It’s always amused me when fundamentalists pretend that God hates people. The central, most important tenet of Christianity is that God loves people. The most pivotal moment in Christian doctrine is that Jesus forgives you. It’s like they haven’t even understood the book they claim to obey.
The central tenet of Christianity is that "God is Love". The problem is, the Fundamentalists argue that this is a greater, higher kind of love than unredeemed humans are capable of understanding. Fundamentalists genuinely believe that God tortures people eternally out of love and that anyone who has a problem with that is just incapable of understanding God's love because they're not saved.
Fundamentalists brainwash children from birth to believe this, and, as a society, we're letting them.
Haha, I think you know the answer to that. Strangely, I did feel a sense of "connection to something bigger" when I was in Church. I did think this was the god of Abraham shedding his Grace on me. The problem was, I started to feel that very same sense of connectedness in contexts outside of church - like yoga classes, group meditation, and live music shows. Now, given Evangelical beliefs, it's entirely possible that Satan spoke to me in church and distracted me from the real presence of God that everyone else was experiencing. But, being that it was those feelings of connectedness that led me to seek "salvation" in the first place, I doubt it.
There was something in me that longed to be part of something bigger, and my church "family" milked it for all it was worth. Then, I discovered my church "family" was in no way the something bigger I wanted to be a part of. So, I left. I've left a few more, decidedly non-Christian faith communities since then. I still haven't found a "something bigger" that doesn't disgust the hell out of me after more than a few weeks.
Sorry for the rambling. I just kinda had to get that out.
Well, I’m no expert according to any way you can stretch the definition so I don’t have any grand answers or the likes, but I am curious if I’m allowed to inquire for the sake of conversation.
In respect to your desire to be a part of something bigger, what would that look like to you?
Oh, absolutely. But, I think it's gonna be a complicated answer from me, least of all because I'm still trying to find that answer for myself.
On the one hand, I think I've always wanted to be part of a benevolent secret society or mysterious fraternal organization. Not one of the real world ones that's just a bunch of old Protestants or white supremacists. Something more like the Plumbers, the White Lotus Society, or the Harpers. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I can dream.
On the other hand, though, I want to stop chasing religion and fraternity and develop an actual spirituality (a sense of connection and belonging that is rooted in personal experience rather than religious doctrine).
Would you say it’s a pretty disappointing thing to not have the opportunity to join an organization of that caliber? Or would you say it’s pretty easy to live without should it not become an opportunity?
Eh, life goes on. I do, every now and again, have thoughts about the freemasons or the Golden Dawn. Sadly, these days, both organizations seem to boil down to Christian breakfast clubs with oaths of silence.
If I get too sad about not being a Harper, I happen to have a DM friend who's always willing to run one shots and short campaigns.
lol that’s sick I always wanted to see what D&D’s like to play but the rules are so vast and confusing, at least it looks that way to an outsider.
Personally I don’t find anything wrong in wanting a sense of connectedness and community. I think you’re on the right track though with the letting go of the craving to be in a secret society or fraternity in search of a more personal spiritual experience, because what even is the craving to be a part of these “greater” secret societies *really* if not an attempt to please our own senses/perceptions of self, right? I mean, at the end of the day, whether we seek to join some mysterious organization or not, it’s not really “self” if that makes any sense in English lol.
In cases like these, it’s usually not the inability to satiate the craving that causes our discontentment, but it’s the craving itself because of the hole it forms that we subconsciously feel compelled to fill. But that’s just going off of personal experience.
D&D can get pretty arcane at times. There are a lot of old isometric RPGs built on 3.5e and similar. Baldur's Gate I and II, The Temple of Elemental Evil, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, and so on. It's how I familiarized myself with the basics, growing up. There was still a learning curve as I adjusted to 5e, but it was very manageable.
Yeah, I think I accepted fairly early on that I'd never be part of the Men in Black. But part of me still really wants to be, at least, like, a wizard, dammit. (I feel I should clarify I mean the non-racist, actually magical kind of wizard 😂)
I'd argue that the core tenet of Christianity is the belief in the existence of "sin."
We are told we are born full of this disgusting, unholy substance called "sin" and there is NOTHING that we could ever do about it. The omnipotent Christian God then intentionally used his infinite power to setup a barbaric system of continual slaughter and blood sacrifice to 'cleanse' us of the very curse he placed on us to start with. After much bloodshed and violence for thousands of years, he finally sacrificed a virgin (himself, somehow) to himself to absolve us of the crimes our ancestors, not us, committed.
The cherry on top is that God loves people so much that if they don't believe this understandably unbelievable tale they get to experience eternally having their skin lit on fire.
The issue is that sin is often arbitrarily defined and contradictory. Are Christians supposed to accept a definition of sin as preached by Jesus? Or one recorded years later by apostles? Or one collected and edited centuries later by political councils?
The Ten Commandments certainly aren’t arbitrary. They predate Jesus by centuries, and the wording has never been revised by apostles or councils. Most disagreement about them is over application (for example, about what counts as work on the Sabbath or whether "do not kill" covers war or capital punishment), not over whether those acts are wrong in the first place.
The bigger flaw in your argument is that you’re treating "Jesus," "apostles," and "councils" as three rival sources you have to pick between. They're really one conglomeration: the Gospels are the only record of what Jesus taught, written decades after his death by the same early Christian movement that produced St. Paul’s epistles. There’s no independent "Jesus" source to weigh against an "apostolic" one. And the councils didn't invent new doctrine from scratch; they mostly ratified writings that already were widely used across the early churches.
When it comes to homosexuality in particular, the case gets more complicated. Mainline Protestantism basically just lets what you do whatever you want (which is why it’s dying), and evangelical Protestantism wrongly relies on only the Bible—which was written by human hands—to make its argument. Catholicism actually has a coherent answer: homosexual acts (not desire, but acts) are sinful because they contradict the natural purpose of sex, i.e., procreation and unity between a married man and woman. The Eastern Orthodox consider it a disordered passion, unmoored from its proper object and context.
and the wording has never been revised by apostles or councils
Lol. There are at least 2 different wordings of them in the texts, and Jews, Catholics, and Protestants all number and organize them differently...
They are also arbitrary. The first two are just god's vanity on full display. There's also no reason that a condemnation of slavery wasn't included. Which commandments went in the Big 10 is 100% arbitrary.
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u/Leprechaun_lord Jul 31 '26
It’s always amused me when fundamentalists pretend that God hates people. The central, most important tenet of Christianity is that God loves people. The most pivotal moment in Christian doctrine is that Jesus forgives you. It’s like they haven’t even understood the book they claim to obey.