Just so you don't think I'm blindly disagreeing with you out of sheer trolling willfulness,
When you open the door that some people use faith to cover their ethical shortcomings, the world is a scarier, more complicated place.
I do think that this is an excellent point, and have always taken issue with the way that people do this, even as a child.
I was raised in the Baptist church. Fundamentalist in every sense of the word. I grew up surrounded by VHS tapes on the impending Rapture and Hal Lindsay books. My Biblical literacy is incredible, because in Sunday school, we didn't sing "Faith Like A Mustard Seed" or "Jesus Loves Me," we learned, over Kool-Aid that seems more than a little Jonestownian in retrospect, about how Job scraped at his boils with shards of broken clay.
When I was eight, I was in a musical called Sing for Jesus. I really wanted to sing for Jesus. I wanted to belt it right in the front row. Unfortunately, the children's choir director had other plans. She told me that I had to go to the back because I was too tall. This bit of misandry wasn't to sway me, though, and I was adamant: I am staying right here in the front. She told me if I didn't get to the back, then I was out of the musical. I stood firm, and she followed through. That night I had a nightmare I still remember vividly, of a scaled hand reaching up through the floor to grab me by the throat, dragging me from where I sat, crosslegged watching Teddy Ruxpin, into what I was sure was the depths of hell. I awoke crying, and my mother told me that the dream was about Satan, who was here with us right now, and had made me act the way that I had earlier, in the church.
Thankfully, my parents weren't total zombies, and I was exposed to the much more moderate Baha'i faith through our family's closest friends. I loved the way Baha'i did not condemn to hell practitioners of other faiths. In fact, it respected their paths as equivalent to their own. Eventually, mom and dad left the church when they wanted to drink a little champagne on their anniversary. The pastor said no, and they immediately pointed out that Jesus' first miracle was turning water into wine. When the pastor responded by assuring them that that was non-alcoholic wine, they knew that their time in the church was coming to a close.
Me, I think that that time in the church, my entire childhood, was essential for my development. I sloughed off everything negative that they taught me, and today, a parent, I believe firmly that telling children that they are going to hell is child abuse. But if it weren't for those experiences, I would not be who I am today. Back to your quote, I look back on that church as a group of people looking for something bigger than themselves, but led by and surrounded by imbeciles,driven deeper into their own dissatisfaction and hypocrisy as a result. I don't blame them for it. And maybe that's why I tend to be very forgiving of people who are caught up in an evangelical fervour, because it becomes who you are, for a while anyway. It gives you nightmares.
But, I was always annoyed by some Christians' insistence that faith is more important than works, and that Jesus will forgive them for whatever evil they commit. People don't just use faith to
compensate for their ethical shortcomings, they use it to cover them up,
deliberately. Today I am all over the map, spiritually, in the main, converting to Reform Judaism, because it's what speaks to me. But wherever my heart takes me I have no delusion that the fact that I am a person of faith is enough.
So that's why I don't eat tuna! LOL
