MISGUIDED

I get overly excited on those few occasions when I get any feedback. Therefore I am constantly trying to figure out what people want to read about here. I have pretty good traffic but commenters are few and far between.

So I’ll do what I always do when I get flustered with blogging, I’ll write about whatever is on my mind.

I’d have to say the primary atheistic thing on my mind the last few months has been how absurd my former religion seems to me now. I read a considerable amount of atheist blogs on one hand and a like amount of political oriented flotsam on the other. There’s a lot of religion mentioned and ranted about by both sources.

It disturbs me greatly when I see some bizarre religious statement and then I realize I actually used to believe exactly that.

But how do I blog about these things? Do I get all scholarly and lecture? Or should I stick with the illustrative anecdote from my past church experience? I tend to want to lecture but I have been informed by more than one person that my lectures are not welcomed. And my supply of clever anecdotes isn’t all that big.

My wife is all excited about a former pastor who has returned to the area. She’s beginning to push to go see him. This man gave me many opportunities to preach and teach, I filled in for him many times. But there’s really no real relationship there that would compel me. My memory is quite different from my wife’s.

The man preached guilt. Loads and loads of guilt. You could walk into one of his services with a huge smile on your face, a spring in your step, and enough joy in your heart to cheer up a dozen clinically depressed people; listen to his sermon; and then walk away guilty, condemned, and far lower than all those people you were trying to perk up before. The man had a huge load and he wanted to share it.

He once stated, “I think about death every day.” He was big on preaching that you must be crucified with Christ literally every day of your life. Somehow crucifying yourself on Sunday wasn’t good enough to get you through until Tuesday. Your supply of sin was so big that Jesus could only take a day’s worth away from you each day. The ever popular “You must die to self” teaching was his strong suit. I didn’t realize it at the time but the man must have had some major issues in his life. Issues he was frightfully guilty about.

This guy was determined to keep everyone feeling guilty and condemned as much as possible. Sin is far more important than redemption to most churches. Sin is more powerful than Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Why is it in churches like this you constantly are told, “You’re just a sinner saved by grace,” and “There but for the grace of God go I.” Even though you accept Jesus your salvation isn’t complete. Even though you’re saved you’re still full of sin. You’re constantly in danger of offending God and ruining your relationship with him. So you had to come to church every week to hear how bad you still were, so you could learn to cling to God tighter and tighter. And by inference and association, learn to cling to your clergyman.

When I finally broke away from church the one thing that stood out among all others was that I stopped feeling guilty. Without those weekly reminders I had no reason to feel guilty. I wasn’t violating my own morals so I had no guilt feelings on my own. At church that was true, too, except that I was accepting the pastor’s own guilt and condemnation as my own. I was feeling guilty for things he said I should feel guilty about. Not about things I was actually doing.

I don’t have a problem with guilt, religious guilt. Why on earth would I want to go back to that?

This entry was posted on 28. December 2008 at 21:32 and is filed under interpretation, communication, listen, hearing, emotion, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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