Category Archives: Non-Christian attitudes

Stupid Christians

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So, mostly, I’ve grown accustomed to people making blanket statements about how Christians are basically stupid.

That is, if you are strong in your belief or faith  you have automatically abandoned all ability to think logically, think critically, question authority, or have any objective opinion worth hearing.

My latest reminder of that is in a comment under the “Christian Sans” post at Deus Ex Malcontent, part of which comment goes:

I only think it is pathetically sad that religious people can only think in terms of right and wrong according to their God of choice, and not in terms of “Okay, how or why does this person do or think this?” Religion gets in the way of objective thought, period. There is no question in my mind that anyone who professes to me to be highly religious is also highly retarded and sheep-like in their morality and almost undoubtedly opinionated to the point of absolute frustration.

I know the commenter didn’t really call out Christians specifically, but really, that’s the group that mostly gets called out on stupidity via faith. Next up on the list to get slammed are the Muslims, but because of concerns about racial and ethnic slurs, liberal and progressive folk (I consider myself fairly liberal and progressive by the way, despite my total faith in God the Father and Jesus the Lord) don’t pick on them as much. I have yet to really hear anyone slam Jews for lacking the ability to think, except from time to time when truly conservative Jews or Israel’s policies come up. Scientologists get slammed too, but that isn’t really a religion…it’s a cultish L. Ron Hubbard fan club. And as yet, I have heard zero comment about lack of intelligence among Buddhists, Wiccans (or other Pagans), Hindus, etc.

Anyway, my point isn’t to rant about how this irritates me, partly because it irritates me less than it used to, if only because I’m developing thicker emotional calluses.

My point is that I think when people slam the intelligence of religious folks, they miss the point. Generally speaking, there are many intelligent and thoughtful people with strongly held religious beliefs. Yes, even Christians. The problem isn’t with people who put their faith in Jesus…or Allah…or Whomever. The problem is with people who blindly follow a religious leader or religious institution. It’s generally organizations and leaders who put wrongheaded thoughts into people’s heads in a way that makes them really stick.

You see, I don’t put my faith in an institution. Nor even a specific denomination. At various times in my life, I’ve been Catholic, Baptist, Congregational and totally non-denominational. That’s because I go to a church to get community and to get my soul feed through the hearing of the Word of God, not to join a damn club. It’s being around people with some common touchpoints and it’s about getting a little edification. When a pastor or institution makes me feel unwelcome, when it starts creating its own special dogma or rules for people to follow aside from God’s, or when it just gets boring or silly or rude, I leave. I find a new church home.

My loyalty isn’t to a pastor or a physical church. My loyalty is to The Church, with a capital “c.” The one that God wanted established through Jesus. Now, keeping my eye on what Jesus taught and told us to do, and filtering that through most of what the New Testament writers shared…well, I can do pretty damn well being accepting of all sorts of people and holding all sorts of opinions and even having many intelligent thoughts about the world.

I don’t base my politics on my religious beliefs. I don’t base my science on the Book of Genesis. I don’t pick and choose whom I will befriend based on whether they believe what I believe.

And I know that I’m not alone in this. It may be that many Christians allow themselves to be sheeple. But at the same time, so do many people in general. They blindly follow their political leaders or their nation without a care in the world. They follow shopping trends or rack up their debt or buy shit that Sarah Jessica Parker wears…because they are often sheeple.

People in general have an aversion to deep reflection and critical thinking. And objective thinking in its truest form is pretty fucking rare. Most people don’t want to lead or dance to their own drumbeat. They want to be led.

That, my friends, is the problem. Not religion. Because while there are many deep-thinking atheists and agnostics, there are also plenty of them who are just as slavishly stupid as Christians are made out to be. They just choose entirely different ways to express it.

If God Came Down…

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I’m going to say something that might strike a lot of you as silly.

If God came down and showed His power and said, “I am God, and by the way, yes, Jesus is my son”…well, I don’t think everyone (perhaps not even the majority of folks) would start believing in God or the way of Christianity.

Mind you, if Vishnu came down or Zeus or Buddha or anyone else, I think they wouldn’t get as much respect as you’d think, either.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit as people have chided me in believing in a God who won’t show Himself more obviously. I also read a very interesting novel recently called The Gargoyle, by Andrew Davidson, and the main character in it, who’s more than a bit of a doubter, writes at one point, something to the effect of: “Just one flaming cross in the sky that everyone can see at the same time. That’s all it would take.”

But that’s a lie, really.

Think about it. If a flaming cross appeared in the sky, would you assume it came from God? Even if there was a booming voice saying, “Respect this cross, for on it my one begotten son died for your sins”? Or, would you be one of the people who claims it’s some sort of prelude to an alien invasion, and that aliens created religion as a way to come back and wield power over us with minimal resistance?

Or might you be someone who would claim that some government or coalition of governments seeking to institutionalize religious precepts had made the cross and voice appear with some hitherto hush-hush technology created in Area 51?

Or might you think you had lost your mind and were hallucinating or in a coma or something, and everyone around you who saw this was just part of your imagination, too?

Or, hey, God Himself steps out of the clouds, not just some fiery lightshow. You might use one of the theories above, or maybe you’d say, “Shit, some numbnut was born with the ability to reshape reality, and now we have a crazy mutant near-omnipotent nutjob who thinks he’s God almighty.”

These are not silly notions; that humans would doubt so much even then. Many people don’t like the idea of a God in Heaven. They will not accept that idea no matter how hard you hit them over the heads. Some people don’t want to have a God in Heaven, and even if they are made to believe He exists, those people may quite well reject Him because they don’t like His way of doing things.

So, in the end, even if burning crosses appear in the sky, well…I think we’re mostly left with faith.

Superstition, Insanity and Faith

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With Friday the 13th coming up tomorrow…oh, that unlucky day…I thought I’d wax philosophical on superstition vs. faith.

Fearing that bad luck will befall you because you walked under a ladder is superstition. Leaving food out for the fairies so that they won’t do mischief in your house is superstition. Keeping a rabbit’s foot in your pocket is superstition.

Hell, I’ll even grant you (despite my Christian faith) that praying for something and expecting to get what you want is superstition. (God isn’t a cosmic ATM).

Faith in any religion or belief in a god (or God Himself) is not superstition. Maybe it is if you’re looking to explain love as being some god firing an arrow in your ass or the movement of the sun as being due to some dude’s invisible chariot. But a belief in a higher power is not superstition.

In fact, I find it no more ludicrous than believing that the whole universe just spontaneously popped out of nowhere, which is what a lot of people seem to believe. Or that it was a pre-existing compressed ball of matter/energy that suddenly exploded. Because the fact is that believing the universe is some random unguided thing that has always existed in some form is just as wacky as believing there is an entity (or are entities) that shaped it and perhaps guide it on some higher level.

So, with that, I respectfully request that anyone who has been baiting Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or anyone else with the “I can’t believe you buy into that superstitious nonsense” line please stop. You can disagree with faith, but please stop lumping it in with superstition. I wish some of you would stop with the “delusional” tag as well, because I know that I’m well aware of reality, the laws of physics and the need to function in the world around me.

As for the Scientologists, who maintain a huge, cultish church around the writings of a bad science fiction author?

Well, they’re just fucking insane.

Taking the Leap

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No surprise to regular readers that I have semi-regular discussions with atheists and agnostics on this blog and at others. I don’t try to covert them, because I’m not clinically insane nor masochistic, but I think it’s great to make sure we all understand each other. Much better than one side calling the other a bunch of superstitious idiots, while the other side is calling them narrow-minded secularists.

In fact, TitforTat and The Word of Me have probably been my most frequent foils lately (and I mean that in the nicest recreational fencing/dueling way possible). In terms of longer dialogs, though, TWOM had a conversation with me here with regard to a Mrs. Blue post here, and I’m trading thoughts with him over at one of his postsover at his blog right now.

It’s good stuff, and I like the conversations. As long as no one gets to calling me an out-of-touch looney-toon, all’s good (that hasn’t happened often, and most of those people I don’t even try to engage again). But I have been thinking a lot lately about what divides a spiritual believer from a non-believer, and it strikes me that as much as we intellectually can appreciate each other, it is hard to truly explain ourselves to each other. For both sides, it seems self-evident that our position is the correct one, and it troubles us on some level that the other side hasn’t broken through to our way of thinking.

This struck me in particular when TWOM recently posted in one of his comments something to the effect of “I’ve read the Bible and I’ve tried to understand it and believe.” I’m probably misquoting him a bit, but that was the gist as I recall. And it’s been said to me before by other agnostics and atheists that they have tried to read the Bible with an open mind and “just don’t get it.”

And this is precisely where the rubber meets the road: Faith vs. concrete facts. Intellect vs. surrender.

This is not to say that the faithful lack intellect nor that the doubters and atheists lack any kind of “spiritual” or moral core. Far from it. But here is the best example I can come up with as a person of faith:

Imagine a person who decides to go skydiving. There are a few likely scenarios.

She completely freaks out with fear and doesn’t go to the skydiving takeoff point at all. This would analogous, I believe, to someone who says “Yes, I’ll consider your points and/or read that Bible thing” but never really tries.

She goes to the site, freaks out, and just cannot get on the plane, or she gets on the plane but cannot get herself out of that seat until it lands again. She never jumps, but she at least went to where it would all start. I liken this to the person who does give some consideration to it, but never really turns off the literal/concrete parts of their brain. I mean, I personally enjoy and respect (and use) critical thinking, but you cannot think your way to faith.

She makes it to the door of the plane while it is in midair, but she cannot make the jump. She sees all that open sky beneath her and feels the excitement and fear in her gut. She has a visceral and emotional reaction, but making the leap is just too much. She goes back to her seat. Here we have a person who has managed to open their heart and might see a glimpse of what the faith believer sees, but on some level, the thought of letting go is too much. Whether because of fear that it might be true, and a desire not to find out and have to consider answering to a higher power, or whether fear that faith will lessen them somehow; reduce their intellect or spin them too far away from provable reality perhaps.

She jumps out of the plane and goes for the ride. This would be the person who does make the leap from purely temporal and rational thought to faith. It is a wild and scary ride sometimes, and the person might regret it in some ways. The person might even decide one day to reverse course and deny that faith she tasted or decide not to embrace it fully, but the leap was indeed made, whether for a short time or a lifetime.

None of this is to suggest that atheists or agnostics are cowards. Fear isn’t altogether a bad thing. And they, in turn, could accuse someone of me of being fearful of considering that there isn’t anything beyond this life; that there isn’t any intelligence guiding the universe. They would argue that I am afraid to let go of a comfortable superstition.

Myself, I don’t feel fear at the possibility there might not be a God. I have considered it. Hell, I spent most of my life ignoring spiritual things and the church and might as well have been an agnostic or even atheist, despite having been a baptized Catholic who occasionally went to church. I still find myself at a crossroads at times when I ask, “Am I spiritually delusional?” In the end analysis, having made the leap and feeling the swell of my spirit and sensing things beyond the physical and intellectual, I simply cannot conceive of there not being a God.

It is, to me, as clear and as unassailable as the existence of gravity. That doesn’t mean I don’t doubt some of the specifics of the Bible or wonder if my spiritual path is the right one. But for me, taking the leap wasn’t simply a transient thing. I live in a world where God exists, and I can no more deny Him than I can deny myself.

Happy President’s Day

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I didn’t feel much like having a Happy Valentine’s Day post since the only two valentine recipients I truly have any investment in are Mrs. Blue and Little Girl Blue. Both would rather have the Valentine’s sentiments straight from me rather than on my blog. (Plus, the latter of the two can’t read yet.)

But hey, on President’s Day, and me spouting off on religious stuff so often…

…Did you know that many of our Founding Fathers (whether they made it to the Oval Office or not) were either full-out Deists or had Deist tendencies. I find this interesting considering how often certain classes of folks insist this nation was founded as a Christian one.

Anyway, for a little on Deism and how it differs from Christianity (though some Deists maintained they were essentially Christian even if they denied things like miracles and revelation and prophecy in the Bible), click here.

Yeah, I know Wikipedia isn’t always the best source of information for a variety of reasons, but this article looks pretty solid.

And for some added fun, a Web page that maintains the Founding Fathers were Deists (here) and one that says that notion is a bunch of crap (here).

Yeah, I know, this is a lazy post today. I’ll try to get something cooler up later today or tonight if I can.

In the “In” Crowd, Part 1

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angel-of-light1Once again, posting far later than I like, but it was a busy day.

It’s been suggested to me a couple times that I post on the subject of why everybody’s so down on Christians because they believe their way is the only way.

This won’t be long, so consider it a prelude to a longer rant/diabtribe/discussion.

At another blog I frequent, in the comments to a recent post, someone mentioned that 4 billion people on this planet or thereabouts don’t follow Christianity, with the suggestion (or so it seemed) that this was somehow evidence that belief in the Judeo-Christian God and in Jesus was wrong.

As one Christian pointed out quietly, why does the fact that 4 billion people believe something else mean he shouldn’t believe what he believes?

And it’s a valid point, for a number of reasons, but mostly because those 4 billion people don’t all believe in the same thing. Sure, a lot of agnostics and most of  the atheists will argue that’s virtual proof that nobody is right, but that’s a line of discussion I’ll tackle another time. The point is, they all think they are right, too, and they believe in a multitude of things.

But I don’t really hear people complaining that the Jews believe they are right or that the Hindus believe they are right or that the Shinto folks believe they are right or that the pagans believe they are right or anything else.

Occasionally, someone grumbles about the fact that the Muslims think they are right, but usually only when some militant offshoot goes on a murderous jihad or something.

Mostly though, they complain that the Christians think they are right, and they turn this into some kind of indictment that Christians are evil, closed-minded, hateful individuals.

Put in that context, doesn’t seem so fair, does it?

I’m sure someone will now mutter (or decide that they should type in my comments) that “Sure, that might be the case, but how often do those other religions go out and try to convert people?”

Well, first of all, at the core of Jesus’ commands to us as his followers, we are to spread the gospel. Thus, evangelism is part of our religion and thus our faith walk.

But more to the point, really, when was the last time a Christian proselytized to you? Really. Not that often for most of us. Sure, we run into the periodic person handing out leaflets about the ways to avoid Hell or somesuch, but the fact is, the vast majority of Christians hardly evangelize at all. They should be, in some way, even if it’s low-key, but they don’t.

So, I guess my point to those of you who hate Christians thinking that they are right: What’s the effing problem?

More ranting on the topic in a day or two, probably.

I Don’t Have a Problem

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I see a common argument among people who dislike evangelism or dislike Christianity in general, and it goes like this: I don’t need to be saved. I don’t want to be saved. I’m insulted that you even think I need to be saved (even if you don’t say so). Stop trying to act like you have any clue how to save my ass that didn’t need saving to begin with.

OK, fair enough. But then again, I’ve never been the kind of person who gets into your face and says, “You need the saving blood of Christ.” Yes, that is what I believe, but I’m not into confrontational encounters where I try to browbeat a person into choosing Jesus.

And before anyone starts, this blog doesn’t count as being in your face. You don’t have to come here and you can leave here any time you like. I haven’t trapped you in a corner or pounced on you at the office trying to proselytize to you. This blog is here for me to muse about spiritual matters, to share my thoughts, to show people that Christians aren’t all from the same cookie cutter, to perhaps get people thinking about Christ, to expand my own thoughts, to entertain, to vent, and other such things.

I find it interesting that some folks here and there still seem to want to paint me as at least slightly judgmental because I believe in Hell. Believing in Hell doesn’t mean I feel warm and fuzzy about it or derive any kind of satisfaction out of anyone who does go there. It’s like saying I’m judgmental if I were to say that having prisons and courts is a necessary thing. Hell is the spiritual equivalent, like it or not. Or believe it or not. Don’t paint my opinions or my attitudes solely on a belief in Hell and judgment of souls. A slice of my beliefs doesn’t give you enough to go on about me. It would be like me judging a person’s intelligence based on the fact they like some empty headed pop music.

But, on to the point of today’s post, which was inspired by a post at another blog, Tit for Tat, titled  Are We So Bad We Need to Be Saved? It’s a short post, so I’ll just paste it below, but check in at Tit for Tat’s site using the link above anyway, because there will be comments to that post, most likely. Besides, you might find some interesting, edifying or entertaining stuff at other posts there. But here it is:

After several recent conversations, it got me thinking(again). Are we really such bad people that we need to be “Saved”. I mean ,like really, do the majority of us continually do crappy stuff to each other, everyday all day long? I like to think that my fellow Human has just as many Good moments as they do bad, and if that is the case then why do many Christians feel the need to see themselves as inherently bad? Im wondering fellow bloggers, do you see yourselves as inherently bad or good?

His general point is a good one to ponder. Are we really so bad? But I would submit that it isn’t so much about being good or evil. It’s easy to couch sin in terms of good vs. evil but that isn’t necessarily always the best way. It has its places and uses, but sin and salvation are a lot more complex than that, which is why I rely on metaphors and analogies a lot around here.

And yes, I’m about to do so again.

Let’s look at sin and damnation/salvation and sinning/being saved from a different angle. Not whether we seek to be good or embrace unfettered badness. Not whether we see ourselves on the side of light or darkness. Not whether we believe in God or not. Let’s consider the alcoholic instead, as a stand-in for the sinner.

Alcoholics comes in all sizes and shapes and types. Some get violent, some get silly, some get unconscious, others get all sorts of other ways. You have constant drinkers on one end of the spectrum and binge drinkers at the other. An alcoholic may drink to excessiveness, or may simply drink constantly at a very low level.

Alcoholism causes problems. It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as killing someone while driving drunk. It doesn’t have to be hitting a spouse or child while under the influence. It can be as simple as wasting family money on too much drink and hurting your household in that manner. It can be the fact that your little buzz every night when you come home from work to unwind is robbing you of opportunities to bond with your family. It could be the slow destruction of your liver. But the fact is that an alcoholic chooses to drink, despite doing so to his or her own detriment and sometimes also the detriment of others.

But what all alcoholics share is a problem. It is in part a sickness and in part a choice. And it can only be solved when the person admits that he or she has a problem.

Sin and damnation are very similar.

We all sin. Even born again folks are sinners. They are simply like alcoholics on the wagon. No alcoholic ever stops being one. In fact, in terms of sin, people are worse than alcoholics because even those who “take the cure” will in almost 100% of cases still sample sinful ways, whereas a committed alcoholic in recovery might never again touch a drop of liquor.

The problem of sin isn’t so much being evil. It’s a matter of whether we recognize we have a problem and seek the solution to that problem. That’s the crux of Christianity.

Sin is a departure from God’s plan and it causes us to separate ourselves from His grace. It is the admission that we are sinners that puts us on a road to getting back in connection with God.

Just like alcoholics, there are sinners aplenty who will maintain that they don’t have a problem. They don’t need help. They are mostly good. They can quit being separated from the divine any time they want. It’s not just atheists or agnostics who do this. It isn’t even people who believe in other religions. There are so-called Christians who do the same thing.

But they do have a problem, even if they don’t admit it. All of them. All of us. The reason the Gospel is there is to provide a mirror for those people to look at and, hopefully, see the problem, desire to solve the problem, and take the cure. That cure would be Jesus.

Just like an alcoholic being confronted with their problem and getting help. What is the reason they should seek recovery? Not because they are browbeat into doing so. Not because the law tells them to or else. Not for any other reason than this: They have chosen to do so, and want to do so.

Two-fer Tuesday: Imagining God by Deacon Blue

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michelangelo-creation-adamI like to use metaphors and analogy a lot when I try to frame God’s actions and the teachings of the Bible. The reason is pretty simple: God is a complex guy.

Now, many of you might tell me that’s the understatement of the ages, but I really think God’s complexity is lost on a lot of people, whether Christian or not.

So, when I use an analogy to compare God’s actions to those of a parent, it’s a good example in one sense, because God is our Father, and Jesus reinforced that that not only was He our father, but even more intimately, our daddy (hence his use of the term Abba in reference to God at various times). On the other hand, it’s a simplistic example, because it isn’t simply a parental role He plays.

God’s relationship to us is also that of Lord and subject. Creator and created. Judge and defendant. And so many others.

You could view this post as a follow-up to my The Eternal Question post yesterday, I suppose, because once again, I’m about to delve into the eternal nature of God and how that affects everything. Because the fact is that God is all-powerful and eternal. To try to pin Him down to one kind of role is impossible. To psychoanalyze Him is pure folly. To expect Him to behave as we expect people around us to behave is ridiculous.

We can intellectually examine various aspects of God. We can accept on faith many of God’s seemingly contradictory character traits. But we are never going to understand Him as long as we are trapped by our human perceptions and preconceptions. Our minds and our senses are not equipped to fully grasp an eternal being with ultimate power.

Fact is, not only is God infinite in His abilities, he is infinitely complex.

The Eternal Question

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eye_of_godWhen questioning the judgment, sanity and/or intelligence of Christians, the array of potential critics (atheists, agnostics and religious non-Christians) have several tried-and-true avenues of argument they can fall back on. Two of the of the better ones, of course, are to simply argue the silliness of the concept of an all-powerful “invisible man in the sky” or to argue that we as humans couldn’t possibly have enough grasp on reality to know the true path of the spiritual, since too many people disagree.

Not going to argue either of those today. Instead, I’m going to go for what I consider to be the second-runner up of all-time fallback arguments against Christianity:

If your God is so freaking kind and merciful and loving and wonderful, why did He do [insert controversial God-sanctioned activity documented in the Bible here], how could He be permit [insert current or past person of questionable moral character here] to live, and how could He allow [insert the most heinous, mind-rending scenario you are aware of or could imagine here] to occur?

Well, before I respond, I would like you to suspend your possible disbelief in an infinitely powerful, eternal being. Really. I mean, you were smart enough to come up with arguments against God or my particular model of God, so I know you can conceptualize an all-powerful entity. OK, cool. Got that  disbelief suspended? Great. We’ll get to that in a moment, right after I ask you a counter-question to the one above.

If you were told that you were about to be subjected to the most intense agony the human mind could experience without shattering entirely, that said pain would last approximately one second, and you would receive several billion dollars for going through the process, what would you do?

Accept the deal, of course. And if you don’t, you’re an idiot.

Which brings me to my point. God is dealing in eternity. Infinity. All the time in the universe and then some.

As horrible as anything that has happened or will happen might be, it is a tiny moment in time compared to eternity. So tiny as to be even less significant than that one second of unbelievable agony I mentioned. God is operating on a framework wherein your end reward is unending and better than anything you can imagine. In this context, there is no atrocity, no event and no disaster that could even come close to denting that. No suffering that Earth, people and Satan subjects us to compares to what God offers us.

Yeah, I know. A lot of you are going to say, “But Deac, by your own admissions in this blog, not everyone is getting that nice reward at the end. So they get shit on Earth and then eternally shittier shit after that. Yay for them, huh?”

Indeed, I believe in Hell and I believe in damnation. I also believe that the only people who are going to get that bitter end are going to be the hardheaded morons who will refuse to acknowledge their sin and their failure to be what they should have been in terms of following God’s word. The damned will be the people who didn’t get it on Earth, refuse to get the message in Hell, and decide that God is a flipping dipshit that they don’t want to spend eternity with anyway because as far as they’re concerned, they didn’t do anything wrong. Those folks get whatever crap they had on Earth, whatever crap they got in Hell, and will move on the Lake of Fire when God wraps up affairs here on this planet and have eternal separation from the good stuff. And frankly they’ll deserve it for being such egocentric self-satisfied remorseless morons, and yes, there will be plenty of souls who take that route, in my opinion.

I don’t believe that God relishes any of our suffering. I think it pains Him greatly. But you know, it pains me to deny my kids something they really want or to punish them in some way. But I do those things because in the end, I’m trying to do the right things for them to grow, and I know that compared to the spans of their lives, God willing that they live long ones, whatever pain they experienced will be a minor thing compared to what they take with them into their maturity.

Can’t Win For Losing

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offended-angryMaybe it’s the lack of sleep over the past few days and I’m feeling a little touchy.

But can someone tell me what I said, in my first comment to this blog post, if anything, to invite a thorough critique of the idea of raising my children with my religion?

I thought it was nice and simple. In my first (and what I intended to be my only) comment, I sympathized with the author’s opinion, noted that I thought it was impractical to think a parent wouldn’t raise children with dearly-held values and beliefs, and then added that I thought it would be shitty to shut that child out later on if they reject those values and views.

And then I get a comment saying, this post was about “religion” not “values,” thus prompting what I felt was a need to clarify my position and the fact it didn’t matter what term you used, which prompted at least two comments that are aimed at me and (a) the supposed ridiculousness of adding religion to the pile of things I pass down to my kid and (b) suggesting that I said people without religion have no values or weaker values.

All too often, Christians get panned for being “holy rollers” and getting all judgmental. I defend the drive to pass down religion and focus on the need to love and embrace your child even if they reject those values, and I still catch shit.

If anyone non-Christian out there wonders why sometimes Christians feel a bit persecuted even though this is still a largely Christian nation, that is why. It gets tiresome to gently mention my faith and be supportive of dissenting beliefs and encourage that we love everyone, and still get painted as being closed-minded and shallow and supersitious.

Yes, I’m ranting. And if you see this, Votar, I still love you, man (in the platonic, I-only-know-you-online-anyway kind of way). But shit, I wasn’t aiming to debate religion, just encourage acceptance of different parenting styles with regard to religion and urging that we cannot reject our kids if they do choose to reject our values.