Why do you take such a harsh approach with Christians?
The Christian Question
The Many Faces of Christians
Growing up in a predominantly white Christian-dominated area, you typically do not start life with a vehemence towards the church so perhaps I was lucky in this way because from an early age I developed a hostility towards God and church, which I detail in my book Memories of Emily. Born of bullying by peers and the rejection of adults for not fitting the mold of sports-playing, handsome Christian white boy, the first fifteen years of my life consisted of daily violence or ridicule. If you imagine a poverty scenario with uneducated parents, you visualize the wrong scene.
My stepfather was an executive for a large multinational corporation and my mother was an executive before she retired early, both were Christian raised, but not devoutly. For many years, I did not even consider my family religious because no one talked about religion or attended church, but for sure my parents embodied business-Republicanism, and they certainly had no qualm supporting a party absolutely entrenched in Christian values.
Despite hostility for the religion, the first fifteen years of my life passed in futile attempts to fit into communities of people, almost entirely comprised of Christians, who simply did not want me — including my parents. By the age of sixteen, I was filled with violence, fear, and humiliation and not one single adult, teacher, priest, nun, or anyone saw the problem but instead leveled the blame on me. Just like good Christians do!
It’s laughable to consider the absurdity of all these supposedly Christian people believing a kid as young as seven or ten or fifteen was just a bad seed or innately evil. To this day, I experience this same thinking most likely some of you reading feel the knee jerk reaction that makes you want to utter, “You just hate Christians because of a bad experience.”
“You just won’t take responsibility for your part in things.”
“You can’t blame all Christians because of a few bad people.”
“Those weren’t real Christians.”
On and on the rationalizing goes but luckily, I overcame these ludicrous responses via the many questions arising from experience and age. Most profoundly, I questioned how all these people with varying levels of Christian devoutness could not see the agony I endured as a kid, and worse yet, punish me for that agony?
For me, the answer to this single question provided the foundation for all skepticism of religion, especially Christianity. If Christianity contained a modicum of truth, mine and other people’s even worse experiences, would not have played out in this manner because some true believer in the multitude of Christians surrounding us would have stood on their supposedly precious values and spoke up or done something.
Christians argue this point with any number of ridiculous claims from God working in mysterious ways to teaching a lesson. Worse than asinine, these claims only serve to fuel skepticism for raising more questions, such as: God, a supreme omniscient being, couldn’t devise a better lesson plan than maltreatment of one his creations?
Eventually, skepticism led to many questions that ultimately questioned the veracity of Christianity. Christianity claims to hold all the answers to our salvation, and by embracing this religion, we are made better as people. If Christianity could not alter a single perspective of the many people surrounding me as a kid, including kids, priests, nuns, teachers, and other adults, then it is worthless.
If an ideology is so easily bent by adherents to ignore or maltreat innocent children, or to justify any act — it is meaningless.
Christians all the time invent their own rules that benefit them as a group and as individuals. Almost no Christian follows the rule forbidding premarital sex, yet this does not seem to keep any of them from believing they are getting into Heaven. As a group, Christians have undermined nations of people through colonization forced conversion and more for the reason of greed than salvation. People who wear the mask of morality when convenient or for the subjugation of others, even their kids at times, are not good people but posers donning whatever ethical hat needed to accomplish their goals. The many faces of Christians are not diverse believers but instead fraudsters colluding.
The Dilemma
Undoubtedly, some of you reading feel anger and will likely unsubscribe for being subjected to my so-called “hostility” towards your religion. You might be thinking I need to couch my words in politeness or have philosophical debates that treat Christianity with equal merit as factual, rational arguments (because clearly the belief in a book thousands of years old telling of an all-powerful entity who couldn’t think of better way to save people from sin, other than to flood world or have his own son murdered) is equal to any secular belief based on science and fact. My answer to you is “good riddance.” I hope you figure out the fraud you live before it bites you, but I truly believe you are a lost cause.
This is my answer to the dilemma Christians create in their relentless, obstinate faith that expects everyone to bend and deal with them on their terms. I apologize for nothing. I give Christians no edge, no quarter, because their position is not equal in merit to mine, and I don’t answer to them.
Oppositely, there are those reading who might remember the sting of religion and the many problems it exacerbated in your life. You may have felt the pain of praying to be treated equally only to meet with more inequality. Perhaps you have suffered misogyny or racism. Perhaps depression and anxiety plague you, requiring some pharmaceutical to control and something I say resonates for knowing you did not bake these stressors into your character without the help of the Christians surrounding you.
Unlike what the Christians believe, you recognize you didn’t become a failure, successful, fearful, anxious, vicious, arrogant, or just plain damaged person of your own doing. You got this way because you were inflicted with harm, and like me — told it was your fault. You won’t hear me saying things like you need to take responsibility for problems you did not create because my default position is to believe you and seek to restore justice — our justice. We will place the onus of responsibility where it belongs and not arbitrarily gaslight ourselves and others with self-incrimination as the Christians teach. We will no longer make choices based on the Christian herd but will intake the facts and make the best, not ready-made answers.