by Luther Reads
A few years ago, church goers openly mocked the non church goers who said, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." The church goers thought that phrase was an excuse to be lazy and stay home from church. But now the phrase isn't being ridiculed because so many people finally realize that churches are problematic for a lot of people.
More and more people see the deep flaws baked into the church hierarchy and structure, so much so that calling a Christian "religious" is like cursing them out. The rampant pettiness, cliquishness, legalism, and judgementalism among religious people has become too much. People backstabbing each other for positions, mismanagement of funds, abuse of power, misinterpretation of scripture, false spiritualism, etc, etc, and another etc. A thousand et ceteras, actually. Church folk be trippin!
A pastor friend of mine once defended this kind of behavior by saying that churches are still full of humans. He said, "People accept that kind of behavior at their job, but are shocked and disappointed to see it at church even though we're all still human." I thought the purpose of Christianity, and therefore church, is to make better humans out of us. So if church folk don't behave any better than the people at my job, I'd say that's a poor advertisement for attending church. But I digress.
Here's what I don't understand about the "spiritual" people, because many of them still read the Bible and pray to Jesus. Who do they think wrote the Bible? Who do they think compiled the Old and New Testament? Who do they think controlled the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jesus for thousands of years? The church! The religious people. The backstabbers, abusers, and misinterpretors. If the church's hierarchy is problematic now, then it was problematic back then. Ain't nothing changed. Jewish leadership compiled the Old Testament, and Catholic leadership compiled the New Testament.
"But God!" they say. Most Bible readers believe that God intervened in the development of scripture to keep it free from humanity's foolishness. Okay, so is God still doing that? Because I can write my own interpretation of the Bible, sell it on Amazon, and God won't stop me. The Quran and Book of Mormon are both attributed to God and he didn't stop them. Christians believe that free will was given to all humans, even the religious people who wrote and translated Bibles, and shaped the story of Jesus. Any biases, selfishness, and pettiness that they harbored went right into the Bible.
But don't take my word for it, read the book for yourself. From rampant chauvinism and patriarchy to the burning alive of non believers, it's all in there and it's quite messy. But above all else, it's predictably very human.
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About the Author:
Luther Reads has recently come to terms with the staying power of the Oxford comma.
