ohmigod. religion and christianity. what an unsexy topic. (though, i should add here, not as completely unsexy as vin diesel is in TripleX. we saw that last night. the worst movie of 2002, though i haven't seen country bear jamboree yet, so the voting could change. the overwhelming question was, after mourning the money shelled out to watch this waste of two hours, "does he kiss like a guppy or was i just sitting at a bad angle to the screen?").
macker is a friend i made at daveworld. we don't agree on much. for instance, he thinks he makes sense when he starts sentences with phrases like "would that i...". but for the most part we kinda like each other. sometimes he thinks that i don't play nice with others. sometimes he is right.
macker is a born-again, promise-keepin', right-winged, pipsqueakskie from poughkeepsie. (say it three times fast, it's fun. and accurate.). and now, going into non-pokin-fun mode, i believe it really bothers him that people don't see The Light. The Truth. And even more, i think it saddens his heart when he meets people who have fallen away from The Church. cuz that implies that The Church or Its People has let these wayfarers down.
i think this bothers a lot of christians. i had a four-hour heated debate with someone pushing bible-study on a college campus once, now ten or eleven years ago. i said i used to be born again. he said "there's no such thing. obviously you never were born again to begin with." because how else can current bornagainers explain that someone who's seen The Light and heard The Word and walked The Path has later flat-out rejected it as The Way? this becomes The Question. (heh).
last week on his pray naked blog, macker wrote the following: the most startling conclusion I have come to in this process is that, 2000 years after Christ's return to heaven, we still don't have it together as Christians. the whole lot of us. the fact that I was willing to attack a brother or sister in Christ because I was offended is proof positive I haven't arrived any more than they have. and if we continue to be willing to shoot someone in the foot over the minutiae of life, we have lost all credibility with people in need of a Savior. it's no wonder people like mary, marya and deanna, having once been burned, have no more use for the church; we're too busy hating the sin to love the sinner.
minus the savior bit, this is very buddhist of macker. his insight is on, but i believe his conclusion is wrong.
for instance, if man is born of sin and cannot help himself but be a sinner and muddled and clumsy and all the other things that man is, we -- humans -- are never going to have it together.
secondly, of course macker hasn't arrived farther than anyone else. please see previous paragraph.
thirdly. i'm going to stretch and use credibility in the same sense as credentials, not as in in trustworthy. and in this sense credibility is widely and wildly overrated. fuck credibility. the minute you start trying to have credibility to win someone over is the minute you have lost. credibility is nothing more than creating something to make us seem better to ourselves. there are plenty of people with no credentials who are brimming with more insight, more originality, more talent. credibility becomes the emperor's clothes.
finally, assuming that the congregation has burned people and that is why they leave the church is an oversimplification. okay. granted. there are probably more than a handful of people who have been burned by members of a congregation and have decided to leave.
but my point is that macker is not allowing himself to truthfully look for the answer to The Question, outlined above: how can current bornagainers explain that someone who's seen The Light and heard The Word and walked The Path has later flat-out rejected it as The Way?
here is what i posted to macker's blog:
1. i'd like to go on record to say that it was not the 'sinner' that turned me away from the church but that retched misogynist and homophobe, paul himself. take him outta the book and then we can start talkin' again (okay, not really). seriously. paul sucks. and he's turned a lot of people away from the church.
okay. that is harsh, but is my story, which i might tell some time.
2. one more thought about macker correlating christians turning other christians away from the church. there is probably some truth there, though i think it is more some christians being so obnoxious that they keep people away from ever getting to the church at all.
macker, you are not like that. i have really enjoyed our conversations throughout the last few years.
but going back to hating the sinner, etc... you have to realize that these same obnoxious people make up every part of our lives. there is the obnoxious co-worker that makes you want to quit your job. the obnoxious front-desk receptionist at the doctor's office that makes you want to switch to a different gp and on and on and on.
i quickly found out that there are difficult people as buddhists too. and here i thought buddhism was supposed to be all about love and compassion and boddhichitta and being boddhisattvas, etc etc.
but really what you have, same as in church, is a group of people just trying to deal with their shit. you have a group of people looking for tools to help them be better people. to help the see the bigger picture, to help them understand the mysteries that surround us.
so what it comes down to is tools. what tools do you need? what tools will help you build something meaningful that you can stand behind (or in front of or under or on top of) that allow you to see some truth.
for a long while, 10 years to be exact, i found my toolbox filled with christian tools. and then i found out that those tools just didn't work anymore. and i cried for a long time, mourning the loss of the toolbox that i had loved and had taken such care of.
and then (after many years) i found new tools. and these tools look a lot like the other tools i had: they support love (which is the basis of christianity which i think so many christians lose sight of); they support compassion; they support helping others; and most importantly, they support me being easier on myself -- treating myself with love and giving myself a break. and that was the one tool i just never found in christianity.
instead i think you find the berate yourself tool, the judge others tool, the tool of you're-a -sinner-sucker; or the even worse-all-powerful tool known as if-you-were-a-better-christian-maybe-you-wouldn't-be-such-an-embarrasing-sinner.
man, i can't tell you how great it is not to have that tool in the toolbox anymore.
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