Readers, I’ve got a wishlist.
All year I encounter anti-Christianity stuff, often posted as funny and there’s always a holiday uptick. I’m pretty sure it’s reaction to atrocities genuinely unworthy of tolerance or respect, that the institutional church absolutely is guilty of.
Only, the things getting insulted are unrelated to atrocities: our alleged “fairy tales,” “sky daddy,” “invisible friends,” “magic cookies.”
Two things: the feeding, healing, resurrection miracle narratives are not the cause of atrocities. The narratives long predate the political juggernaut church. The first followers of the Christian narrative were the persecuted - an outlaw movement. The establishment could not stamp it out, no matter how brutally they tried, so they finally decided to harness it to expand their wealth and power. The power-mongers don’t care squat about the narrative, they just use it. “We won’t feed y’all to lions anymore. Come be Christian Soldiers” was calculated, and brilliant.
Correlation — the faith of beliefs, and the establishment religion of conquest — is not causation.
Thing 2: Mocking the beliefs while you make careful effort to honor and respect pagan, indigenous, Eastern spiritual traditions THAT ARE JUST AS WOO AS THE CHRISTIANITY WOO-NESS YOU EXPRESS CONTEMPT FOR is something I would ask everybody to just…think about. Ok? Just ponder whether it’s logical?
Anytime a Christian makes even the gentlest protest about being told their faith is abuse apologetics hiding in infantile comfort objects, someone’s gonna say “You’re a hypocrite for not ‘turning the other cheek.’ ” This means shut up. Sorry, it’s not going to fly. I obviously have an opinion on whether treating each other this way has a point. Mine is that the divisiveness in our world isn’t driven only by a big sledgehammer, but by a thousand little rock-hammers that splinter us into thousands of tiny “I’m superior to you” fragments. The belief issue is only one such issue, but it matters, maybe to people you don’t want to hurt with bitter words, even in jokes.
