Your Own Personal Jesus, Fuck You

My thoughts on religion lately--although I'm not sure I've put it quite this way--are that religion is not actually a cohesive set of beliefs but a framework for an identity and self-entitlement. "I am Christian and can justify my actions through scripture/church peers/church elders." However the individual beliefs vary so much it's comical.

Christians--and I use Christians all the time because that's what I've grown up around and am surrounded by--seem to believe all sorts of crazy things that aren't shared beliefs. In particular I've had them describe tree fairies (remember that, Faithinate?), varying incarnations of angels (you'd think there'd be a standard definition of what an angel is), ghosts, etc. And they have differing beliefs on raising kids, accepting gays, and all sorts of other stuff.

It's hard to look at the world as cynically as SurferJesus looks at it, but the more I look the more the cynicism seems justified. Perhaps the most comforting thing about religion is that it accepts and forgives your flaws and sins if you pay mouth service (and tithe) to the church. It cleanses the guilt from the guilty without remedying the victim, and quite often it demonizes the victim for not accepting the sinner's cleansing. I think the three of us have seen examples of this closer than we want, and closer than I could have imagined just a few years ago.

No, I take that back. I had imagined the possibility before that the sinner had wronged the victim. Some questions had no satisfactory answers, and one possibility seemed to fit. When I was told the story I was not surprised. It's just that everyone else who knew about it kept quiet about it, deified the sinner and made the victim a pariah. Some great goddam Christians, eh? That sin fucked up at least two generations of a family, and the rest of the family praised the sinner and wondered why the vitcim was so crazy. Fuck you all, seriously, for allowing Christianity to celebrate a multi-year child rapist for 40+ years and leave those of us who finally say enough is enough to be the outcasts.

I think I was going somewhere else with the thread of thought that started this post, but now I am here, pissed off at the more prominent Christians in my life. And sometimes we wonder why so much anger shows through this blog. It's because I've seen too many Christians, Muslims and Jews near to me and far away use religion to excuse acting in ways universally perceived as evil when not blessed by or later excused by God (with or without the victims' consent). Fuck all of you.

Oh yeah, I think the point I was headed for is that each person has their own individual religion or set of beliefs rather than a cohesive shared religion. Perhaps the shared parts are the forgiveness. "God forgave me, really, so I'm all right now." And everybody's happy...except the family pariah who was raped by her father for years and her family. But it's her fault because she hasn't accepted that God forgave the sinner. Guess she didn't get the memoBible.