bloody hell
As I age and work on myself to raise my personal self-awareness, to see and monitor my selfishness and greed as a normal human being, the thing that bothers me most about Christianity as it has evolved from the fear control exercised by the Church as a blot of the Dark Ages, is the element for whom Christianity's central appeal is the bloody egocentric "Christ came to suffer, bleed and die on the cross for my sins" and the notion that if I claim Christ as my personal savior I'll be "as sure for heaven as if I were already there" therefore no worries if I don't make it home from church this morning. I love singing the good old hymn "Nothing but the blood of Jesus" more than anyone, and I sing it loud and raucous, with both hands in the air, fists clenched in conviction; but this confession about myself no longer surprises me, nor likely surprises anyone who has ever known me.
Yet, this my confession ongoingly challenges my confidence in what I hope for and assurance about what I do not see, which the author of Hebrews defines as Faith. Not my belief itself, which, I guarantee, already is far different to what you say you believe, but my continuous unease about whether my God is too small. My God does not call me to confess my sins lest I die unredeemed or come to the Altar rail with a soiled soul; my God bothers me unendingly that I have more stuff than anyone else, and that I'm not constantly working on myself to get along with less in life so that others can have more of life.
My principal torment is the Second Commandment (which Jesus says is in every way the full equal of the First Commandment), "You shall love your neighbor as yourself", where my neighbors are the people in the world about whom I care least of all. I don't hate them, I just couldn't care less about them. Indifference, I don't know them or think about them. Among them currently, people in once so-called Third World countries or its newer euphemism Developing Nations.
See this?
And I'm supposed to believe that Creator God came to die in bloody human agony to save me from my sins? What sins? Such theology of self is below absurd. God came to live within selfish human society to show and tell me God's values for human life, and to challenge me to live and love accordingly.
Here's a current events case in point:
In the race between infection and injection, injection has lost.
Public health experts estimate that approximately 70% of the world’s 7.9 billion people must be fully vaccinated to end the COVID-19 pandemic. As of June 21, 2021, 10.04% of the global population had been fully vaccinated, nearly all of them in rich countries.
Only 0.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.
Do I care? I'm working on it.
This one I care about without trying, showing people as the worst of the worst:
BREAKING NEWS |
The remains of 761 people, mainly Indigenous children, were found in Canada at the site of a former school, an Indigenous group said. |
Thursday, June 24, 2021 11:04 AM EST |
The discovery, the largest one to date, came weeks after the remains of 215 children were found on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia. Both schools were part of a system that took Indigenous children in the country from their families over a period of about 113 years, and housed them in boarding schools, where they were prohibited from speaking their languages and sexually, physically and emotionally abused. |
T