Faith or Folly

     I just watched "Surprised by Oxford". There was a time in my life where a story of a religious boy saving himself for marriage looking for a girl who was doing the same would have been everything I wanted from a movie. Now, as an adult, watching a movie about a girl losing her dreams of a doctorate to become a religious christian and fall for a boy who "knows" more about God, causes me to roll my eyes. 

    I have lived the way that you're "supposed" to live. And the more I read the less I agreed and the less I agreed, the harder its been for me to hold on to my faith. People who are convicted into faith and belief in God have a lot in common with people who grew up in it and leave it. They are both unsatisfied with the meaning we are told to find in life. We are frustrated about the ways you're supposed to pursue it. And we turn from what we have known to something new at some point. 

    Construction and deconstruction are the same at their core. It's just people living meaninglessly finding meaning in nothing. There is no point, we all die. We all end up returning to the earth. One promises life after death. One promises eternal rest. Both can't be proven and neither have witnesses. Black nothingness, or everything forever with no connection to anything of the earth. 

    You aren't married in heaven. You aren't related to your family. There is an argument for whether those who never heard the story of Jesus's sacrifice never being in heaven. So the babies we've lost before conversation, tribes in the middle of nowhere... cavemen who lived hundreds of thousands of years before Jesus was even born... None of them will be there. Break a rule and you're not allowed.

    He could be bigger than that. He could want more of us than we as "Christians" ever give welcome or acceptance to, and I want to believe in that version of spirituality. But Religion hangs around me like a toxic ex. I don't want to be associated with the tribalism, hatred, and bigotry of anyone who claims to be Christian. 

    Life giving faith, like the faith of Bob Goff or C.S. Lewis, to live whimsically and joyously outside of society's norms. To give so generously there is nothing left but pure love and acceptance, That makes sense to me. I don't know anyone personally that does that. And I don't know that I could either. It's scary to force yourself out of the norm and pursue a life of absolute service. Most Christians don't. So how can we see ourselves as Christ-Like? It's just hypocrisy and self-congratulations that you live in the time and place that HAPPENED to end up with you being religious.