I don't think Jesus said anything about passing laws to punish people who disagreed with him. Actually, I'm pretty sure that his entire message was about striving individually to be better people. I'm pretty sure he said to leave the judgment up to him. The old testament is pretty confusing with it's weird contradictory rules about what you can eat and the types of fabrics you could wear and how to properly stone your wife, but Jesus was pretty clear. He was all "be good to each other, and I'll take care of the naughty/nice list".
But aside from the Quakers and the UU- I don't see much of that attitude in Christianity.
I'm not unlearned about religion. Sure, I've never read the Koran so my knowledge of Islam is a bit lacking, and everything I know about Hinduism or Jainism or Shintoism is less than I know about quantum mechanics . But when I was little I went with my grandma to the Kingdom Hall. She was a Jehovah's Witness. Even as a little kid, I thought their rules were pretty dumb. Why wouldn't god want you to celebrate your birthday or play sports? But I got to wear shiny shoes and new dresses and go out to lunch afterwards.
I went to a baptist summer bible camp. It was cheap daycare while mom was working, and they had good snacks. But it still seemed pretty fake to me.
By the time I hit high school, I was in full religious experimentation mode. There was the summer I was a Buddhist. I still use the meditation stuff when i can't sleep, and I can sit still with my eyes closed and my breath slowed for 8 hours. But 15 year olds have social lives, and boys and friends and things to distract them. I figured my middle path involved less meditation and more keggers at the reservoir.
Not much later (16, 17 maybe) I discovered wicca. Ohhhhhhhh a religion where girls aren't considered 2nd class (true for Judeo-Christian faiths and Buddhism). But I am not a nature girl. Not even a little. And again, the ritual of the thing seemed so false, just like baptisms.
I toyed with the idea of Zoroastrianism. I like their funeral rituals. I seriously considered marrying a sikh, but their ideas of equality don't exactly translate into real life action.
What kept popping up is the idea that if you are good- if you say the right prayers (or spells) or believed the right way, then god or the universe or whatever would have your back. That good would come of believing the right way and there would be justice or fairness or something that came out of it. What also kept popping up was the way that women were treated as less than, in everything but wicca. I couldn't imagine how there could be any sort of supreme being who would automatically subject one half of the population to greater hardships just because of a piece of flesh.
And that's a big one, but it's not the biggest reason why I just don't buy it. I don't believe the world is just. I don't believe that people get what they deserve. I don't believe that some cosmic entity is up there balancing the scales. I don't believe in kharma. I think terrible people get away with horrible things all the time, while good people get punished for uncontrollable things like race or sex or class or physical ability or sexual preference. And I think that those who believe that you get what you deserve make the lives of those at the bottom worse.
I do believe in striving for a better, more just, world. I believe that if we are here for any reason, it's for that. It is to prove that we can do better for everyone. If there was any one philosophy I had to pick, religious or otherwise- I'd say I'm a Rawlsian. I believe people are more important than ideas. I believe it's easy, too easy, to kill for an idea, for a religion, for a belief, for a country. I see a lot of calls to killing in religion. I believe that you should never trust any group who puts their ideas above the welfare of actual people, whether that group is PETA or Operation Rescue.
But back to Jesus, since that seems to be the dominant flavor of religious types I get around here.
Jesus was cool. A dear friend of mine, a brilliant, beautiful, brainy gay man, once wrote a poem about how he and Jesus could totally hang out, if Jesus' followers weren't so hell-bent on stoning gay men to death. I see that, we've all seen it. The hypocrisy, the purposeful misreading of the bible, the claims to faith without any examination.
Jesus said some good stuff. The whole rich men/ eye of the needle stuff is good. It's not because having money is bad- it's because the actions required to get and keep money are sinful. You have to ignore the suffering of others to do it. The whole stone throwing thing- also good. But as we see with his followers, they aren't ready to put down their own stones yet. There are too many of us harlots for them, I suppose.
And it keeps getting repeated in comments around here- but "know them by their fruits" is one that Christians like to throw at others, but I haven't seen them using it on themselves much. I see a lot of hate, a lot of judgment, a lot of fake "god bless" coupled with embarrassingly bad logic. But not a lot of evaluating their own deeds for rottenness.
And then I go back to my days with Grandma at the Kingdom Hall. Now the women in my family may have a tendency to be bat-shit crazy, but also really damn smart. When I asked grandma why Witnesses didn't vote, she quoted the "render unto Caesar" line to me. She explained that law making and politicking had nothing to do with Jesus. He was the one and final judge and that making laws on earth was bad because Jesus already told us all how to act.
Now- I vote. But I'm not Christian. And i don't have a problem with Christians voting. But I do think it's hypocritical and wrong in the eyes of Jesus for Christians to try and force their views on everyone else through the law or the government. (Do they think they get bonus points or gold stars in heaven for most number of non-believers oppressed by the church?) And I think it's wrong in a Rawlsian sense to limit individual liberty to a specific religion.
And with that- I have to end my philosophical ramblings for the evening.
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