Studying your friends?
The Redheaded Skeptic just wrote about “Best Friends?” where she asks an important question: Why do certain conservative Christians have this idea that you have to have formal academic degrees in order to really understand God or Jesus?
Indeed.
If fully understanding the message of God depends on doctoral level classes explaining language and culture, doesn’t that kind of diminish the message?
And if only those with theological training can really understand God, it means all these other people don’t really have a relationship with God, but have a second-hand experience filtered through preachers. A real friendship, like any other relationship, requires active participation of both parties. This is impossible with Christians and their ‘best friend’, because their best friend is a figment of their imagination, fed and stoked by reading about God, but not really having any contact or interaction with God directly.
What? You say you have a relationship with God? You’re a liar, straight up. The God you claim to know is not the same as the God other people know. Not the other people in your church. Not the other people in your religion. And definitely not the people in other religions. You’re all just making it up inside your own heads. You read your sacred texts and invent your own Gods in your own ways. That’s how it has always been, and you cannot prove otherwise because it cannot be otherwise.
If there were a God, then everyone who actually experienced God would have similar testimonies. This is not the case, clearly.
So, when you tell me about your friend Jesus, you are telling me about your imaginary make-believe “friend”, not someone real.
I don’t have to read about my friends. I don’t have to study about them in some book in order to build a relationship with them. I go meet them directly. We go out together. We actually talk. And if someone is standing nearby, they can verify the conversation — both sides of it. That’s real. Your talks with Jesus are not real; when you talk to Jesus or pray to God, you are merely talking to yourself. You need to get over it, and wake up to the fact that the God you believe in simply does not exist, and never did.
Seeking God fills up empty lives.
January 11th, 2010 at 1:24 pmand finding God makes it emptier.
January 11th, 2010 at 2:14 pmPer Redheaded Skeptic’s question, people go to seminary to get the religious education they can’t get in church. Things like Greek, Hebrew, early church history, etc. The “second-hand” info that churches get from preachers is what the preachers learn at seminary.
January 12th, 2010 at 12:19 amBut it’s all just second-hand and IRRELEVANT to a “personal relationship”. It’s all just make-believe because there’s only one person in the relationship, playing with an imaginary friend.
January 12th, 2010 at 6:03 amActually, seeking God creates a sense of purpose for the masses who essentially have nothing worthwhile to do. The Earth has so many people that there’s no danger to the species overall, so what possible purpose could all these people have? They’re not creative in any meaningful way. They don’t understand logic or the scientific method. Of course, seeking God is a waste of time, since all they find is fantasy and myth, but it does keep their lives structured in such a way that they (mostly) don’t devolve into anarchy.
And for most people, the world seems so huge and out of their control (which it is) that they would have difficulty coping with the notion that there isn’t a unifying force, which they believe is God. To that end, I would say that most people believe in God because they’re afraid not to.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:00 pm@Richard: For nearly all the religious people I know, I would have to agree. I “didn’t-believe” for quite a while before being able to admit I didn’t believe. it took a while to move from hard-core fundagelical Christian through “spiritual-but-not-religious” to finally getting that all the religions and spiritual pathways are the exact same thing in different clothing. There really is no overarching unifying force; it’s just us trying to make the best of it.
But it’s funny. Instead of my world dissolving when I realized there is no God, my world became a lot more solid and manageable. No more irrational fears about invisible forces. I still can’t control the world, of course, but knowing that there aren’t unseen forces conspiring for my eternal soul makes it much more enjoyable and peace.
Contrary to what they say, there is a LOT more peace without God in my life.
January 13th, 2010 at 1:38 pm