Some of the Reasons Why I’m “Not a Christian”

Don’t get me wrong now. I am a Christian. I accept Christ as my savior and I do my best to follow him (though Lord knows I fall short on a regular basis) but there are certain issues that I hold dear to me that have led others to accuse me of not being a Christian at all. I thought it would be best to get them right out into the open here at the start of this journal so that people know what they’re in for when they visit.

1. I fully support the LGBT community. I believe that homosexuals/bisexuals/transgendered folk/whathaveyou have the right to be married both in the eyes of the government and the eyes of God. I believe that they have the right to be church leaders and should not have to renounce love or be celibate for the rest of their lives to do so. I do not believe that love between two consenting adults of the same sex is a sin (see #2.)

2. I’m not a literalist. I believe that the Bible was inspired by God but I also believe that it was written by fallible human beings living in a different time and cannot be completely divorced from its cultural context. I read the Bible. I soak up the words of God and if I come across something that seems difficult I pray about. I pray a lot. And then I wait for an answer. Sometimes the answer falls in line with scripture. Sometimes it does not. I live my life according to what he tells me. I cannot do otherwise.

3. I fully support the ordination of women all the way up to the highest offices of the church. This one isn’t so controversial among a lot of the Christians I know but there are those who would tell me I am disobeying God by believing it so I’m adding it to the list.

4. I believe that Jesus is male but I don’t think that gender labels can be adequately applied to big-G God. So sometimes I say “he” and sometimes I say “she” and sometimes I say “hers” or “Mother” instead of “Father”. Now, this shouldn’t be controversial at all. After all, almost every Christian I have met, even some that fall squarely in the fundamentalist camp, admits that God is beyond gender. It’s funny, then, that so many will get bent out of shape if you refer to God with anything other than masculine pronouns.

5. This is the big one; the one that nets me the most criticism. I do not believe that the organized religion we call Christianity is the only way to salvation. I believe that the way to salvation is to live the kind of life that Jesus calls us to live — a life guided by love for God and love for others — and I don’t think Christians have the monopoly on that.

So there it is. I’ll be writing more about each of the above issues in more detail somewhere down the line, I’m sure, but I feel better having it out in the open now.

 

Filling Buckets

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” — Yeats

I heard this quote the other day and it struck me. I started thinking about it and turning it over in my head and it slowly dawned on me that it applies quite neatly to my search for faith. I have spent most of my life filling buckets — taking in information, processing it, filing it away in the appropriate sections of my mind and then moving on to the next piece of information. I think I imagined that if I filled the bucket to the top that I would magically come to a place where belief took over. That if I knew enough about God and applied that information correctly, I would come to a place of knowing God.

It didn’t occur to me until much later that knowing about God and knowing God were two very different things. It wasn’t until God lit the fire in me that I realized the difference.

I was raised in the church (Baptist) but I was never on fire. The only thing I really got from my early religious training was a mild sense of frustration and confusion and a few drops in my bucket. I drifted away from the church as a teenager but kept searching. I looked again at Christianity. I researched Eastern religions. I looked into neo-paganism. I read a lot of Dawkins and called myself an atheist. I learned a lot and still value each and every little bit of knowlege I dropped into my bucket but I was never fulfilled. I was never turned on. When I came out of that long period of searching and assessed the situation I saw that I had not only filled one bucket, I had filled thousands of them. Thousands of buckets filled to the top and yet I was still cold.

I had learned. I had memorized facts. But I had not been educated.

 

Talking to Atheists

How To Actually Talk To Atheists (If You’re Christian)

I stumbled across the above article while sorting through my del.icio.us feeds. I think it’s quite well written. I went through a long period of non-belief. I did not believe in any kind of God. Now I was never completely content with that (my atheism was more of a “giving up” than a “coming to”, if that makes any sense) but I knew plenty of atheists who were and still are. Now that I am on the other side of the fence as a convinced believer I find that I still maintain a great deal of sympathy for atheists.

I know that many American Christians believe that they are being oppressed or silenced by an increasingly secular culture but if they could just step back for a moment and take a good look around I think they would see that this is simply not the case. This culture is saturated with Christian beliefs, images and frames-of-reference. The default position of most believers, even ones who do not identify totally as Christians, is still heavily influenced by Christian thinking. In most places it is still difficult to be elected to a government post without professing some sort of belief in God. Messages referring to God are on our money, in our pledge of allegiance and frequently on the lips of some of the highest elected officials in the land. We are so used to seeing references to Christianity that we cease to see it at all and it just becomes background noise.

I’m not arguing that this is either a good thing or a bad thing. It just is what it is and for an atheist it can be a bit overwhelming at times. That’s why sometimes the language they use can seem so harsh; why they sometimes sound angry or frustrated or as if they don’t like you, a Christian, personally. The fact is, sometimes they have a right to be angry. Believers eye them with suspicion. The culture in which they live seems built for believers. They are told that they cannot be moral, that they cannot be good citizens of the country in which they live. There are people out there who claim that atheists are less than human. All of these things are usually said by people who claim to follow Christ. Can you see why they resist the message? Can you see why they might not think of what we believe as “good news”?

That’s why I believe the linked article makes a very good point, and it’s something I believed when I was a young Christian, something I believed as an atheist and something I still believe today as a person who knows down to the very core of her being that there is a God and that he loves us very much: the best way — the ONLY way — to share the good news is to allow your life to become an example of the transforming power of Christ’s love and God’s grace. I don’t believe there has ever been a person who was talked into believing in God. I don’t even think that’s possible. Knowing God is so far beyond an intellectual exercise that it’s silly to even think of conversion in those terms. But I know plenty of people (including myself) who have been shown the Way. I’ve known plenty of people (including myself) who saw the changes God worked in someone else’s life and felt the call to know more.

Jesus didn’t badger people into believing in him. He loved them into it.