CONSIDERING THE UNCONSIDERABLE

4. May 2008 by Frank.

There are books in your average Christian bookstore that denounce your particular brand of Christianity.  They are written by scholars and preachers who belong to denominations other than yours and who do not share your doctrines.  Many of these books will flat out tell you that you are not saved.  Because you don’t believe the right things or if you do, you don’t believe them correctly.

I used to be terrified of these books because if they were correct, then my faith was a sham.  But I was also oddly compelled to look at these books because if they were correct I was a sham myself.  At the very least these books could cause doubt.  Doubt destroys faith.  Doubt stops your prayers.  Doubt breaks your fellowship with your god.  Doubt is the work of Satan.  Doubt is something no Christian of any denomimation can afford to indulge in.

Unfortunately for me I had doubts enough that I would consider these books even though they frightened my religious mindset.

I had doubts because I could quite clearly see that what the Bible talked about and what I saw in a variety of churches was not the same thing.  I had doubts because no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t avoid admitting prayer didn’t work as advertised.  I had doubts because the Bible contradicts itself.

But I rationalized them all away because the Bible is the inerrant word of God, it can’t possibly be wrong.  So everything I saw that said it was wrong had to be wrong.  I had to be wrong.  If there was a problem it had to be my fault, my lack of understanding.  It had to be my sin blinding me to the truth of the word.  That was what I had been taught so that was what I tried to do.

But what would happen if the Bible wasn’t the word of God?  What if you considered that just maybe it was just an old collection of stories told by generations of nomads?  What if you saw contradictions because they really were contradictions?  What if your prayers aren’t answered because there isn’t anyone to answer them or even because prayer makes no logical sense by its own definition?  What if the reason there’s a church on every corner that condemns the church on the other corner is because people flock together with people who have similar beliefs and prejudices and they only see what they want to see in the same book? 

Think about it.  How can a divinely inspired book - divinely inspired by the same Holy Spirit - be the source of hundreds if not thousands of denominations with doctrines that clearly deny, condemn, contradict, exclude, and outright refute all the others?  Where is the unity of the faith the Bible talks about?  Seriously, if there’s only one true god and only one inerrant, infallible word inspired by that god, how can any varied interpretations even exist?  How can churches in one community, both preaching the love of Jesus, take out ads on secular radio stations denouncing the way they worship at the other church?  How can people who call themselves Lutherans refuse to even pray with other people who call themselves Lutherans but from a different synod?  How can the Pentecostal churches routinely declare the Baptists and Methodists down the street are dead churches while those same Baptists and Methodists warn their congregations to stay away from those holy rollers?

You can avoid considering these issues for a long long time.

Unless you stop making excuses for god and take a long hard look at your religion.

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