because that don't make a lick o' sense
So, here's a rant about Christianity. Again.
I was watching this evangelistic animation because someone linked it on Doug's blog and I was curious, and something about the way that evangelicals present the gospel really struck me.
It's always this:
God loves you. No matter what. No matter if you're a homosexual or a murderer or someone who bites the heads off of kittens (because obviously, being gay is just as bad as those things!). He just gosh darn loves you!
But! The bible says that if you do any of those things, you have to die and go to hell forever and ever and be separated from God and get tortured for eons! Oh noes!!! What is God going to do??!?!?! This is a real pickle for God to be in!
So he sent Jesus and he died and somehow that made it all better even though Jesus didn't spend eternity in hell so he didn't REALLY take your place (you get to die anyways, maybe even in a nasty way like Jesus!), but whatever, yay!, the end. Oh, except if you don't say a certain set of words, then you still go to hell! Oh no, you made God have to send you off to be tortured just by not saying some words! You must be super-powerful! The end.
So, here's a question that really bugged me and was one of The Questions That Led To My Deconversion: Why the hell is God stuck in a system he doesn't like? I mean, is he in control or not? It seems... not? Isn't that weird? And who got to make up this system if not God?
I know the drill, "God had to give us free will or we'd be robots, therefore there has to be sin," blah blah blah... but couldn't he have dealt with it in a better way than just automatically throwing EVERYONE into hell FOREVER? I mean, this is the dude who is supposed to be a father figure? I believe there are some laws against that style of parenting...
Some days I just shake my head and think, "Wait a second, I used to believe WHAT?? And it took me HOW many years to notice the math didn't add up?"
P.S. HEATHER: There are so many Dutch people in Nova Scotia! There is even a town called Dutch Settlement! But there are Germans there too, perhaps more of them, and there is confusion because the German word for 'German' is 'Deutsch', and people get them mixed up. But yes, there are many people there who sing "hoppy birdsday" once a year. :)
P.P.S. MARCO: Dude, who are you? You comment all the time, and I haven't got a clue. Please email me.
posted by Heather Ann @ 5:51 PM
5 Comments:
I think that if there is a god, she is a woman. And she's not Dutch.
PS: I minored in German at Queen's; many words/phrases are quite similar to Dutch and also to English. Still, I was confused for the longest time re. "Dutch"/"Deutsch".
Hey HA
I was out of town and just got back - LOVE the last two posts that I missed. You are VERY funny and a treat to read. I've actually moved you up on the Marko Hot 100 all the way to NUMBER TWO :) (really number one, but I don't want you to go into coaster mode).
I think you misread something I "comment"ed earlier and you've made it unintentionally hilarious for me. I said something like summer colds in Nova Scotia are a B*tch. Meaning , excuse me here but I did try to disguise it, "bItch". ie. not nice.
And you've been on a bit of an Acadian DUTCH rant ever since.
I love the Dutch as much as anyone, and I didn't want you or any of your readers to think otherwise. Go Dutch! Although I'm not sure if they have made many significant contributions to the international world of fine cuisine. I mean, besides that salty black licorice.
Hope your Deutsch cold is better.
keep 'er comin'
marko, you didn't answer the question. Come clean, you are a spy for billy grahame, aren't you?
The nature of God, Jesus, the Devil, Heaven and Hell are all unknowable.
For that matter, what is life itself, the soul or consciousness -- unknown and unknowable, though theories abound.
OK, the nature of all that lives, from Man down to microbe, is unknowable, and God's nature by definition is beyond comprehension -- how about the material world? Apparently Matter is either made up of tiny particle-waves or wave-particles, or perhaps probability functions, or is it tiny strings of folded 11-or-22-dimensional space-time? And time and space are just axes on a big squishy four-dimensional doughnut, none of which existed before the Big Bang. Although something apparently did, there was no 'when' or 'where' for it to exist in.
...that's this season's theory, anyway.
Does that make any real sense? No, not to me either, not even to the people who devised these theories.
So, given that the _deepest_ nature of _anything_ is so infinitely complex as to be unknowable, is it so terrible that some people use a set of approximations and models that are a little bit simpler than you or I?
The True Vine, the Good Shepherd, The forgiving Father, the Bread of Life, The Word -- in modern terms, these are models. The human mind can't actually accept the raw data they describe. But they fit the facts.
When a model fits the facts, we accept it, and build on it. And look how far we've come!
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