I am a Christian

[lorimt]

The internet has me rather annoyed tonight with blanket Christian bashing, and I've meant to do this for a while. I'm not feeling very eloquent, but whatever.

I am a Christian, a Lutheran to be specific. I may not be as good a Christian as I'd like to be, but my faith is important to me. Moreover, this affects the way I choose to think and live my life. I hold many of my values because of (or maybe with, its hard to tell) what I think is most important in my faith. My faith is a deep part of me. I am certainly a member of organized religion, and want to make clear that fact.

This does NOT mean I interpret the Bible literally, nor that I hate or think everyone who disagrees with me is evil. Nor does it mean I'm a crazy wacko. (At least not for that.) It also doesn't mean I follow the official interpretation of every religious issue, I actually do think about things and come to my own conclusions. I'm fairly liberal and like to think myself intelligent as well.

I also agree that organized religion has done some bad things, but want to point out that governments have as well. They also do great things, both of them. One of the things about large organizations that affect millions of lives is that they are imperfect, and sometimes do things counter to their very reasons for existance. We should do our best to point out and attempt to fix these misdeeds, but to suggest the entire institution is inherently immoral is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

All of this has much more to do with some some misperceptions I've run across rather persistantly online, among some otherwise fairly intelligent discussion, than it does the people likely to read this. I also realize I've only really talked about what I believe in in a negative sense, in contrast to some stereotypes. As to what I do believe in, maybe I'll write about that soon, though it'd be a whole lot harder to put into words, and my desire to be accurate and fear of misrepresenting things I care a lot about would be much higher.

Comments

[meep.livejournal.com]

The reason government and organized religion have done bad things are because when power and/or money are involved, lots of people misbehave.

In any case, I'm used to hearing crap about the Catholic Church, much less about being Christian. (and the majority of the former crap comes from other Christians, so yay Christian fellowship.)

Are you a member of any specific Lutheran organization? I know only about ELCA and the Missouri Synod (or whatever it's called). My stepdaughter is nominally Lutheran (as in, that's the church she was baptized in), but she's been to Mass more often with Stu and me than she's ever been to Lutheran services, Sad, really.

[lorimt]

I'm a member of the ELCA.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

I think those people who people are usually complaining about when they bash Christians would probably say you're not a proper Christian, because if you were you'd realize that everyone who wasn't Christian was going to hell, so if you actually *cared* about them you'd be busy trying to convert them. Possibly in violent ways.

I'm an atheist, and it still annoys me when people think that's what it means to be a Christian, and bash Christians because of it. Some people who do this also adopt the same line as the scary Christians, and say that if you're *cool*, you're chearly not really a Christian.

Blaarg.

[bobbzman.livejournal.com]

"Witnessing" is often a pretty big part of Christianity, but it also tends to take a much more innoculous form than most people think of. Many schools of thought I've been exposed to consider the best form of witnessing to be simply doing good deeds, thus showing what God has done to your life.

Of course, some Christians consider this a complete cop-out, and there's something to that claim, altoough I generally consider it a far better message to send than yelling at people.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

At the very least, most people have been yelled at, but not everyone has had the experience of strangers doing good deeds.

[lorimt]

I agree with you almost exactly, both regarding good deeds and copouts. One thing about yelling at people is that it not only rarely works, but it goes against a fairly large number of important values, no matter how much one thinks it is for the yelle's own good.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

I hope I haven't been one of the generic Internet Christian bashers. I try to confine my bashing to "Christian fundamentalists," or some other designation to indicate that I'm not talking about all Christians, but rather those who hold a particular set of values I find abhorrent, including sexism, theocracy, and intolerance. (I try to do something similar with Muslims: there are many Muslims who hold views that I agree with. However, there are unfortunately also many Muslims who pursue a virulent form of Islam that has all the same problems as the virulent form of Christianity.)

[mothie.livejournal.com]

Hi Lori,

Will's mom here. I came across your post (with his permission) and wanted to say how courageous I think you are to state your faith so openly in this day of open season on Christians. You're swimming against the (perceived) current. I think you can take heart in the fact that it's a small vocal minority (the country is something like 80% Christian) that is doing the bashing. It's currently chique.

I'm not a Christian, but I believe in tolerance for all faiths. There's too much Balkanism in the world.

Blessed Be,
Ellen

[dclayh.livejournal.com]

1. Frankly, I've heard a lot more Christian-basher-bashing than Christian-bashing recently (but that could be because I've been listening to Bill O'Reilly a lot).

2. Admittedly religious organizations aren't always bad, but look at the other side of the coin: is there anything they can do that an equivalent secular organization (and personal religion) can't?

[lorimt]

I think it depends more on numbers than on other factors. The amount of power/available effort a group has is pretty directly related to the numbers. I'm fairly sure it is one of those synergy things where the group working together manages more than the same number of individuals. I also think the bad things are proportional to numbers/power. There are certainly secular organizations that do great things, no argument there. I don't see a need for either-or though. The more organizations that let people put money and effort behind their goodwill the better. I'd actually prefer if some religious groups would make people of different or no religions more welcome, as there are plenty more people that could be helping or benefitting from that help. In fact, I'd like to start one here for a variety of reasons, but need to find someone to keep working with it when I'm not here.

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

I have nothing against religion or religious people. What i do dislike is the brainwashing aspects of organized religion. The most obvious example is attempts to convert people, which some religions turn into doctrine (Jehovah's Witness anyone?). But there are two more grevious aspects of religion as an organized entity.

First, the tendency of organized religion to encourage its practitioners to look down its nose at people not in their religion. Its a group psychology thing in part, and in part due to the promises that many religions make that if you aren't part of their particular brand of that religion, you're going to hell/whatever unpleasantness non-believers suffer in the afterlife. Mormonism goes so far as to allow the conversion of ancestors to 'the true faith' so they can be saved posthumously. The farther away you are from a given organized religion, the more those practitioners tend to look down on you. Now, this isn't to say that all adherents to organized religions do this, some people (you included) have a strong sense of self and are willing to form and hold their own beliefs. But most people are willing to follow and obey blindly... willfully making themselves sheep in a gross parody of the shepherd-Christ symbolism. Eg, while organized religion is safe for a few people, cost-benefit analysis strongly recommends against it because of the large number it has a negative influence on. Just look at the religious opposition to same-sex marriages as a glaring instance of the abuse of power organized religion naturally lends itself to.

What makes this especially bad is that practitioners often believe for reasons not having to do with an actual choice on their part. (See below). Eg, they didnt come to the religion of their own free will, and they believe because they've been trained to believe. This means that they have no way of knowing whats appropriate to the religion because its not theirs, their only access to 'truth' is through the pastor/minister/etc... Thus, anything their spiritual leader says is automatically true in their minds. Now, again, this doesnt describe all believers, but it describes the vast majority of them.

The second is the indoctrination of children. Take someone at a young age when they are impressionable, and teach them something as true without proof and they are likely to stick to that belief for most of their lifetimes. Put them in this situation with their parents behind it and its even more likely. Now, i'm not trying to say any given organized religion is right or wrong on the whole, although a good case could be made for some on the basis of their own holy books (the Catholic Church in particular), but its impossible to know if they are right, or which is right. Thats why there are so many divergent ones today. Ideally, people should be able to make a rational choice for a religion that best suits them (or no religion, as appropriate). Not only is this denied the average person, but, in my experience, religions attempt to capture the minds of children without telling them what exactly it is their religion believes in. Lets take confirmation. I dare any one of you to give me an example of a religion that lays out the specific doctrines of that religion in comparison to other religions. My experience was mostly an exploration of the gospels, which everyone in the confirmation group had been doing for the previous n years of their life in Sunday School, and when i specifically asked about church doctrine as related to other christian churches, my question was deferred and never returned to. They don't want you to know or care about the specifics. And yet, thats what confirmation should be about, a confirmation that you want to follow that religion and not any of the other myriad choices available to you.

[continued]

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

This also means that most people are likely trapped believing in something which does not mesh well with their personal views. This intellectual conflict causes people to feel guilt for doing things that otherwise wouldnt bother them (we're not talking about breaking the law here, we're talking about solely religious transgressions), which leads to increased mental stress. Stress has been documented to reduce lifespan in primates, and is known to impair the immune system in humans, thus religion has a direct negative impact on the health of many of its believers.

Now, this is not to say that there is no way to do organized religion right, but it is to say that human nature makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to actually construct one which isnt subject to these problems. These problems arise, not primarily in the individual believer, but in the consequence of the structure of the organized entity and the way it uses its believers.

Spiritual belief should be something arrived at through contemplation and experience. It should not be something ramrodded into a child's brain. And i dont think that contemplation+experience would create any set of uniform beliefs such that organized religion could legitimately exist, which is why religions favor and encourage (if not demand) the brainwashing of children. Further, it also means that organized religion philosophically does not believe in diversity of religious ideas - if they could compel it they would compel everyone to believe in their religion. The actions of the Catholic church, such as the inquisition and the crusades, but also the prosecution of a variety of heresies (including the heresy of owning a bible and not being a clergy member) are not unusual, they are the natural result of a near monopoly on organized religion. You'll note these religious travesties ended with the reformation, and otherwise span the entire existence of the catholic church (defined as when the bishop of Rome became the central power in the early church). To say there is a baby in this bathwater is to conjure up an entity of whose existence there is no proof.

Again, this is not to say individual beliefs are bad. I'll encourage individual belief. I'll encourage group bible study. I'll encourage fellowhsip. What i don't encourage is power structures, spiritual leaders, or anyone who can claim a monopoly on knowledge of any aspect of the 'truth'. Build an organized relion without these things, and i'll concede that there exists an organized religion whose existence i approve of.

[squirrelloid.livejournal.com]

Oh, you'll also note i favor minimal government (eg, strict Lockian government), so these types of views aren't constrained to religion.