At one time I had a problem with Christians and Christianity. I was raised as a Christian. I was baptised as a Christian, a Southern Baptist, no less. I came to the realization that what I had believed was almost certainly not true, and frankly, I felt betrayed. Now I question myself. Who had the problem?
I never have felt that anyone personally misled me, certainly not intentionally. I was misled by the misguided and misled, people who did not just believe. They knew. The “blame” lay further down the line. I was deluded by the deluded. I felt that Christianity had violated the trust I had placed in its doctrines. It is easy for a former Christian to feel that way. Who is to “blame”? Why, “they” are. They, the ubquitous, faceless “they misled me”. Could I name names now? No. Could I name the names of Christian leaders who are misleading people now? Well, certainly. Pick a leader, any Christian leader. Are these leaders bad people? Probably not. They were probably misguided themselves, spectacularly misguided. And they are spectacularly misguiding others. Bad people? Probably not. Their intent is pure. Their message is not.
Is Christianity bad? Certainly not, not the way it is preached and practiced by many, probably most, Christians. Christianity has some of the most loving and forgiving characteristics of any revealed religion. Do I believe in or agree with Christian doctrine? Certainly not! To go back to being a Christian I would have to believe in things that don’t make sense. Can Christians be bad? They can be horribly bad, especially when they throw their weight around and try (and often succeed) to impose their worldview on the general population.
In my opinion that’s why we have Christian Deists. I’ve gotten to know John Lindell pretty well over the past couple of years, and he has told me his story several times. He was a Baptist minister when he came to the realization that he could no longer believe the awful things that Christian doctrine said he must believe. He gave up his ministry. John invented his own religion, and then later he found Deism. It was exactly like his own invented religion. John is a Biblical scholar. He sees Deism in the life of Jesus. He believes Jesus was a Deist, a man, not divine. John is a Deist first and a Christian Deist second. I believe that deep down inside John would love to be a Christian, but he cannot accept the horrible things in the Bible. So John takes the good and leaves the rest. John sees Deism in Jesus’ words and actions. I have problems seeing the same thing. I can’t look past the other things.
Does that mean that John filters Jesus’ message from the Bible? Yes, but he is very up-front about it. I think we all filter things that way. We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. We deemphasize some parts and apply emphasis to other parts. We take a subject and make it our own. Humans do that. I do celebrate humanity, even with all our imperfections. These imperfections make us human. Christianity is based on the Bible, which has some of the most inspirational and uplifting messages on Earth, and it has some positively dreadful and ghastly parts. And both the good and the ghastly are attributed to God. So Christians face a dilemma. They want desperately to believe the good parts, so they ignore the bad parts. Not even the fiercest hellfire and damnation preacher encourages his flock to go out and stone someone to death these days. The best Christians suppress the distasteful and stress the glorious. It is the only way they can deal with their dilemma.
The Christian message of love and forgiveness represents two of the best facets in a flawed jewel. When you add salvation to the mix, you get a very powerful message. I cannot, however, make the bad parts go away, so I cannot be a Christian. Like many who have left Christianity, I felt betrayed. People I trusted had told me that the Bible was inerrant, the word of God. I believed, then I found that what they told me was false. So I turned my back on Christianity, a very human reaction. I rejected it all.
There is nothing about getting older that makes you any wiser unless you learn along the way. We learn from the good people, and we learn from the flawed people. We learn from the good experiences, and we learn from the bad. But we only become better ourselves when we apply what we have learned and improve our own behavior. I have taken a page from the Christian Bible and have decided to forgive Christianity. I forgive the well-intentioned Christian ministers and lay leaders who filled my head with nonsense, because they put some good and useful lessons in there too. I forgive the hypocrites who populate so many churches; they have taught me well through their bad examples. I forgive myself for turning a blind eye to the atrocious things in the Bible. I studied more than the parts my mentors wanted me to read. There is much good in there, along with much that is bad or absurd if taken literally. Allegorically, much of the Bible is beautiful.
So I have forgiven Christianity. It is the Christian thing to do. A good friend who went from being an Atheist to being a devout Christian has told me several times, “Don’t judge Christianity by Christians.” I do, of course, but I get the drift of his advice. Just as we should not judge a book by its cover, we should not condemn the good along with the bad. There is much about Christianity to dislike, but to discard the positive aspects along with the negative is very short-sighted. We should eat the fruit and discard the rind. I think Ziggy got it right. “You can complain because roses have thorns, or you can rejoice because thorns have roses.” Kahlil Gibran perhaps said the same thing a bit more poetically, “The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose.”
To withold forgiveness is to be negative and pessimistic. Try forgiving yourself for having been unforgiving.
