Why I’m Not A Good Christian. Part 3.
(10) I get angry at Christians when they dramatize their spiritual battles.
Maybe this bullet is to my detriment. I dunno.
In my blog feed a while back, a post from a person who will remain nameless (I protect the innocent here.) came across my screen with the following title: “I am in a fight for my life! Please pray!” I could only imagine the horror that must have been unfolding for him while he was writing. Could it be that a tiny evil unicorn had broken into his home and had him pinned cowering in the corner with his laptop? Could his wife finally have snapped and been trying to beat him to death with her curling iron and he was using his laptop as a shield? Sadly, when I read the blog entry his “fight for his life” had to do with a bunch of his friends from work inviting him to go see a R rated movie that weekend. Where is the fight for his life in that? That was my question too… then I realized that he had made a commitment to God that he would not see any R rated movie on principle, but with this latest invite from his friends, his commitment was tested as he really wanted to go.
Ahem.
This example leans a bit to the extreme side, but it really isn’t far off from the way a lot of Christians face their spiritual battles. Giving poetic license or mental imagery to struggles in faith can produce beauty and art that glorifies and gives honor to God, and I don’t want to take anything away from that. I get angry when Christians start to supplement struggles with the dramatic.
Some of the most beautiful hymns I’ve sung and meaningful books I’ve read have been penned by people after they have had their lives broken. Whether they were coping with a tragic loss of a child, dealing with the pain of being imprisoned in a foreign land for their belief, or even while a cancer or terminal sickness ate away at their body, their hearts cried out to God and spilled onto paper in the form of life changing words.
I would make a safe assumption that if you were to poll a group of 100 Christians and ask how many of them would like to be able write such inspiring words you would see 100 hands shoot up. Ask the same crew how many of them would willing go through the same struggles the authors faced in order to obtain the inspiration to write these words and I doubt you would see a single hand rise.
Never-the-less, because some Christians so badly want that life changing Christ-like influence on other people, but are blessed enough to not have to go through a life changing trial, their alternative is to add drama and theatrics to issues that don’t warrant them. The closest analogy I can make would be for me to attend a military veteran’s convention, and having never severed in the military myself, make comparisons from the struggles in my day to day life to those of a solder’s combat experience. I believe this behavior would be seen as immature, and not a whole lot of people (if any) would take me seriously. In the same way I believe when you add theatrics instead of struggles to your testimony as a Christian, you are not only being disrespectful to those that have ‘earned’ their spiritual battle scars, but I doubt people are going to take you very seriously.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. - Hellen Keller
(11) I do not support censorship in any form.
This is a bullet point I feel very passionate about and wish other Christians could understand the logic behind. Censorship is bad!
When I speak of censorship I am talking about the ban of the availability of content deemed objectionable in advertising and media in the forms of magazines, books, television, video games, internet, and movies. What I am NOT talking about is the screening of material for decency through widely accessible means. For example, a commercial aired on basic cable should be screened for decency, where as on my personal website I should be free to post whatever I want no matter who may find it offensive.
Here is the biggest problem with censorship. Who gets to decide what is objectionable or not? As a Christian, the answer to that question should really scare you: the power of censorship lies with the government alone. You are taking the responsibility of personal conviction and individual character out of your own hands and giving it Uncle Sam. This is bad for two reasons:
1 Censorship is a double edged sword and it will cut both ways.
It is true that if he was given the power of censorship, Uncle Sam could filter out a lot of the smut off the shelves that’s being sold today, and then he could ban books written by the greatest tyrants and evil men of history. He could do away with violent video games and movies and make sure that no music album is released with a parental advisory sticker ever again. But what happens when Uncle Sam catches onto the fact that more lives are taken in the name of God than for any other cause? His next logical response, by the power we gave him, would be to start banning religious books and I would stake my life that he would start with New and Old Testaments.
Do I have support the publishing of books about witchcraft and trashy-romance novels? No– but I will support the right for them to be published. These are two very different issues.
2. By taking away content, we can easily fool ourselves into thinking we have changed intent.
Despite what humanism is trying to sell us it is very easy to see how wicked the heart of man is at it’s core; and I freely admit to this being an accurate description my own heart. If there was no Terminator movies, it would still not remove the violent thoughts from my mind. If there was no Playboy, it would not remove the lust from my heart.
If just half of the resources that some Christians expel trying to lobby the government for censorship went to reaching the individual and working with him through his angst, through his lust, and through himself; I believe it would be safe to say that the sources that prompted the misguided need for censorship in the first place would diminish.
We as Christians are merely treating the symptoms while the real disease is destroying the body.
On a side note:
A common argument I’ve heard in favor of censorship takes the shape of “What about the children? Won’t they see this garbage?” If a child is too young to make a convicted choice on such matters he/she is still at an age where the parents should be regulating the sensory intake of that child. It is the parents responsibility to know what the child is playing, reading, watching, etc.
(12) I consider myself a skeptic.
In my opinion skepticism has gotten a bad wrap in the Christian community, but I completely understand how it happened. In a “nutshell”: skepticism has become the only constant of modern thinking. For the modern man to consider himself educated he has to believe that he can’t believe in anything.
This mind set has unwittingly brought about the ideals of solipsism to the modern thinker and in it’s most dangerous form subscribed him to the philosophy of nihilism and/or materialism, whether he knows it or not, and we are left to wonder why is modern man never content, why is modern man never happy?
I like how GK Chesterton sums up this line of thought:
“The new rebel is a Skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything.”
He goes on to say:
“In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
I feel I could write pages on the complications of skepticism, but for the sake of my time and yours let me conclude to you that I believe the distortion of skepticism begins when we start to see it as the result of education instead of what it is more useful as, a prompt for further study.
Merriam Webster defines skepticism as: “the doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain“. This is an accurate statement to make in regards to any religion or philosophy. (This includes the philosophy of unbelief for you atheists out there.) Christianity has a healthy amount of uncertainty associated with it, and this uncertainty calls for the analyzing of evidence. Skepticism, if used as a study tool- not letting you take sides one way or the other until intellectual curiosity has been satisfied, usually will produce objective opinions.
On a similar note, I love it when Christian and non Christians alike ask me outright why I believe in a god, because my answer always seems to catch them off guard. I believe in ‘god’ because there is more evidence that supports his does exist than he doesn’t. In addition to that, I believe in the God of the Bible because the evidence points me in that direction. Thats the starting point of my faith. I had no divine encounter. I didn’t encounter a burning bush, I didn’t get a fax from heaven, I just took a look at the world around me and started thinking.
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