CHRISTIANITY'S

DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

As I reflect upon my own life history, Christian bigotry is not something that I understood the impact of immediately, although I always had the feeling that kids treated me differently.

I had a very public confrontation with one of my science teachers in the 9th grade in which I took up a defense of evolution against his defense of creationism.

After that day, the kids in my grade turned on me a little.

Like the girl who sat in front of me in English class who later would become our class president whose name I will not repeat here, and whose current beliefs may or may not reflect her opinions at the time, but who provided a crystalline example of how discrimination against so-called non-believers works in practice when you live in a truly small-minded town.

This budding Christian bigot turned around to me at one point when the teacher wasn't in the room and she said, 'Lane, you're going to hell!' and then she just turned back around like nothing had happened.

One might ask, why did she say that?

Apart from the fact that, I suppose her conscience must have compelled her to say it, that incident resulted merely from her knowledge and understanding about me that I didn't attend church each Sunday, the way so many of them (how many of them?) did.

Add to that I didn't believe in creationism the way she had been taught to believe in it, nor was I deferential to authority in a way that put her at ease, and you have in your hands a Molotov cocktail of Christian-triggering factors.

In any event, whatever the best explanation for that event and how it unfolded, and regardless of what one might suppose I should have done at the time or shouldn't have done, I'm focused on what we need to do about it now.

I don't need to have it explained to me that she felt justified in saying those things to me because of her beliefs way back then any more than I need to have it explained to me now that there's no such thing as Hell.

Meanwhile, what business did any pastor have filling her head with the notion that she got to decide who is or isn't hellbound?

Judge not lest ye be judged and pride goeth before a fall and all, but also, how long must I suffer ye, ye wicked and adulterous generation?

Raise your hand if you call yourself a Christian but you don't remember the themes to those little ditties of poetic wisdom.

So here's what it boils down to, even though this might stick in the craw of those who still call themselves Christians - you cannot appeal to a supernatural power without making yourself into a mythologist, nor can you claim the teachings of Jesus as divinely inspired wisdom without reducing them to philosophy.

Or, as so many so-called Christians like to call it, 'mere' philosophy.

So I think any protestations to the alternate must be jumbling up their words.

By embracing cognitive dissonances regarding their own claims of a tripartite God, they render their protestations of faith incoherent.

Their fastidious choice of language leaves the true moral dilemmas within the Bible unarticulated.

There's nothing you can claim about Christianity that will ever separate it from philosophy, in the end.

Everything you could ever have to say about it, you can only express as part of a philosophy, dear believer.

Now you could say it's part of 'my' philosophy, as opposed to being a 'mere' philosophy. 

You could claim it as your own homebrew philosophy where you pick and choose a little bit from this place and a little bit from that place.

But you could say, 'I borrow this notion from this era of Christian mysticism, and I borrow this idea from the platonic phase of Christian theology, or that era of the history of Christianity, and so on and so forth.

You can do all of those things okay, and all that's just cherry-picking.

Then you'd be a cherry-picking Christian, which is nothing like a cherry-popping Daddy, so don't get too worked up in the pants, churchgoers of America.