The “religion of love” illusion

I often see people talking about the dreadful (and even evil) things that evangelicals and fundamentalists believe and practice in the name of God, supported by the bible.

And I agree!

The problem is – we THINK the bible doesn’t support all those horrific things, and that it actually espouses a life of love.

But it doesn’t.

It’s a hodgepodge of ambiguity that has been cherry-picked to justify anything humanity is capable of.

It’s awesome that the loving bits are generally recognised as what Christianity should be, but that’s at the expense of the huge amount of scripture that says otherwise.

We have become so use to twisting and manipulating the bible that we’re almost incapable of seeing how absurd the whole thing really is.

Instead, we fight over interpretations, and who are the “real” Christians – and who is led by the Holy Spirit – and who is deceived – endlessly – for two thousand years – and we are still no closer to the unity we dream of – possibly further than ever – driven by the latest and greatest eschatology, exegesis, and whatever tools we want to make the cherry-picking work!

It’s worth noting that even our desire to simply embrace the teachings of Jesus, carefully avoids many of the harsh divisive things he apparently said.

It’s also worth noting that the texts we use to refer to “what Jesus said” are not even reliable sources anyway. We don’t ever bother to ask how a scribe followed him around endlessly transcribing every word, accurately, on parchment, with ink, balancing his little table, often at night. How often do we stop to consider how absurd that is? And don’t get me started on oral traditions!

It’s a complete mess, and yet we go on and on and on trying to make it work.

You’d think we would have realised by now that it’s time to question everything, and actually learn from history. But that’s unlikely, when our whole identity is built around a 2000 year old religious institution.

This is not to invalidate the work many have done over the centuries to promote unconditional love using the bible as a backdrop. It’s all about recognising the complete and utter subjectivity of a religious belief system that has dominated humanity for 2000 years.