Odd Theist Beliefs
Offline I was thinking on some things today.
I was raised in a small southern town and in a Southern Baptist church.
However, even though I was raised to be a theist, I did not pick up some of the predominate ideas that a lot of Theists believe.
Evolution: I've always believed in evolution. This is despite the fact that I was raised to believe in the bible. I think of it as a sort of "Duality of Mind". On one hand I was raised in church to believe in god creating everything in 6 days. But then I was also told through various sources about dinosaurs that lived a long time ago when humans did not exist. I did not believe in the idea of the literal sense of 6 days. I even hobbled together a theory that humans evolved on the earth but were souless, until the sons of Adam and Eve interbred with the "evolved" humans thereby passing along the human soul to the offspring. Like a dominant gene or something. Eh, it worked for a few years for me.
I suppose this is because neither the church nor my parents ever mentioned evolution at all. For or against it. So I believed both and made them work as best they could. I wonder if all the theists aren't the same way because a parent or their church actively told them that evolution was false. I thankfully did not suffer from that.
Blaming the Jews for the death of christ: I've never understood this. I sat in church growing up being taught about the jew Jesus. And yeah I know that the jewish rabbis back then supposedly gave Jesus up, but it was the Romans that actually killed him. Shouldn't you be more ticked at the people that actually killed him? But even over that, Jesus came to earth to be crucified. If the Jews didn't surrender jesus, and the Romans didn't kill him....well he couldn't complete his mission, right? So why blame anyone for helping Jesus to complete his plan? Baffling. Whenever I hear about something like when Mel Gibson was muttering anti-jewish statements to the jewish police officer I'm baffled by the behavior. Are some churches actually talking crap about the Jews? No one said anything like that to me either growing up.
Even being taught to be theist my entire childhood and adolescence these two ideas completely baffle me.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
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I was raised here in the South too where Jesus is very popular. But even as a kid I never understood the whole Jesus thing. I believed in God but just couldn't figure out why we needed Jesus.
I knew Jesus came to earth to keep us from going to hell but why was there a hell to begin with? If God created everything then that means he created hell. Why?
And why do we need Jesus? Why couldn't God just make us all sin proof to begin with? I mean, he's God right? He can do anything. So why not just make us all good? It just didn't make any sense.
I didn't ask my parents or my Sunday school teacher because I didn't want to sound dumb. But if I had asked them, I'm not sure they would have had an answer.
In fact, I haven't met a Christian yet that had the answer.
Frosty's coming back someday. Will you be ready?
I was also raised in the south, predominantly in very conservative protestant churches, including Southern Baptist.
My escape hatch for reconciling the contradictions was simple. God was right, and any time there was a contradiction, it was because the people who were talking about it didn't understand the bible correctly.
It took actually reading the bible all the way through for me to see that it really is silly and contradictory.
But, more to the point of the post, one pastor was a big fan of preaching demons, demonology, astrology, etc as gigantic hurdles to the believer. He had this whole dungeons and dragons style approach to daily living...
1) get up in the morning, and physically go through the motions of putting on your "armor of faith."
2) When you see stuff on TV, out in public, etc, that you know to be demonic assault (MTV, for instance), use your armor like real armor until you can run away.... literally.
3) If you know a Christian brother is having trouble with demons, "give" him your armor of faith, so that your faith will shield him.
Seriously, it wasn't too much different from living in a video game, but it was pretty scary to think about how many demons were all over the place, just waiting for me to think the wrong thing so that they could posess me and ruin my life.
(No, I never did the whole armor of faith craziness. Thanks for wondering.)
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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