No longer sure...

Guys, some of you may remember me as the Christian Liberal who always tried to correct the wrongs of the Christian Right, while arguing the whole time with Atheists and Agnostics about a belief in god.

Well, overall...I'm not so sure anymore.

I've been nothing but humiliated as of late by the actions of Christians and the like. The racism, sexism and homophobia ingrained in Christianity is getting virtually impossible to defend.

While I'm still an admirer in some of the philosophies of Jesus Christ...I've always been slow to believe in many of the supernatural intricacies. Not to mention the brutality and genocide of the Old Testament.

While their may be "something" in the world (I've thought deeply and agree for the most part with the belief in Karma)...I'm not 100% what it is or if it is. Seems I'm turning Agnostic more and more.

I welcome any thoughts, I told you sos, and you're going to Hells.

Thanks

 

I was raised Christian and went through pretty much the same thing. I was 17 or 18 when I realized I didn't subscribe to the Christian religion, so I've had my whole adulthood to come to terms with it...I think it was a verse about God giving women much sorrow that finally drove the nail into the coffin. I'm a woman and i don't want to be sorrowful!

I remember that it was a hard process, mainly because the idea of heaven and hell is so ingrained in Christianity. When you start having doubts, the idea of going to hell for having doubts can be quite scary...but if you never were a big believer in the supernatural aspect, that shouldnt bother you too much

Religion should be a personal thing anyways....you can be a Christian without agreeing with other Christians. You can also believe in anything you want without slapping a label on it.

 

Mel, thank you for your reply. I'm having more and more trouble with the "personal" aspect however. Its like saying, "I'm a Nazi but I don't believe in genocide or white supremacy."

You should be able to defend the actions of any group you are willingly a part of. Both, internally and externally. I'm having more and more problems doing either.

 

Be careful of making the mistake thinking irrational beliefs are a component of religion when it's the other way around.

 

Same here. One main reason I can't flow with Christianity is the anti homosexuality thing. Many seem to spread more hate regarding this than anyone else I know.

But, I think it's natural to rethink faith, it shows that you have your own mind and will think for yourself - not saying that Christians don't, but many I have met refused to even acknowledge another viewpoint that isn't stated in the Bible.

Like it's been said - faith is a personal thing. See what comes to you and I think if you agree or accept its teachings, then go with it. Nothing is permanent.

 

anyone who can read the book of genesis and not think "this god dude is a deranged egocentric meglomaniac who is willing to kill babies if he don't get his own way" is obviously a few chromosomes short of being a human

i'll be glad when humanity grows out of such stupidity as teh abranic traditions... gods know they've held us back long enough

 

I struggle with the same problem. I am a follower of Jesus - and yet I find it impossible not to be distracted by the hate, hypocrisy, mean-spirited, closed minded nature of so many who call themselves "Christians".
Every time I read about the hateful behavior of "Christians" it turns my stomach and makes me question my own beliefs.
I have to continually remind myself that these people represent Christ in name only and are true impostors. The may be Christians but they are not followers of Christ.
There is a difference. Christianity is a religion - following the path Christ took is a way of life.
Thomas Jefferson, in his bible, cut out everything but the words of Christ. I think if that was done we would quickly solve the quandary we find ourselves in. Who among these conservative, venom filled people would jump on that ship.

 

Sounds to me like your spirituality is evolving and you are starting to form your own opinions -
Good for you..

 

Heeh, I'm not trying to be a jerk but its there in black and white. The Bible is full of condemnation of homosexuals, wiping out tribes and groups for not praying to who "we" pray to, and women being treated pretty horribly.

Again, whether its a fairy tale or not I still love the "idea" of a Jesus Christ. Loving and caring rebel who took a shot at the elite whenever he got a chance. I'm just weighing that against against the lunacy that's not going away anytime soon.

 

nothing wrong with admitting you don't know

seems like one of the biggest problems with the religions of the book is the surety

 

I understand that, I'm just saying religion is not a top level cause.

Sure, people do stupid things because of religion, but there is a reason people believe in religion, same as there is a reason people believe one race is superior to another. The reason is (however senseless it is) that they don't understand what they believe.

Homophobia, racism and sexism are not OF religion, they are in the same category.
I believe we should eliminate all of the above through understanding, but getting rid of just religion wouldn't do the trick because it isn't the underlying problem, it is an effect of it.

 

I'm not saying get rid of all religion. I'd never be one of those types of people. I do think the ancient and outdated beliefs need to fall by the wayside.

My biggest issue is in Christianity...Most, not all, but most who are serious about their religion are unwilling to let go of things like homophobia, sexism and a lot of times racism. You have retards like Glenn Beck, John Hagee, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, etc etc. I could go on and on.

People say its a personal thing and Christianity doesn't have to be this or that. But, if you're part of a group of people who overwhelmingly do cruel things...At some point you need to take a look at the big picture.

 

Religion is the Ultimate Mind Control


I know that some of you will immediately put up some road blocks to the information that I'm going to put here, but for your own good, please keep an open mind. The discomfort is being caused by your conditioning and has nothing to do with TRUTH.

Upon first looking at religion, no matter who you are, we all stand back and offer a little respect and reverence for the INSTITUTION. Let’s take a look at the institution of religion as a whole and see what the truth has to say. I like this quote: "They must find it difficult, those who confuse authority for truth rather than truth for authority".

Babylon is the source of most of the world’s nastier habits, e.g. fiat money (money that has no worth other than the paper it is written on), state religion, institutional theft on every level of government (sound familiar?). Their religion was one that sacrificed human babies to a god called moloch (google bohemian grove). Can you say cann-a–baal (cannibal)? The high priests were called cannah baals, or the priests that come from cannah and serve baal. It is not normal human behavior for people to give their children to the cannah baals to be sacrificed. The idiom of being a cannibal came from the high priest eating the livers of the ones they sacrificed. Do you think that anyone would do this if they had their own minds? I THINK NOT! They did it because of their conditioning!

Then the Gnostic religion followers came along and they used the same methods as the Babylonians, however their sacrifices were to a mythical person called "the Christ". The person of Jesus came along a few hundred years later. They sacrificed him every day and twice on Sunday. The Gnostic priests knew that the bread they used was just bread and the wine they used was just wine, but they told the people that they had special powers to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of the Christ person.

Then came along Constantine and the council of Nicene, in the 4th century CE. They realized that this Gnostic religion had a lot of public appeal, so they highjacked it and made the Universal Catholic Religion. Borrowing from the available historic figures they found a magick wizard named Simon Margus, who was very popular in the first century CE. He was regarded as a demagogue and much revered. The Club of Rome on the Hills of the Sorcerers (Mountis Vaticanis, Vatican Hill, 7 hills) made him their first “Peter the Pope”.

The people were ready to accept this wholeheartedly. After all, was he not just like Baccus or Dianisus? With the lies of the Council of Nicene put down into a document, anyone who challenged it would be executed. The original document of the "New Testament" had the Papal Bull upon it and if anyone did dare to challenge it, it would be the last thing they would ever do. This immediately created a "you better not question this or it’s your ass" mentality. If the truth needs to be protected that hard, then how true can possibly it be?

This was just the beginning of the lies and deceit that the catholic/christian religion brought to the world. Over the next 1500 years, they raped, killed, butchered, stole and perverted the natural world without any remorse.

Some of you may wonder, whom did they kill? The list is long and it included:
Catholics vs. Anabaptist
Catholics vs. Huguenots
Catholics vs. Lutherans
Catholics vs. Baptist
Catholics vs. the Church of England
Catholics vs. Ireland
to name a few of those who were killed in the name of the church.

A bit of trivia: What is the derivation of the word "Church"? The Greek word,
eclisia. This is also the word for whorehouse. Speaking of the Greek mystery schools, they also had baptism, holy eucharist and confession, to name a few. Coincidence? The baptism was what the vestal virgins did after a night of servicing the parishioners with sexual favors for cash donations. Doing this all night long can make a girl a little smelly and worse for the wear. So why not make the taking of a bath a mysterious sacrament so that the simple minded persons can marvel over it? The “cleansing spirits” come over someone when they entered the baptismal bath and removed the smells of being debauched for the evening by men hoping to get the "spiritual experience" with a vestal virgin. Can you say, mitkva, baptism, nuns, priests, holy bread, holy wine, confessions?

You may say whom did they rape?
It would be easier to say whom they did not? That I know of, none. The first to be raped for the purpose of genetic cleansing were the Jews. They might have gotten the job done if not for the rulings of smart Rabbis From then on, Jewishness has been determined by the lineage of the mother, not the father. This meant that they could rape all they wanted, yet the children would all be Jewish no matter who their father was.
There were others not so fortunate.
The Spaniards raped their way though central america and south america with the priests of the Pope blessing them with holy water before they went out to the people to “bring them to the church of christ” – by raping them. These men were required to give their name to the bastard children they fostered, to give the sick deed an air of litigitmacy and all offspring were automatically children of the church of rome.

This was also done in the Philippines, India, Africa and America by the Protestants, as well as the genocide of the indigenous native peoples.

There has not been a war since the 4th century that did not take place with the blessing and acquiescence of ALL Religions, bar none.

For those who think that Judaism is the only pure religion, please think again! If we go back to the days of Abraham, there was none of the following:

Ceremonies
Regalia
Pageants
Mysteries
Secrets of any kind
A Ruling Class

So where did these things come from? Babylon, where else?
When King Nebucadnezzar took the Jews into captivity in 500 BC, he took away their original language. Under Babylonian law the only language allowed to be used in any written document was the Chaldee. The Jews adapted their original pictograph language to the cuneiform Chaldee to be allowed to write anything --
government documents, religious documents, business transactions, etc.
While doing so, they also learned the religion of the Chaldee. The Babylonian religion had its own mystery schools.
Today we call these mystery schools Kaballah. Madonna and Brittany Spears are among the adherents of the Kaballah.

The basis of the Kaballah is a road map to contact spirits on the “other side” for the purpose of conversing with the fallen ones (those who were expelled from heaven with Lucifer), a.k.a., Fallen angels.
The Kaballah has two sides -- the white or positive side or right hand path, and the Black or negative side or left hand path. We use many names for this today -- witchcraft, black magic to name a few.

The Mikva, wine, bread, candles (candles were made from the rendered fat from a sacrificial offering, either human or animal). Imagine if you could convince people that the candles that you sold them allowed them to offer sacrifices to your deity without anyone you love dying -- just buy the candles and you are exempt from the sacrifice lottery. So you could make an offering to the deity anytime you wanted by lighting a candle.

The cultural intergenerational religious beliefs have been passed on for thousands of years. You may ask, how could they do this to us and no one challenges their authority? Truth is, there have been many challengers:
Martin Luther, Alexander Hisop (author of the book, The Two Babylons), Achyra S (author of the book, The Christ Conspiracy), Jordan Maxwell, to name a few.

We have had a group of liars, priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, who for generation after generation have conditioned us to accept their authority, no matter how antithetical to our own interest this may be.

Some of the emotional black mail they use includes getting dead loved ones out of purgatory, getting yourself out of hell before you even get there, and the most famous of the blackmail lines, "He died for your sins".

Only those who entertain the deity with the proper regalia, ceremonies, pomp, and words spoken exactly (a mind control technique) are what is really pleasing to deity. How many times has the average christian spoken or heard the "Lord’s prayer"? How many times has the average Jew heard the Shema? Repetition is the most basic form of mind control. I believe that it was the nazi Joseph Goerbles who said, "if you tell a lie often enough, the people will begin to believe it". Does it not seem much more plausible that the deity knows who you are and what is in your heart and knows if you love or not without the words being carefully chosen by the religious leaders? It is anything more than mind control that if anyone has the audacity to challenge the most ridiculous of the religious leaders’ lies, they are called God haters, heretics or worse? The last thing the rulers of this world can withstand is the open mind searching for truth, because the thinking mind cannot accept the mountain of lies that religious institutions have wrought.

A very effective mind control technique is to quote scriptures within a sermon.

Listen to this:

Please turn with me to Matt 23.13
Please turn with me to Gen. 3.11
Please turn with me to Isa. 43.14
Please turn with me to Hos. 3.4
Please turn with me to Rev 12.4
Please turn with me to ......................
Please turn with me to.......................
Please turn with me to…………………..
please turn with meeeeeeeeeeeee.
please turn with m......................
By now your mind is ready for whatever conditioning the sermon giver wants to insert and can accept the Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLP).
“Neuro” for your nervous system or brain
“Linguistic” for Words
“Programming” for mind control.
So when the minster or priest or rabbi tells you to continually turn to this chapter or that, after all that frantic page turning, that is when the program code is implanted into your brain.

Anyone who has ever been to a sermon and has been through this mind control technique can attest to the fact that there are few who can keep up with the preacher’s rapid page turning, and has no conscious choice but to accept the conditioning as “truth”. After all, you would not be there if you did not have a certain level of trust in the institution and its representative, the priest, rabbi or minster. This sets you up for whatever “truth” they choose to insert. This is the real purpose of prayers of a very specific nature, ceremonies that are very carefully crafted to condition your mind, and a moral structure that is crafted to make you comply with their mind control. Imagine being told that the most basic function of life is only done with their permission.

Think not? Look at marriage licenses. The Olde English marriage license was called Fornication Under Consent of the King, which acronym is F.U.C.K. If you can make people think that they need the permission of the King (who gets his authority from the church) to allow you to perform one of the most basic human functions, you truly are under some very strong mind control.

In the book of Genesis, all the patriarchs simply “went into their wives”, declared them to the public to be their wives, and the deed was done -- no permission from a king or a priest.

If we search for truth with a mind that has been pre-conditioned by imbedded “truths”, our search will be fruitless. Where does that imbedded “truth” come from?

Schools, whose only purpose is to condition our children to be good citizens and believe all the lies the system masters want the people to believe.

Organized religions, loaded with lies too numerous to mention them all. Suffice it to say that no one’s religion is immune to the real morality of their actions.

Governments, who are the police force used to keep the simple people from thinking too much and asking too many questions.

Large, transnational corporations, whose reason for owning and controlling everything is to make sure we continue to pump out “good corporate citizens” who will be good consumers and follow their conditioning. If you doubt this for even a second, think of it this way: who in their right mind would trade in a perfectly good car every two years for another new car (and additional payments), if it were not for the constant reinforcement from the above mentioned institutions? The beast needs compliant, docile, mindless consumers, and religion serves its purpose. Can you say protestant work ethic? Who were they working for?

I prefer using the original hebrew word for what is today called religion.
Ha Deen, meaning “the life”. “The life” to be lived is one of love and peace, not of lies and religions, i.e., mind control. This mind control blocks us from the real power of the Creator Deity and leaves us helpless to men’s malevolent control.
The only true religion is Love, everything else is used as control for our masters.


The real truth is simply Peace, Love and Compassion.
Everything else is a method of
control.





Religion is the Ultimate Mind Control


I know that some of you will immediately put up some road blocks to the information that I'm going to put here, but for your own good, please keep an open mind. The discomfort is being caused by your conditioning and has nothing to do with TRUTH.

Upon first looking at religion, no matter who you are, we all stand back and offer a little respect and reverence for the INSTITUTION. Let’s take a look at the institution of religion as a whole and see what the truth has to say. I like this quote: "They must find it difficult, those who confuse authority for truth rather than truth for authority".

Babylon is the source of most of the world’s nastier habits, e.g. fiat money (money that has no worth other than the paper it is written on), state religion, institutional theft on every level of government (sound familiar?). Their religion was one that sacrificed human babies to a god called moloch (google bohemian grove). Can you say cann-a–baal (cannibal)? The high priests were called cannah baals, or the priests that come from cannah and serve baal. It is not normal human behavior for people to give their children to the cannah baals to be sacrificed. The idiom of being a cannibal came from the high priest eating the livers of the ones they sacrificed. Do you think that anyone would do this if they had their own minds? I THINK NOT! They did it because of their conditioning!

Then the Gnostic religion followers came along and they used the same methods as the Babylonians, however their sacrifices were to a mythical person called "the Christ". The person of Jesus came along a few hundred years later. They sacrificed him every day and twice on Sunday. The Gnostic priests knew that the bread they used was just bread and the wine they used was just wine, but they told the people that they had special powers to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of the Christ person.

Then came along Constantine and the council of Nicene, in the 4th century CE. They realized that this Gnostic religion had a lot of public appeal, so they highjacked it and made the Universal Catholic Religion. Borrowing from the available historic figures they found a magick wizard named Simon Margus, who was very popular in the first century CE. He was regarded as a demagogue and much revered. The Club of Rome on the Hills of the Sorcerers (Mountis Vaticanis, Vatican Hill, 7 hills) made him their first “Peter the Pope”.

The people were ready to accept this wholeheartedly. After all, was he not just like Baccus or Dianisus? With the lies of the Council of Nicene put down into a document, anyone who challenged it would be executed. The original document of the "New Testament" had the Papal Bull upon it and if anyone did dare to challenge it, it would be the last thing they would ever do. This immediately created a "you better not question this or it’s your ass" mentality. If the truth needs to be protected that hard, then how true can possibly it be?

This was just the beginning of the lies and deceit that the catholic/christian religion brought to the world. Over the next 1500 years, they raped, killed, butchered, stole and perverted the natural world without any remorse.

Some of you may wonder, whom did they kill? The list is long and it included:
Catholics vs. Anabaptist
Catholics vs. Huguenots
Catholics vs. Lutherans
Catholics vs. Baptist
Catholics vs. the Church of England
Catholics vs. Ireland
to name a few of those who were killed in the name of the church.

A bit of trivia: What is the derivation of the word "Church"? The Greek word,
eclisia. This is also the word for whorehouse. Speaking of the Greek mystery schools, they also had baptism, holy eucharist and confession, to name a few. Coincidence? The baptism was what the vestal virgins did after a night of servicing the parishioners with sexual favors for cash donations. Doing this all night long can make a girl a little smelly and worse for the wear. So why not make the taking of a bath a mysterious sacrament so that the simple minded persons can marvel over it? The “cleansing spirits” come over someone when they entered the baptismal bath and removed the smells of being debauched for the evening by men hoping to get the "spiritual experience" with a vestal virgin. Can you say, mitkva, baptism, nuns, priests, holy bread, holy wine, confessions?

You may say whom did they rape?
It would be easier to say whom they did not? That I know of, none. The first to be raped for the purpose of genetic cleansing were the Jews. They might have gotten the job done if not for the rulings of smart Rabbis From then on, Jewishness has been determined by the lineage of the mother, not the father. This meant that they could rape all they wanted, yet the children would all be Jewish no matter who their father was.
There were others not so fortunate.
The Spaniards raped their way though central america and south america with the priests of the Pope blessing them with holy water before they went out to the people to “bring them to the church of christ” – by raping them. These men were required to give their name to the bastard children they fostered, to give the sick deed an air of litigitmacy and all offspring were automatically children of the church of rome.

This was also done in the Philippines, India, Africa and America by the Protestants, as well as the genocide of the indigenous native peoples.

There has not been a war since the 4th century that did not take place with the blessing and acquiescence of ALL Religions, bar none.

For those who think that Judaism is the only pure religion, please think again! If we go back to the days of Abraham, there was none of the following:

Ceremonies
Regalia
Pageants
Mysteries
Secrets of any kind
A Ruling Class

So where did these things come from? Babylon, where else?
When King Nebucadnezzar took the Jews into captivity in 500 BC, he took away their original language. Under Babylonian law the only language allowed to be used in any written document was the Chaldee. The Jews adapted their original pictograph language to the cuneiform Chaldee to be allowed to write anything --
government documents, religious documents, business transactions, etc.
While doing so, they also learned the religion of the Chaldee. The Babylonian religion had its own mystery schools.
Today we call these mystery schools Kaballah. Madonna and Brittany Spears are among the adherents of the Kaballah.

The basis of the Kaballah is a road map to contact spirits on the “other side” for the purpose of conversing with the fallen ones (those who were expelled from heaven with Lucifer), a.k.a., Fallen angels.
The Kaballah has two sides -- the white or positive side or right hand path, and the Black or negative side or left hand path. We use many names for this today -- witchcraft, black magic to name a few.

The Mikva, wine, bread, candles (candles were made from the rendered fat from a sacrificial offering, either human or animal). Imagine if you could convince people that the candles that you sold them allowed them to offer sacrifices to your deity without anyone you love dying -- just buy the candles and you are exempt from the sacrifice lottery. So you could make an offering to the deity anytime you wanted by lighting a candle.

The cultural intergenerational religious beliefs have been passed on for thousands of years. You may ask, how could they do this to us and no one challenges their authority? Truth is, there have been many challengers:
Martin Luther, Alexander Hisop (author of the book, The Two Babylons), Achyra S (author of the book, The Christ Conspiracy), Jordan Maxwell, to name a few.

We have had a group of liars, priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, who for generation after generation have conditioned us to accept their authority, no matter how antithetical to our own interest this may be.

Some of the emotional black mail they use includes getting dead loved ones out of purgatory, getting yourself out of hell before you even get there, and the most famous of the blackmail lines, "He died for your sins".

Only those who entertain the deity with the proper regalia, ceremonies, pomp, and words spoken exactly (a mind control technique) are what is really pleasing to deity. How many times has the average christian spoken or heard the "Lord’s prayer"? How many times has the average Jew heard the Shema? Repetition is the most basic form of mind control. I believe that it was the nazi Joseph Goerbles who said, "if you tell a lie often enough, the people will begin to believe it". Does it not seem much more plausible that the deity knows who you are and what is in your heart and knows if you love or not without the words being carefully chosen by the religious leaders? It is anything more than mind control that if anyone has the audacity to challenge the most ridiculous of the religious leaders’ lies, they are called God haters, heretics or worse? The last thing the rulers of this world can withstand is the open mind searching for truth, because the thinking mind cannot accept the mountain of lies that religious institutions have wrought.

A very effective mind control technique is to quote scriptures within a sermon.

Listen to this:

Please turn with me to Matt 23.13
Please turn with me to Gen. 3.11
Please turn with me to Isa. 43.14
Please turn with me to Hos. 3.4
Please turn with me to Rev 12.4
Please turn with me to ......................
Please turn with me to.......................
Please turn with me to…………………..
please turn with meeeeeeeeeeeee.
please turn with m......................
By now your mind is ready for whatever conditioning the sermon giver wants to insert and can accept the Neuro-Linguistic programming (NLP).
“Neuro” for your nervous system or brain
“Linguistic” for Words
“Programming” for mind control.
So when the minster or priest or rabbi tells you to continually turn to this chapter or that, after all that frantic page turning, that is when the program code is implanted into your brain.

Anyone who has ever been to a sermon and has been through this mind control technique can attest to the fact that there are few who can keep up with the preacher’s rapid page turning, and has no conscious choice but to accept the conditioning as “truth”. After all, you would not be there if you did not have a certain level of trust in the institution and its representative, the priest, rabbi or minster. This sets you up for whatever “truth” they choose to insert. This is the real purpose of prayers of a very specific nature, ceremonies that are very carefully crafted to condition your mind, and a moral structure that is crafted to make you comply with their mind control. Imagine being told that the most basic function of life is only done with their permission.

Think not? Look at marriage licenses. The Olde English marriage license was called Fornication Under Consent of the King, which acronym is F.U.C.K. If you can make people think that they need the permission of the King (who gets his authority from the church) to allow you to perform one of the most basic human functions, you truly are under some very strong mind control.

In the book of Genesis, all the patriarchs simply “went into their wives”, declared them to the public to be their wives, and the deed was done -- no permission from a king or a priest.

If we search for truth with a mind that has been pre-conditioned by imbedded “truths”, our search will be fruitless. Where does that imbedded “truth” come from?

Schools, whose only purpose is to condition our children to be good citizens and believe all the lies the system masters want the people to believe.

Organized religions, loaded with lies too numerous to mention them all. Suffice it to say that no one’s religion is immune to the real morality of their actions.

Governments, who are the police force used to keep the simple people from thinking too much and asking too many questions.

Large, transnational corporations, whose reason for owning and controlling everything is to make sure we continue to pump out “good corporate citizens” who will be good consumers and follow their conditioning. If you doubt this for even a second, think of it this way: who in their right mind would trade in a perfectly good car every two years for another new car (and additional payments), if it were not for the constant reinforcement from the above mentioned institutions? The beast needs compliant, docile, mindless consumers, and religion serves its purpose. Can you say protestant work ethic? Who were they working for?

I prefer using the original hebrew word for what is today called religion.
Ha Deen, meaning “the life”. “The life” to be lived is one of love and peace, not of lies and religions, i.e., mind control. This mind control blocks us from the real power of the Creator Deity and leaves us helpless to men’s malevolent control.
The only true religion is Love, everything else is used as control for our masters.


The real truth is simply Peace, Love and Compassion.
Everything else is a method of
control.









Visit <edit>

 

I'm just trying to help you understand that the 'group' isn't Christianity, or Islam, or any of the other thousand religions but rather people who are satisfied with not understanding things (which does include the religious).

 

Well, the reason why I'm being particular towards Christianity is because that's the hangover I'm coming off of.

 

Trust me, I'm only trying to make your arguments stronger.

Theres something in it for me.

 

I see your points heeh2. Pardon me if I at all sounded contrary. I didn't solidly understand your points until I reread them. I have a better idea now.

 

I think most political leaders that claim to be Christian are just using it for political purposes. Some of those leaders might truly think they are Christian, but if you can send thousands of 18 year old boys off to die in war, how Christian can you truly be? Its the same concept as the political leaders in the middle east who recruit young, vulnerable boys to islamic fundamentalism with some terrorist training and western-hating thrown into the mix. As someone said above, people use religion as mind control. That taints the religion, but it doesnt have to define religion. Neither does anything else you mentioned...homophobia, racism, sexism, etc...

My brother was a pretty extreme Christian for years. He would literally start yelling at me about the sodamites because I have gay friends and i'm pro gay marriage, blah blah blah..he called them fags and spewed a lot of hateful ideas. I found out that the other day he went to a movie with a gay man he works with. now THAT is the most Christ-like thing I've seen him do in years.

My point is that just because people taint religions doesnt mean that those things become the truth of the religion. The truth of any religion, as far as i can see, is the message of love. I understand what you mean about not wanting to identify with people that taint religion, but you can choose to turn your back on them and find fellowship with gentler, more loving Christians that also despise how people taint the religion. A good friend of mine is a Christian and she chooses to have fellowship with me, a non Christian, because my ideals are more along the lines of her ideals even though we label them as two seperate things. She tells me everything she loves about her religion and i tell her everything i love about every religion lol.

Your actions will always speak louder than your words. If you choose to remain a Christian, people aren't going to judge you by someone elses actions. They will see that you walk a loving, open-minded path and not the stereotypical hate-filled path of many Christians. You might actually inspire other people to stop viewing the religion as hateful and start viewing it as something kinder and softer.

Or you might walk away from Christianity all together. Enjoy the time it takes to figure things out; spiritual self-discovery can be a life-long journey.

 

I see your points and you do make some valid ones. I'm not sure if you read my other posts however. People will indeed judge you if you say you're a Christian and you also say you're for gay marriage and equal rights for women. On both sides.

Its not really the judgment part that annoys me however. I suppose its the hypocrisy of the whole thing. We love you...but if we don't agree with you'll burn in hell eternally. If you don't believe in a lot of the supernatural, are for equal rights for all, and shun many of the ancient morals...Why even call yourself a Christian? Even still...How does that make you a Christian?

Sure I agree with a lot of what Jesus said. I agree with a lot of what the Buddha taught as well. Ghandi, same thing.

Yet, I know I'm not Buddhist or Hindu. Heck, I'm not even for peace and love in all circumstances. I believe in the right to defend yourself physically if need be. There's just a lot of ifs there.

 

One other thing...Please don't believe the message of all religions is love. Sure, they may have some loving people in religions. But, if you look at the sacred texts of most major religions...Its not just about "love". There's a lot of killing and debauchery going on. A lot of you're different so you must suffer going on.

There's watered down versions of said faiths but at their purest rarely is it just about love.