"But what was the big deal about building a church?"
She asked.
It was then that I knew that certain concepts were likely to be lost in translation. She was from North Korea. I was born in Mobile, Alabama. I had recommended "Lilies of the Field" starring Sidney Poitier as a good movie.
It never occurred to me that anyone would question building a church as a good and necessary thing. A decent thing. A hallmark of civilization and one of those good references to put on your spiritual resume.
This was not the only time there was no meeting of the minds on the subject of religion. My girl friend was taking business courses at a local hole-in-the-wall "university." In the midst of some discussion on business ethics several of her classmates who claimed to be Christian as much as told her that as a non believer from an atheist nation she was doomed to burn in hell.
The whole situation was wrong on several grounds.
I was not comfortable with having to come to the aid of rednecks trying to beat someone into submission over Christianity. I had to explain to her that if they were truly believing Christians then they were actually trying to do something good for her in their eyes. I said this even though I did not entirely buy it.
One of the problems was that every time I turned around my girlfriend was pointing out some uncharitable thing her fellow students were doing or not doing. It was difficult to understand for instance, why someone who ran around professing to be Christian didn't take care of responsibilities like doing their homework and showing up on time. As evangelists like Joyce Meyers are forever pointing out, people are watching
While this might seem unfair, believers in whatever faith have to admit, you often claim to have, or to know, or to be something special.
If you are lazy and slothful and never do anything you commit to, what are observers to think?
All of this defending the indefensible was taking something of a toll. There was that and there were theological conundrums of my own that I could never get past. For instance there was the notion of Almighty as a poor workman. It is said that a poor workman blames his tools. If we were made by God to be, as some suggest, his instruments in this world, then it seems odd that we should be subject to eternal damnation if God doesn't care for the way the tool works. If a man did that we would think he was not right in the head. Or, since surely good people are praying good prayers all the time, why don't all amputees spontaneously grow limbs from all those prayers?
So I have come to the conclusion that the spiritual and the material world do not interact. Since I was brought up to believe in the spiritual, I still believe in it. But the notion that God wants babies born retarded or Buddhist monks to be tortured by tyrannical governments is way too odd for me. Again, if all of this is some passion play to teach us a lesson it looks more like something out of that Saw sadist series than some holy writ.
I once heard a rather stern fundamentalist state that anyone who said he talked to God was actually talking to devil and that that the Catholic Church had succumbed to dark forces. Actually that was pretty much my turning point on steering clear on dogmatists, when I heard one of them saying that all Catholics were going to hell.
I am not Catholic but I can't buy that kind of absolutist theology. There are folks who pretty much come out and say that you must dot every "i" and cross every "t" in a certain way or you will go to hell. Again, why would a sane God create a world were billions of souls were doomed to go to hell because of an accident of birth. They happened to have been born into the wrong religion and in the wrong country. If you listen carefully to the dogmatists you will hear them say the Almighty is trying to make us more like Him. And that not being like Him is called sin and must be punished. So the only thing God can stand to be around is clones of Himself.
Again, if a man did this we would find him peculiar. What is divine about this? Why is it that for religious extremists God has all the worst characteristics of man?
My beliefs are now more similar to those expressed in books like "A New Earth" or "The Secret" and even "A Purpose Driven life."
My own spiritual changes are still not fully translatable. My girlfriend seems to have fewer problems with my beliefs but she stills goes off in directions that I can not follow. For instance, I tend believe that we can have happier and fuller lives by thinking positive and giving of ourselves. You get a blessing by being a blessing. She seems to think this means that God is a kind of cosmic Santa Claus or a Genii who grants wishes if you pray enough. That's not quite what I meant