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What are we going to do, church? Version 1.0 Beta that’s more like an Alpha

There is a huge elephant in the room, Christians, and it’s in your interest to pay attention.

A lot of you don’t know how to read the Bible. It’s true. Catholics insist on establishing trust based force more than undestanding. It is because it is. Protestants lead a cell group by discussing what the pastor shared the other day, and if it’s an Asian church, you will be penalised for “thinking” instead of obeying (I can say that because I’ve been in no other church for years) with overt or covert humiliation. And the pastor USES the Bible to give his sermons legitimacy, like why he hates gay people (being lazy here), sometimes it’s less boring when they aren’t added. 

So pastors, tell me, how many people in your church understand the Bible? How many of them? How many can say that they know about John’s account of Jesus instead of mindlessly making superfluous quotations about it.

Here’s an anecdotal example of my target audience: I sat next to this girl in class (Grade 7 equivalent) and one of her favorite things to do is to use a correction pen to write John 3:14 (i think) about believing in Him to get eternal life. She did this throughout the year. She will find it smudged out a week later or she’d erase it and replaced with hearts on the “i”s and her penmanship improved with each new attempt. I never asked her why she did it but I never asked anyone why they would deface school property and seeing what I believe was a good quote written by a condescending person made me disgusted with the whole religion. 

As a Christian, we should call that kind of behaviour retarded. But she is the very kind of person our “understanding” of the Bible has created. She is one among likeminded millions and millions. She didn’t fail any of her subjects though, thank God.

Read the Bible, don’t quote it if you don’t understand a thing about it. Can I quote Shakespeare and not sound like an ass if I never read his works? ‘Why can’t you be interested in learning about the politics and economics of each era so that what you read makes sense?

This is a very stupid problem and it’s making us stupid. 

Just one sentence.

In a leaderless world (google Dr. Ian Bremmer), we must believe in causes higher than ourselves again before we split into smaller and smaller factions.

Edit: Nothing will define our times or our character more precisely nor more thoroughly more than rediscovering and fully re-employing our capacity to believe in causes higher than ourselves, trial and error in no way disqualifying any of us who holds true to this pursuit.

[4 edits so far.]