More Things That Bother Me About Sky Daddy

Here are some other issues I take with the church’s sky daddy and followers:

Praise and worship out of fear of what might happen if you don’t. Seems like non-believers that know how to serve others and do good to help the world are more holy than believers who do it because they feel obligated or to attempt to secure themselves a better spot in the afterlife. The atheist just helps to help, without expecting anything in return.

Moral superiority and virtue signaling. Playing the victim. Claiming to be victims of discrimination over things like a fabricated war on Chistmas or marriage or whatever. 

Tax free money. Tax the church. Not doing so is absurd at this point. There are “teachers of the Bible” who are obscenely wealthy. Tricking the poor and elderly out of their money. 

Good deeds with an agenda. Assuming people must live under the fear of eternal damnation to be able to have a concept of right and wrong. The most empathetic people I see and know in the world do not identify as consevative Christians. 

Their God is the only correct God and your God is bad. All Gods are the same. There is only one, according to everyone so obviously they are all talking about the same God in different packaging. Either they are all true or none of them are.

Twisting the Bible to fit any agenda or narrative. If you are looking to prove a point, any point, you can do it using the Bible. Because it’s vague and contradictory. There are some really awful things in there. 

Mission trips. This bothers me so much. Send a group to a third world country. Build a school. Build some homes. Spend time at an orphanage. Do God’s work, for all the wrong reasons. Traumatize orphaned and homeless children by bonding with them and then abandon them. Build a school, but make them participate in the exercise of being colonized and evangelized. Help, but with a catch. But, boy don’t you feel good about yourself for making the world a better place. It’s modern colonization and it’s gross.

Weird weekend teen retreats. These are like conversion therapy and lessons in purity culture, lite. These are weekends of emotional manipulation. Not to mention I am actually aware of sexual misconduct associated with the one my friends attended in high school and there is lasting trauma to this day, as a result.

Other Thoughts I have:

Everything is sort of true. All of it. Religion. God. Energy. Astrology. Magic. Chakras. It’s all real, to a degree. 

If the God of the Bible set all of this up, Adam and Eve and the whole plot, and God’s main goal in life for us is to be together with him in heaven, yet even though he is fully capable of showing proof of his existence, won’t do it because it’s not up to him to prove to us that he exists, so we can be together, it is up to us to, not only believe he exists, but pledge our lives to him with zero proof. That’s a little messed up and that is NOT love. And the way he coaxes everyone to be close to him is through fear of damnation and punishment. Like, God’s main want is recognition for everything and for the people to worship him and beg him for forgiveness and to be content when terrible things happen because everything happens for a reason as a part of his big plan and they just have to trust that the suffering is all worth it and part of his plan? Wouldn’t that actually mean God isn’t good and is actually evil? This is like a textbook toxic relationship. “Well, yes he hit me but I totally deserved it. It’s an act of love because I know that he truly  loves me.” Wouldn’t that mean God rules earth totally based on ego? Is God of the Bible actually Ego or a metaphor for it? That would make a lot of sense.

 All we have is planet earth. There is this big narrative in the Christian teachings that says we have to turn away from the world and focus on God. We have to avoid “worldly things” and live according to what the Bible tells us. This narrative teaches us that A LOT of things are worldly and therefore sinful behavior. This varies based on your flavor of Christianity, but it ends up opening the door for sexual abuse in the church and other harmful things like purity culture and conversion therapy.  What I am saying about us only having planet earth is that we are expected to treat this place like a prison we are condemned to and that earth is something we are separate from. We are supposed to view this world as this big ugly, fallen place. We are taught to disregard this place in favor of this promise of a better place, next. To me, this is absurd. Earth is all we have. It is a reason for climate change denial as well. Because the world MUST end at some point, so why try to stop it. It’s all part of God’s plan, remember? Every human being who has ever lived, lived here. That means everything aside from what exists along with us has been created by people. Every story that has been told, has been told by people. People made everything up. Language, writing, mythology, religion, all of it. I would also like to add that I think it is foolish to look at this place, at this planet, our only home, as something we are separate from. We are not beings separate from the earth. Church taught me that we live on earth, but we come from God. There is a feeling among a lot of Christians, possibly the majority of them believe that humans are put here to use the planet and that God gave us the things we need, but that we are not a part of the planet, we are separate from it. I cannot accept that. We come from the earth and our physical body will return to it when we die. The planet is alive and we get to be part of that. It’s amazing. 

The “God” I know is not some misogynistic, closed minded, boxed in male tyrant who requires currency in the form of blind devotion or else. The God I know is just the life force that flows through everything. God is the thought that started the universe. God is pure energy. Pure consciousness. It’s not a guy with a book and a plan. God is beyond our understanding and lexicon. God is the every. God is not a person and God is not a HE. I believe in God, in the respect that I believe in the source, the essence of all life and the one light, the one consciousness. I do not believe in the God of the Bible. That God was made up by man as a means to control others. 

What about Jesus? I am also not insinuating that Jesus was not a man who existed. But, I do have some questions about whether or not the accounts we are given in the Bible are accurate, if they were translated properly and if people wrote then when they happened or much later based on stories they heard instead of eye witness accounts. If Jesus lived, he was a good dude. If he was sent to earth just to be a sacrificial lamb, to be a pawn to fulfill some holy loophole, then that’s pretty sad. 

Every major religion believes that their interpretation is the one and only one that is correct and any others are not only WRONG, but also EVIL. And each religion believes just as strongly as the next that theirs is the one true way to worship the one true God. Is one correct and the others not? Or, are all of them incorrect? Or are all of them a little correct and a lot incorrect? I choose to believe the latter. 

Every civilization has stories about why we’re here and how we got here. There are some common themes in all of the stories which might suggest that the basic understanding that comes from the source was communicated to all tribes around the world and not just one. I always thought it was odd that God would favor one tiny group of people if he had supposedly created every single person in his likeness and image. Why does it seem he only cared about one of these groups of people? Like, how were all the other people supposed to even hear about him? Did he even care?

Why do evangelical and fundementalist christians especially, put God in such a little humanized box? Assuming they know everything about what this tyrannical father figure thinks, feels, accepts, excludes, hates, and refuses to tolerate? Humans have shrunken God into this pathetic excuse for a man who is abusive, manipulative, callous and intolerant. I am really questioning why anyone would even WANT to worship a person or entity so toxic. I think they got it wrong. Like, REALLY wrong. You can’t put God in a box like that. Again, God is not a dude with a book and a list. He’s not Santa with a good list and a naughty list. That’s juvenile. Humanizing God is so BEYOND grotesque. If I were God and assuming God even spends time worrying about these trivial things, I would be so offended! Dude, that’s not even how it is…

I keep thinking about the difference between Atheist doing good deeds and Christans doing good deeds. I have spent a ton of time thinking about it and I am CONVINCED that the atheist is actually the one doing the good deeds correctly, not the christian. The atheist has no other reasons to do these aside from simply making the world a better place and so that they feel a sense of contribution of fulfillment. A church goer would tell you that the atheist is doing the good deed for purely selfish reasons whereas the christian is doing the work for God. I would argue that it’s the opposite, actually. The christian believes they have everything to gain for themselves by committing a good deed, securing a place with God in heaven. The atheist doesn’t expect anything in return and is just doing something morally and ethically good, because they feel it is the right thing to do for humanity. Who is actually being selfish? 

At this point I would safely say that I have been on the fence about considering myself a textbook christian for about five years and have, in the last two years, managed to hop over the fence. During that time I have become someone recognizable in the community for the charity work I do for the Christian based food pantry in our town. The market does a lot of good and feeds a lot of families. But, I can’t tell you how much I wish I could form a pantry similar to the market that was not affiliated with a religion. I bet more people would feel comfortable coming for help if they knew they weren’t being judged. This is something I have been putting thought into.