own training and faith-growth, she seemed to blame God for her own negligence in this area and also passed blame off on her circle of friends.
Isn’t this just like many in today’s world? No personal responsibility anywhere. Blame God, blame others, blame TV, blame McDonalds…anything goes. But don’t blame yourself! (I’ve even been there myself during my darkest trials)
In the modern world, you also hear multitudes of excuses such as… IF God exists then he wouldn’t (insert pet peeve of choice)… or He would do (insert innate fleshly desire). And people use various wars, tragedies, suffering, and human sin to try to say “Hey look, that means there is no God”.
How does human suffering (even if it is undeserved!!) and human mistake ”prove” a supreme, multifaceted, emotional, omnicient higher intelligent being doesn’t exist?? Under what flawed philosophy have us humans determined that “if a supreme God exisits” then he would be this big huge circle of loveydoveyness - with no other side, emotion, or intelligence to him? It sounds incredulous to even speculate upon. I wouldn’t want a “God” like THAT! I don’t want a personal ATM machine or a big super-being to coddle and console me unconditionally when I make a boo-boo. I want a deep, supreme, intelligent life force that has emotions, intellect, will, plans, goals, and the ability to shape lives. I want to be corrected, chastened, disciplined, taught, and “made wise” as I grow.
I’ve also learned over the years that God isn’t the one who causes the “bad stuff”. Our God (the supreme being / intelligence of this universe) can’t be judged based on the goings-on of meager humans. Human frailty, human desires, fleshly lusts, weaknesses, need for power and prestige - all of those morally degrading characteristics cause “bad things”. Natural disasters also cause ”bad things”. Humans and Earth - the “natural” parts of life - are behind suffering. Not God (the supernatural)! He was good enough to provide a way out of all of that.
Anyway, that’s just how I view the issue. You may have been convicted otherwise (as Paul says, we currently look through a dark glass - no one knows it all…that’s for sure!) It just deeply saddens my heart when I read of people who have completely abandoned their Christian faith based on how other humans in their social circle have portrayed “Christianity” to them. Someone who abandons their faith in God based on their social life and what others “teach” saddens me FAR more than the athiest who logically thinks out the basis of his own beliefs and never feels a yearing for god-presence in his life.
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