ONE PROMISE KEPT...
For those of you who want an answer, however elliptical, to Bigg's question:
I would like to ask to what you attribute your religious faith. Is it your upbringing, a conversion experience... What led you to the faith you have today? I am sincerely interested, and hope I cause no offense.
you can now find the long-promised post at Troll Talk. Click here, on the title in the sidebar, or on the blog title above, to access my long-winded reply.
It seems that I revised the text and uploaded pictures while Bigg was himself trying to access the post... sorry about that, Tough Guy. I also changed the title, which is why the links weren't working. I think it's all there now, though.
Let me know if you have trouble.
Hey, I couldn't get there! Blogger says the URL is bad...
ReplyDeleteSorry.
ReplyDeleteAs you can see, I was again returning to my vomit to add pictures. It's really a disease, as each post eventually takes me most of a workday's time...
Oh well.
I hope it addresses your questions.
If not, check back in.
yr
Troll
Wow.
ReplyDeleteI want you to know that I respect your beliefs and your conviction, even though I don't share them.
I guess you would have to say that I have rebelled against the church and the very notion of god from the beginning. I suppose you could blame this on my extremely conservative fundamentalist parents; or maybe it's the message that I absorbed from them and their church at an early age, that god did not want me because I was different.
I still have some pretty strong feelings on the subject to this day -- I think I expressed them best to an early commenter on my blog in the following words:
As it happens, I have a response to that.
I am what God made me. I have known from my first thoughts that I was different, before I knew what that difference was or what it meant to those who were ignorant around me. I knew what I was when I was a blameless child, by anyone's reckoning.
If your God would make me what I am and then condemn me for it, then why should I fall down and worship him? Christ never uttered a word against my kind, but he certainly had something to say about people who hate.
Will I end up in hell? Maybe so, if there is one, but it will be for denying who and what I am, and what God made me to be.
But if I am so damned, I can at least count on saying "I told you so" when I see you there.
I don't say this as an attack on you, Troll, nor do I think (given the circumstances) that your beliefs and conviction are anything but noble.
My objection is to formalized religion and the biblical notion of god, not the idea of god himself or the impulse to worship him.
All my best to you, Troll.
Biggo:
ReplyDeleteWell, that was a mouthful.
Let's agree that we were created the way we are. Now, as to judgment...
CS Lewis wrote somewhere [The Great Divorce??] that the saints, and the rest of us, are not singled out for what they manage to do, but by what they manage to do given where they started from. You could say, for instance, that a kid like me who was loved from birth has a higher standard to meet than some poor soul who never received love to begin with. Hard to ask anyone to act like a human if they have never been treated like one.
However, I challenge you, in my non-objective, partisan way. to find a god anywhere in human history who can match the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Now, if the Old and New Testaments are to be believed [and here we obviously part company], the God of the Jews is the God of all mankind. One of the things that is almost never mentioned about the Bible is how late the Jews appear; there is tremendous humility in the proclamation that God cared for the world so much before they even showed up on the scene.
We all get exercised nowadays about the prohibitions in the OT about homosexuality, but I can't see how being in a temple of prostitution [which is where most of the ancient Middle East made a place for men to sleep with men] or a Greek slave or "student' offers a more compellingly human view of life. It is worth bearing in mind that there are literally hundreds of things punishable by death in the OT, and yet the rabbis maintained that any court that handed down more than a very few death sentences was an unjust court. Husbands who wanted to have their wives stoned for adultery were often asked to produce two witnesses to the act itself -- how often do you think they found them? That is the clue of the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery; the Pharisees thought they had him cornered because they had somehow managed to find an "open and shut" case: a woman caught in the act by more than one witness. Jesus' reply sort of says it all. And I think that St. Paul was actually making something of a dirty joke when he said that we "r eceive in [our] selves the due penalty for [our] error." Think about it...
There is no question that there is a lot of ignorance and hate masquerading as religion, and a lot of lust for power masquerading as leadership, and that a lot of terrible things are done in the name of religion. Yet if the 20th century teaches us anything, it is that religions with a little "r" [whether it was fascism, Nazism, or communism -- and we don't even know the full extent of what happened in China!] have brought human sacrifices on a scale no religion, with the possible exception of the Aztecs' has ever contemplated.
I absolutely love your response about "seeing you there". Right on, Bigg. You have the bastards there, I think. But I would also suggest that you try reading, the next time you happen to pass by a Bible, Matthew 25:31-46, which is the parable of judgment featuring the sheep and the goats. And what is worth holding on to, IMO, is the fact that as the judge separates the souls out into sheep and goats, BOTH parties are astonished. Nobody has figured it out ahead of time. That includes us, of course, but at least we will have plenty of company.
Thanks for your question, and thanks for your response. It is always a pleasure to find out that there actually IS somebody out there listening. [There was a while when I was sure it was all just WOE logging in under different names. Well, not really, but you know what I mean...]
yr Troll