This is my first post to the blog, and I’m glad to be here. I’m an ex-fundamentalist and recent college grad who is still grappling with the events surrounding my “de-conversion.” I hope to post on various theological issues from time to time, and I welcome any feedback you’ve got.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently with my moderate (or even liberal) Christian friends. In fact, one of the hardest parts of “coming out” as an atheist has not been the scorn of fundamentalists but the outcry of mischaracterization that arises from moderates when I explain my reasons for rejecting theism. It would be hard to number the times that I’ve heard the cry, “what you’re talking about isn’t true Christianity!”
Essentially, moderates love love. They love Jesus because they think he embodies love. With Zen-like fervor, they focus on a few New Testament passages about giving away your wealth, turning the other check, and selflessly loving others. When pressed, they will admit that God is holy, absolute perfection, and they accept the fact that he cannot accept humanity…because they are also quick to admit that the world is a messed-up place. But that is about as far as they will go.
The difference between moderates and fundamentalists is how seriously they take the Bible and how willing they are to reject modern morality in favor of what the Bible says. In both cases, the fundamentalists are far more serious, and in that sense, more in touch with reality—however repulsive that reality might be (and, of course, it is repulsive to moderates, who validate their religious modernization by claiming that those who don’t come along with them are “hijacking” the religion for their own bigoted agendas).
Fred Phelps knows the Bible better (and takes it more seriously) than any moderate pastor or theologian I’ve heard. Why is he denounced by reasonable Christians? Not because he’s wrong by biblical standards, but because he’s obviously bigoted, hateful, and doesn’t restrain himself to quoting from the safe sections of the Bible that moderates embrace. As a society, we’ve decided that the best way to deal with homosexuals isn’t to stone them to death. The Bible hasn’t quite caught up.
Once we get past the point that the most shocking and horrific parts of the Bible are in the history and law books, which were never meant to be read as metaphor, the most common excuse moderates give to biblical examples of God-endorsed misogyny, genocide, infanticide, homophobia, rape, etc., is that there were certain contexts under which those things were okay, but that we are now under a new covenant of grace and love. This is position is inconsistent (God is immutable), immoral (why was that crap ever okay?), and dangerous (if God “tells” you to do something, it’s great!), but the point I bring up with moderates is that ultimately, Jesus is even worse.
As evil as the God of the Old Testament was(/is), he only dished out crap in the present life. Sure, you might have been slaughtered by God via the Jews if you were an Amalekite (1 Samuel 15:3) or taken as a sex slave if you were a young virgin (Numbers 31:18), but your time of suffering (or punishment for sin?) was limited by your mortality. In the New Testament, as Thomas Paine famously pointed out, the concept of infinite torture for finite transgression was introduced. (To be fair, the first-century BCE Pharisee movement developed the idea, but Jesus was the first to speak it into the biblical canon.) Either way, how can Jesus be the embodiment of love if his main message of salvation was that you are going to be cast into a previously-unintroduced place of eternal torment if you don’t intellectually assent (believe) that he exists and was executed with you in mind?
Here’s the rub (listen up, moderates): love doesn’t have conditions. If your parents say they love you and then utterly reject/disown you when you don’t fulfill their vision for your life, you assume that they either stopped loving you or didn’t love you in the first place. The cliché (but true) claim of parents to “love you no matter what, even when I’m disappointed in you” is what love is about: constant, unconditional, and independent of what you do or think.
If you want to go even a step further than most moderate Christians and accept universalism, that’s fine; it’s just not biblical. And as long as moderates aren’t taking the words of the Bible seriously, they’re not within a biblical tradition either. Jesus took the law seriously (Matthew 5:17-19), and he made the punishment for failing at a harder task (belief) infinitely worse. Don’t claim to be a Christian unless you can affirm the words of your infallible book without yards of yellow tape and hours of contorted explanation.
At its core, Christianity isn’t about love: it’s about worshipping an unloving god, no matter what immoral acts he commands or permits. Those who haven’t had an experience or seen enough evidence to permit honest belief are automatically damned, as are those who can believe but refuse to worship an essentially immoral being whose precepts are trumped easily by basic modern morality. Moderates: this is your religion, as long as you choose to go by the name “Christian.” No matter how enamored you are with love, your God is not.
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You know what is hardest for me about “moderates” – is that they are usually moderate because of ignorance. I think the MAJORITY of Christians are genuine people like my parents who are just trying to be good people. They don’t have a big focus on biblical studies or literalism, but rather on community, charity, hospitality – and on their emotional connection to the familiar things they were raised with, like singing hymns and parables.
I am not sure what the answers are for most moderates – while for me personally, I couldn’t handle the imbalance of morality the bible (and christianity overall) represents. But I think for a lot of people who are just your average human being, they just want a simple life. I can’t blame them honestly. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Excellent points, DickJohnson. I usually try to avoid conversations with Christians about why the Bible sucks, but yesterday I was drawn into a conversation with a moderate friend who was genuinely concerned about fundamentalism and the ilk of WBC. When I pointed out the obvious scriptural support employed by these groups, she responded, “That’s so sad. What’s happening to our religion?”
Gosh, you just don’t get it. What’s happenED to your religion is the advent of basic morality in a cooperative society. Some people just aren’t catching up yet. A good example, of course, is religious (it’s always religious) opposition to GLTB rights.
So in some ways, I do fault Christians for cherry picking. It’s a problem, especially when you’re trying to make absolute truth claims. But my main problem with moderates is that they are ENABLING the fundamentalists by lending credibility to crazy. All the moderates I know are genuinely nice people who live decent, moral lives. I don’t begrudge them that. But if they really think that their interpretation of Christianity is correct, they have some serious house cleaning to do. Right now that house cleaning seems to be left almost entirely up to secularists…
Fred Phelps and the WBC is a great example of pure Biblical Christianity. The fact that modern America shuns this group, for good reasons, shows how “Christians” can’t even accept their own God’s teaching. Last year for a class on Biblical Morality I argued that the bible was not a piece on human morality, it is a book written to subjugate the masses based on the belief of a myth in order to explain the “hard” questions in life i.e. Why are we here? We do we go when we die? and other unanswerable questions. If we go off of Biblical morality slaves are a-OK, as is ethnic cleansing, war, human sacrifice, rape, and other nastiness as long as it is sanctified by the great surveillance camera in the sky. Laura also makes a great point when she points out cherry-picking. When I presented my attack of biblical morality, I was accused of picking and choosing the bad passages. They (“they” are the highly religious West Virginian members of my class. WVU is a very religious school and to be an atheist is a difficult thing for many people here to understand) said that God didn’t want that now, or they were just metaphors, and other such nonsense. And here is the great divider between fundamentalist and moderate…the belief in the book that their religion is based off of. To be a moderate Christian, and to phrase it like mikhailovich the “loving” Christians, one must reject the teaching of the Bible. Fred Phelps and the WBC are awesome Christians. Go to their site, http://www.godhatesfags.com you’ll get a good laugh, and better yet, you’ll get an understanding as to what Christianity would be if they read the bible literally. Obviously this can go on and on when one considers human interpretation and what-not, but the bottom line is this: If you read the bible, you will see that God murders, commits ethnic cleansing, pressures Man into human sacrifice, and overall is not a very friendly or loving person. Whether or not one considers themselves moderate or fundamentalist it does not matter, Christianity is based upon an archaic understanding of the world in which Man was grouping wildly through nature trying to understand his place without any scientific means. Now that humans can subjectively look at nature and their place in it; it is time for these beliefs to be cast off like a heavy suit of armor, and for humans to finally move forward and make progress without fear of a man who is in the sky ready to strike them down with fire and lightning.
When I was still a Christian I struggled with the denomination in which I was raised, United Methodist, and my own tendency to be very hard on myself. UM’s are very moderate: they ordain women and gays and lesbians can be members. They even have an open communion table where anyone, regardless of church affiliation, is welcome to participate in the communion ritual. However, I knew there were contradictions to how the church was run and what the Bible had to say about things like homosexuality and women being authority figures, and so on. I still don’t really have a problem with UM’s really, but my perception and understanding of Christianity through biblical study made me struggle with how much I could look past their liberal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. Eventually I realized that I did support gay rights and women’s rights, just outside of the context of a religion that ultimately says those things are wrong. I personally couldn’t be a part of something that cherry picked the things they would stand by and shun others so they could stay in the realm of promoting “love and understanding”
Hi there, an interesting site that you two might be interested in: losingmyreligion.com
Two of my favorite quotes from there:
“ Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.”
- Harvard Lampoon
“Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love.”
- Butch Hancock
The second one seems to be touching on the same “love” inconsistency that ‘Mik’ brings up.
Thanks for the article!