It's not all or nothing, you self righteous bastards...

I wrote this paper for my GWRIT class a few weeks ago. Didn't really anticipate the depth it would take till I was halfway through it. It really packs a punch. Take it with a grain of salt, ye small minded fundamentalists.

February 11, 2009

I grew up in a Christian household. My parents both adhered and still adhere to a strict, fundamentalist Christian faith, and attend a “non-denominational” Christian church. For my siblings and I, questioning the faith was neither a notion we entertained nor an option we bore, since the scriptures were considered the infallible Word of God, and therefore beyond doubt or inquiry. For the first 16 years of my life, I shied away from anything that contradicted this viewpoint, including alternative translations of the Bible, and especially any faith that denied Christ’s status as the Son of God. I lived in what I now perceive to be a blissful ignorance of any and all ideologies beyond the threshold of the Church, content that somehow I’d been lucky enough to win the lottery of childbirth, being born into a family that had somehow been lucky enough to win the lottery of religion, what my parents called “the will of God”, and others in the faith would call “predestination”. For whatever reason, perhaps out of sheer indolence, I never studied the Bible to the extent that my parents boasted, never bothered to investigate for myself the dogma that I had professed as Ultimate Truth since I was a toddler. Not until I was sixteen, and upon my mother’s demand I started reading the Old Testament, the book that would soon grow to disgust and horrify me more than any other in my entire life.

See, my parents had done their job indoctrinating my siblings and I as to the beauty of the legend of Christ: the gospel, the greatest story of wisdom, self-sacrifice, and love that I have heard or read to this date. But no amount of psychological training could have prepared me for the stories of intolerance, murder and outright genocide that I would encounter in the Torah. Exodus, Leviticus, Chronicles, Deuteronomy, Numbers, all filled to overflowing with the shed blood of innocent women and children who died at the whim of ignorant Kings and Prophets, all in the name of a God I had never known I worshiped. Infants were cut apart if their parents were accused of committing blasphemy (2 Chronicles 15:12-13). Newlywed women were dragged through town in shame and then stoned to death at their father’s doorsteps if they were not found to be virgins on their wedding night, for whatever reason (Deuteronomy 22:20-21). If anyone, man woman or child, were accused of working on the Sabbath Day, his family would be “cut off from the community” and exterminated (Exodus 31:12-15). Individuals, families, towns, cities, entire civilizations were wiped off the face of the earth to appease what was meant to be a loving, merciful God, the Great I Am. I sought justification, any justification for the crimes against humanity my God had committed, but none were to be found.

Needless to say, I remained ignorant no longer. I sought after answers, the kinds of answers I couldn’t abide with in my present, unlearned state of mind. I knew that the God who taught to “Love thy enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43) couldn’t possibly be the same God who commanded to "Follow them through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion,” and to “defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain” (Ezekiel 9:5-7). But every question I asked inspired anger and disappointment in my friends, my pastors, and especially my parents, as if to question the nature of God meant to doubt his existence or omnipotence. Indeed, to question the legitimacy of a single scripture was to question the entire faith, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not convince my fellow Christians that my intentions were not nearly that radical. I simply wondered at the logic behind taking the word of man as the Word of God, to assign a collection of stories written by hundreds of authors over the span of millennia such authority as the utterance of an almighty Deity. Wasn’t Christ the only human who lived without fault? How then could I attribute perfection to writers whose names weren’t even known by modern day historians and theologians?

Despite my parents best attempts, and maybe even because of their own closed-minded nature, I remained stubbornly unconvinced. I had reached a conclusion, one that I have now resigned that they will never accept or fully understand: the stories of the Old Testament were simply that. After centuries of passing down the fables of Noah, Moses, and King David (all of which involved accounts of miraculous mass genocide), the children of Israel did the only thing they could to absolve the sins of their forefathers, justify their bloody history, and keep their unruly people in line: they invented a God; a vengeful, jealous, even schizophrenic God who demanded fear and punished disrespect with swift and almighty wrath. In a time where might almost certainly defined right, the influential and manipulative religious leaders of the day appointed kings and generals to control the tribes of Judah, and used the laws of Moses and fear of divine retribution to preserve their power and ensure the survival of their civilization. Their God was an intangible incarnation of the fear and hatred inherent in the hearts of all men, used as a weapon and a leash for thousands of years.

But my God was a different God. Mine was a God of compassion and infinite mercy, who had undoubtedly watched the pain and suffering of humankind with tearful eyes, hoping that one day they would come to their senses and choose a path of forgiveness over the much easier path of ritual vengeance. And when the time for that choice finally came, Christ was born, the physical manifestation of God’s Unconditional Love.

2000 years later, and the children of God still haven't quite gotten it right. The purpose of Christ’s birth, life, and death was not to establish a self-righteous V.I.P. club in the guise of a compassionate world religion, but to unify mankind under one common ideology, regardless of race, culture or personal creed. Christ would be ashamed of the atrocities committed in his name; the crusades, the holocaust, and the genocide of Latin America, to name but a few. Nor do I believe Christ would associate himself with any present day Christian church, since none fully live up to the pacifist, forgiving, and all accepting nature of their adopted Deity. But there is good in man that I have witnessed, and to his credit, sometimes the good stems from compassion rather than outright fear.

I do not put my faith in any man, nor any group of men, and certainly not in any mass organization of men. I do not associate myself with any sect of Christianity, and am even hesitant to adopt the label, for I know the connotation of ignorance and shallow blindness it bears. But I do love the Lord my God with all my heart, with all my soul, and with all my mind, and I do try daily to love my neighbor as myself, despite his imperfections, and especially despite my own. I pray that my parents, and indeed the Christian faith as a whole are wrong, and living by this standard, Christ’s Greatest Commandment, will be enough.