User blog:AustinDR/Venting

Lesson learned: never ask logical questions in a southern Baptist church. I just feel terrible today. If my depression episodes weren't already something that I have dealt with a few times, but now I was also passed over for teaching the Sunday School lesson. The reason? It had to do with the whole "Us vs. them" rhetoric that many Christians adhere to. I always get annoyed by how some religious people talk so much about how the world is awful and in need of a savior or that somehow without Jesus, they'd revert to psychotic beasts and commit all kind of carnage and atrocities. I can understand that they feel that way even though I do not agree on that notion and find it...almost pathetic really that they'd put all their faith into something that by all means didn't exist. To me, faith is the excuse people give to justify believing in something they otherwise have no reason to believe. I blame it mostly on indoctrination.

I didn't intend on challenging any views of anyone. If I did, I would've mentioned some things such as how there couldn't have been light had the sun not been created yet, or how the original sin made no sense because God punished Adam and Eve over disobedience but never bothered to explain to them what death or good or evil was. It's just that as I began to grow up, I felt the more I learned about these stories, the more I was convinced that they did not make any sense and that they were at best stories that back then made the attempt to explain how things were or how they came to be. Not necessarily as factual. Or with Jesus, I was fine with Jesus being a historical person, but whether or not he was truly divine was a whole other stories. I believe that he did say wise things, but some of his points I felt were bad. And don't even get me started with the whole persecution complex.

So to make matters short, I started to ask if God truly knew what it would take people, like atheists, to believe, why then was it that missionaries or evangelists always failed to sway their minds. I was genuinely curious. I mean if God really wanted mankind to reconnect with him, why would he deliberately send his missionaries to give unbelievers unconvincing suggestions? They did give me explanations...but they largely depended on assumptions of there being a spiritual war that is making them not believe. Or then they tried to say "well, since we all didn't God, we were all atheists at one point." There answers were not satisfactory.

As it was Pride Month, one of them brought up how Obama legalized same-sex marriage, and that caused a spark in the LGBTQ+ community. Keep in mind, they were fine with Obama becoming president as he was an African-American. Many of them were practically kissing up to him because he was a Christian...and yet when it came to that decision, they suddenly went "well, he was misguided, but I believe in my heart he knew it was wrong." That is the very definition of No True Scotsman. You know, when you have a group and that group believed a certain thing, but if one member of the group expressed a contradictory view point, oh, they simply weren't a true member of the group! I am serious, why are some -- not all -- Christians obsessed with who is in bed with who? Why would it even bother them in the slightest. The only explanation I get from people of course are founded on biblical principles never mind the fact that they were made by a group of people at a certain time where it was necessary to have as many children as possible. Nowadays, that is no longer an issue, and it is generally understood that sex is done for pleasure and closeness rather than procreation. Or for any who say that it is unnatural, the same thing could be applied to driving a car or typing at a computer. That, and how did they possibly know that God truly said that? You can say that the Bible is the divine word of God all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that it was passed down from generation to generation and written by different authors. Don't tell me that none of those authors didn't have an agenda behind what they were writing.

I was very civil with my church body, and I ultimately said that I respected their beliefs even if I did not agree with their justifications on faith. So after VBS was over, apparently word got out from some snitch who willfully misconstrued what I said and gave it to the preacher. And my Dad tried to force me to watch one of those Christian movies that appeal to only one demographic.

I am now considering not referring to him as my Dad anymore. Especially when he raised Hell about me going out to see the latest Annabelle movie even though he had no problems with the other Conjuring films. He is becoming a blot on my life that I want to disown, but I'd feel bad for it at the same time. Even though I try to tell my Dad I respect his beliefs, he just won't respect that we think differently and I do not entirely agree on topics such as having absolute faith.

I just don't know what to do anymore....