Take a Walk Somewhere Beautiful

Here is an email I received in response to one of my essays.

Take A Walk Somewhere Beautiful

What’s goin’ on. My name’s Jonathan. I’m 16 and a sophomore in high school. I just read your thesis on how the bible is inaccurate. I am a christian. I have to admit, you have posed some incredible and interesting questions with the bible. There is nothing I am going to say to try to disprove what you have brought up and it wouldn’t be my place to judge you anyway. Besides, you have excellent points. Had I not been stronger in my faith, I might even start believing a lot of what you say.

It’s funny. You look on your faith as a virtue. I look on it as the sin of deliberate stupidity and closed mindedness. You can only hold onto the myths you were taught by deliberately refusing to think about disturbing questions. The actual truth will stand up to any amount of scrutiny. The truth is very, very robust. If what you believe needs faith i.e. deliberate blindness, to coddle it, then probably you are defending an untruth.

However, for myself, my faith in Christ has helped me through difficult situations and I have actually felt him at work through parts of my life. I remember looking back on days that I didn’t believe in Christianity and the lack of peace that came with it. Ever sense I have taken God seriously, my life has changed. Even if I didn’t believe in the bible, I would never forfeit the faith that there is a God; He desires an intimate relationship with us; And life simply isn’t full without him.

This is a much more rational. You aren’t just taking someone’s controversial word for it. You are basing this on your actual observations.

I don’t want to sound trite, but I know that’s all I’m probably coming off as. You seem to be bitter for reason’s out of my knowledge. Perhaps the way you have been treated by a number of christians has swayed all of your thinking to the fact that there is no God and that we are all hypocrites.

I have stated in many places I don’t know if there is a God, but I am quite sure that the Bible does not accurately describe Him if He does exist. The universe is far too magnificent to have been created by the pathetic, petty, forgetful, inconsistent being that passes for God in the Bible. The Bible is an insult to the real God.

As far as I know, you could have every right to believe that. Keep in mind, that christians are real people. Just like everyone else, we take offense when the basis of everything we believe in is being challenged. However, that gives us no right to condemn anyone else in what they believe. That is God’s job.

Three of my lovers were devout Christians. Obviously I thought highly of them. However, the most vocal Christians 99% of the time are calling for my civil rights to be taken away. Only 1% of the time does a Christian stand up for my right to full citizenship. No other group persecutes me like that. Christians made themselves my natural enemies. I agree with Christ that is my duty to love them anyway, even while I oppose their actions. I admit I am not very good at that and my brush is too broad and tends to tar all Christians when only a subset deserve the full force of my wrath. However, I do oppose all Christians, even kindly ones because their actions are based on superstition instead of truth. Superstition is not a sound base for a society.

I know that you are a homosexual and according to the bible, that is a sinful practice. So is lying, cheating, stealing, committing adultery and many of the other sins christians are committing every day of their lives. God does not judge you any worse for what you are doing than he does, any of us for the sins that we commit. We as christian’s are not called to condemn, but to; Love the sinner, hate the sin. Take light of that when someone judges you. They are wrong.

Oddly, the Bible is far more condeming of heterosexual sex outside marriage than gay sex. It is just that fundamentalists like to lift a few phrases out of context. Some scholars even argue that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality at all. I think that view is extreme, but it is clear to me from reading the Bible from cover to cover that modern day Christians greatly exaggerate the sin of homosexuality relative to the importance given it in the Bible. For example, Jesus never even mentioned it once. Compare that with the emphasis he gave other sins that he hammered at over and over.

I gotta go and I haven’t had a chance to say everything I wanted to say. If you want to write back, my address is branham@integrity.com. Or visit my band’s website [no longer available]. If not, that’s cool, too. In any case, I will be praying for you and anyone else who experiences the same problems in their life, including myself. For now, take a walk somewhere beautiful. I was told to do this once and it drew me into the belief that there was a God. Just look around you. See how things are made and how everything holds together. It begins to become quite hard to believe that there is not a greater power at work. When I see a building, I think that someone built it. I don’t think that it simply appeared out of nothing over a long period of time. So how in world could you look at something as wondrous as the human body and say there is no design to it? Just a question.

The best evidence for the existence of God comes from science. It is basically a mathematical description of what you described so poetically. I will be posting more on that later today. Keep in mind that evidence for the existence of God is not the same thing as saying the Bible is an accurate depiction of God and His wishes.

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