More likely it is “Everyone else is actually serving the same God I am…but I am the only one doing it correctly”.
Not really; it’s common for them to consider their beliefs the obvious truth, and to think that there are only two sorts of people in the world; those that agree with them in ever way, and knowing servants of Satan. The belief that they are so obviously in the right that only the knowingly evil would disagree with them is pretty common with fanatics, religious or not.
It answers so many questions; for example why does all the evidence support evolution? Because the scientific community makes up the evidence as part of a deliberate deception. Why do so many people say they believe in other gods or no god? Because they are lying in the service of Satan. And so on.
I was just never that good at being a fundamentalist. Maybe because I had a very liberal agnostic Aunt.
Sure I believed some of the stuff. I believed in purity culture for instance. For myself.
But LGBTQ hate? Absolutely not.
Anti evolution? Absolutely not.
I think that’s why I left the church at 17. I was maturing past a lot of what they were trying to teach me at church. It was hard. I had to let go of my Good Girl identity. But I just couldn’t justify hanging out with people who were saying horrible things about my gay friends, friends who were homeless and worse because of religious fundamentalism. I’m still mad just thinking about it.
Plus Christianity had no satisfying answer for the problem of suffering, which figured large in my life that year.
Slight hijack, just for general interest: the Samaritans are still around. They’re a tiny community of around 800 people, split between Israel and the West Bank: Samaritans - Wikipedia
Thanks for info! That’s fascinating; and I had no idea.
Ignorance fought!
There are some denominations that fully accept LGBT people as members and leaders. If that was a problem for you earlier, you wouldn’t have a hard time finding something now that rejects that old hate.
Also, I never understood why Evolution and a belief in God were in opposition. I think Evolution is the process by which God moves things forward. There’s no reason to assume that Evolution requires one to be an atheist or an agnostic. You can be a Christian and agree that Evolution is a valid theory.
As for suffering, there are many denominations that are focused on helping the needy. I know the Methodists are very active in serving humanity.
When I say “the problem of suffering” I mean the meaning of suffering, the question of why we suffer at all.
I’m unsatisfied with Christian perspectives on this. There is really no platitude that can paper over what I went through in my childhood and early adulthood, and there are people on this planet who have it far worse. I’ve looked into what others have to say about this, and I’m partial to existential thinkers like Nietzsche and Frankl. They don’t offer an explanation for suffering beyond cause and effect in the natural world, but they offer something to transform it: Meaning. Creation. A sense of purpose. Autonomy. On this foundation I have built my practice.
First, evolution destroyed their most effective argument for God - “If there’s no God where do humans and living things in general we come from?” - and they’ve always resented that. That one used to completely stump skeptics and people who just found the whole idea of “God” absurd, many of whom would just give up and say “God did it” because they couldn’t think of an alternative.
Second, many of the religious are also believers in essentialism (something you also see with their common attitude toward gender issues); the idea that everything has its own unchangeable essence (defined by God as they see it) that cannot be changed. Living things violate that concept by evolving from one form to another over generations.
Third, it hurts their pride to think that our ancestors were “just animals”.
Fourth, it doesn’t fit with the Garden of Eden or the Christian creation myth in general at all. Which is a major problem for a Biblical literalist, which for that reason overlaps a lot with evolution denial.
Most Christians are not “literalists.” So, I don’t see why we can’t admit that Evolution exists, and that it’s the process that God created. To me, the existence of Evolution doesn’t refute the existence of God, and the existence of God wouldn’t “do away” with Evolution. They can co-exist, and many Christians feel the way I do.
60% of Christians worldwide are creationists, only about 10% believe in evolution. So while they are capable of believing in evolution only an insignificant amount do.
Far higher than 10% of American Christians believe in Evolution. In fact, it’s a majority, depending on how the question is asked, and which sub-group is asked.
The literalists I’ve seen are petrified at the prospect of having to decide which parts of the Bible are true if they admit that any part is not true. The Book of Job is clearly a story making a very specific point - and they consider that literally true also, though Satan in that story contradicts their typical view of him.
But I’d like to hear your solution to the problem of Eden. If Eden was not a place, and if Adam and Eve did not commit the original sin, why are we cursed and why is Jesus necessary to save us? If our common ancestors did not make us all flawed due to a choice (never mind that they didn’t know it was wrong) then God made us that way.
The order of creation is not all that important, but the Garden would seem to be.
There are evangelical Bible scholars. Members of the Evangelical Theological Society must take a pledge that “The Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is the word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
They are “scholars” that must start with the conclusion that the entire Bible is literally true. You must have a Master of Theology degree to be a full member, and in 2010 there were 4200 full members. Evangelical Theological Society - Wikipedia
Its not so funny when we have elected officials using he same “reasoning” to impose their personal beliefs on the rest of us after hearing directly from their god. You know, the one and only true god.
I try not to get hung up in all of that. I think some of the Bible is literal history, and some of it is literal “teaching moments”, where the writers were trying to teach a life lesson. As a Methodist, we believe you need to take the Bible as a whole, and that within that “whole”, there’s enough information to lead you to salvation. It’s available to all who want it. But if you allow yourself to be dragged into a debate about every single passage in isolation, it can box you into a corner (IMHO).
Within the scripture, we see that Jesus is required for salvation, and that us humans are not “good enough” without him. You asked me about the Garden and my only comment there is that it’s an example of our sinful nature as humans…
Are they generally good?
I"m not a biblical scholar. So, there are probably plenty that would do better than me in debating about literalism within Christianity. I think most people, including some who consider themselves to be fundamentalist types, have parts of the Bible that they don’t take literally. For instance, I don’t consider the Earth to literally be about 6,000 years old and created in one week (as we currently view a week). I think how we view time today and how time was stated in Genesis isn’t so important.
TBH, I find this the most odious tenant of Christianity. I work in the field of domestic violence services and when I hear people talk about God like this it sounds like textbook Stockholm syndrome that we see in abuse survivors. “We’re inherently unworthy of Him but he loves us anyway. And if he punishes us it’s only because we did something wrong.”
Uncoincidentally, I had a similar relationship with my abusive mother. No thanks.
Well, I have a different take. I look around, and see proof of human nature over and over - murder, rape, torture, dictatorship, genocide, among other things. As a species, we’re a wrecking ball. So, we need something that we can’t provide for ourselves. I don’t see Jesus as a stockholm syndrome situation. I see him as a radical departure from how humans interact with the world.
What bothers me the most is that a lot of Christians go through with the Baptism and joining of church and such, but you see no change in how they interact with the world around them. Many of them walk around with their chests puffed up, like their shit doesn’t stink. But they’re full of the same hates they had before. And within certain groups of Christians, I wonder if Jesus is their savior or if they’re more focused on worshipping Trump. Some of what passes as Christianity these days looks more like fascism to me.
I’m reminded that during WW2, many baptized Christians were involved in the wholesale slaughter of Jews, by the millions…or they killed Jews with indifference. Christians don’t have a great track record in many ways.
I feel like “among other things” is doing a lot of work here. I mean, how many murders, rapes, tortures, disctstorships and genocides have you committed? Your family? Your close personal friends? Your neighbors?
I mean, I don’t know my neighbors that well (or at all), but I’d be willing to bet the number is a lot closer to zero than you seem to make it out to be. It seems to me that human nature is only sinful when you conceive of sin as something done against (a non-human) god, rather than other people. And the flip side of that is, once you’ve divorced harm to humans from the concept of sin, some other things in your list ironically cease to be sins because, for example, genocide is not a sin if god commands it, right? Certainly it’s in the bible often enough.
Or is that the part you’ve decided isn’t literal history, but more like “teaching moments.” In which case… I have to wonder, what was supposed to be the lesson it didn’t actually go down like that?