I am not an educated man in regards to the Christian faith. I have not studied. The most I can say is that I’ve read the Bible from start to finish (I have not read the Apocrypha) but I certainly cannot recall it’s entirety. I’ve read a significant proportion of the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book while sitting bored through sermons in those churches that utilize the full text (if you’re ever at Holy Trinity Cathedral and the center ribbon bookmarks have been plaited and knotted at the end there’s a reasonable chance I’m responsible).

But in these years, I’ve noticed a rather sorry state of affairs. On the outside you could assume that everyone who proclaims themselves a Christian is a nice person, and has a wealth of knowledge on their faith. After all, isn’t it the most important thing to them?

Well guess what. It’s not true. And I doubt it ever was.

The different denominations within the Christian faith are well defined, and you’d expect that their members would know what each believes. So a simple question of whether it’s okay to baptize infants should draw a monotone response no matter which person you asks who identifies themselves as Anglican or from someone who is a Baptist. It doesn’t. And the reason is thus:

Not once did they consider what they were saying when they decided to become Anglican, or Catholic or any one of dozens of denominations that differ themselves solely on the answers to these sorts of questions. That’s without even considering if they actually believe at all!

beliefgraph.png

First we have a blue rectangle to represent the priests/ministers, etc of the church. They know stuff (well sometime they make massive mistakes, but they’re only human after all nobody is perfect) and it’s generally their job to maintain order and make sure that everyone is kept along the straight and narrow.

Then for our cyan segment we have the general non church population. Doesn’t believe, but there’s still a range of knowledge.

Green would be typical of any modern church denomination. Lots of enthusiasm but to be honest they’re in danger of becoming a creepy cult and they often teach lots of strange stuff. You might notice there’s a ‘doesn’t believe’ segment there, but I’ll get onto that later.

For me the most interesting is the red sector. Typical of a large mainstream church. Some of the congregation knows what’s going on, others don’t. But here’s the bit that a lot of people would find strange. The sheer number of people who don’t believe. Why are they there?

Religion is a bit of sticking point for a lot of people when it comes choosing partners. Typically speaking males will pick up the religion of their partner. Going out on a limb here, I’d say that if you can swap as easily as you change clothes, then you probably don’t believe since it’s obviously not important to you. And of course the Church knows about this. Anglicans are so lax about this they only require two or three services per year for you to be attendance of to be considered a member.

Hence you end up with a lot of people who have great knowledge of what you’re meant to believe but don’t believe. And to be quite frank I don’t mind, often they’re good people who get a lot of work done. I’d much rather have people who don’t believe, then people who do believe who are a danger to themselves and those around them.

Take the Exclusive Brethren for example. I hate them. The Church’s job is in fellowship or something like that, in my personal opinion it boils down to teaching people not to be little shits and looking out for one another. It’s not meant to be about controlling people’s lives and destroying them if they should dare question you. It is not about oppressing women. It is not about making people’s lives a living hell.

Even the larger mainstream churches are guilty of this.

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Asides from restraining a snicker over ‘activities’; Why is it the churches job to function in this area? If anything it was their parents or their schools. Why meddle where you don’t belong. How on earth can you justify arguing for the restriction of teaching evolution in schools. (It’s not just in America, even here in New Zealand there are schools that do this, that miss out massive developments in science. It does nothing for the kids, and puts them at a massive disadvantage). You simply cannot, it never was and never will be their jurisdiction. They should be using their truly enormous resources to try and make the world a better place, then waste time on stuff like that. Focus on the stuff that’s really important.

Simply put, stop using your religion as a crutch to force your own views on people. If you want to be ultra fundamentalist and try that, stop being so retarded. You’ve got a text that is self contradicting in places, don’t even try. It’s like trying to find the drop cable length in IEEE 802.3. You can’t live your own life like it says to if you take it literally, so don’t be a pain.

The Bible was never meant to be a thousand step program of things to do and not to do, that if you followed them all to the letter you’d magically goto heaven. I honestly can’t see God being annoyed with you for not showing the priest your clothes that have mildew on them. It sounds more like stuff the priests desperately would have wanted in there as they tried to keep everyone alive. As it was taking way too much effort to keep the Jews alive. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was stuff in there saying that trying to eat rocks is a bad idea. You could probably replace Leviticus entirely with warning labels. I can’t even really see God having a problem if you want to sleep around left, right and center, what I can see a problem though is where other people are getting hurt because of this.