..Make Believe..

I've joked that I never learn the references to the scriptures I know because the references weren't inspired. But its true, by no stretch of the imagination are bible chapter & verse separations inspired by God. Adding chapter & verse separations took away the story of scripture & made it into a reference book, similar to modern law code. The mere existence of references gives people the impression that the bible is a legal moral code book. Thus many christians act as lawyers, simply comparing bible references. Jesus didn't speak kindly regarding lawyers (aka "teachers of the law"). "Turn your bibles to Luke 11:46."

Even when stories are being read preachers must insert a principle or moral or way to avoid sin into them. So even the structure of how the bible is taught & studied is done in a legal way. Let's teach our kids to memorize the 10 commandments, lets memorize verses. It's all Godless religion & it's stupid.

Christian "debate," discussions, & apologetics are often people acting as lawyers trying to prove the other guilty, guilty of being wrong. They are being devil's advocates because the devil is the accuser & an accuser is DEFINED as someone with the goal of charging others with guilt or error.

Sure Jews did the same things in Jesus' time & before that but at least they read the whole thing. Many verses are simply sentence fragments. People will quote a verse without even quoting an entire sentence. The ever popular "forsake not the assembling of yourselves" is 1/3 of a verse & that verse itself is already a sentence fragment.

I'm sick of playing scripture tag & seeing legal style biblical arguing. Of course it is right to love. But love either has to be the sole goal or the natural course of life. The goal preached of always being right & doing right seems like a good goal but it is self-centered & makes an enemy out of all who we view as wrong. When you are always seeking to be right a single wrong idea or wrong action from anyone (including yourself) demonizes or at least stains that person in your mind. This leads to inner turmoil or outer disrespect & combativeness.

One thing seldom realized is that "earning righteousness" can not only be attempted by our behavior but also by our knowledge, by trying to "believe" all of the "right" things. Of course people want to know & believe truth but to box yourself or others into an imaginary expectation of no mental error is a terrible goal because it cannot be real. None of this was even supposed to be academic to begin with.

Jesus came to introduce us to our real loving Father. Instead of relating to our Father & receiving His love many of us seek to have all of our intellectual questions satisfied. Let me tell you I didn't set up a classroom in the hospital when my daughter was born to teach her everything I know. Why should you expect the same from God when you're reborn? A baby needs to understand trust, love, & security before anything else. Why would it be different between you & God? And when do our needs for trust, love, & security leave our lives?

We want God to be Quiz Master G the host of The American Bible Challenge on GSN & give us all the answers regarding what the bible says & means. A good father wants to be with & enjoy His children & he will teach them as their lives go on.

How most of Christianity teaches a "relationship with God our Father" boils down to learning the bible & trying to act perfect. Thus No Real God Interaction is Necessary. So all this self-righteous intellectual bull crap that church teaching squeezes us into leaves us living as abused orphans so traumatized that we're always getting into fights with one another regarding who is right about the facts regarding our daddy who is nowhere around. Feeling smarter & morally superior to others is our replacement drug for actually knowing our real Father with our bible knowledge & bible obedience being how we take the dosages.

I've heard several Christian authors admit that their "belief in God" or the reason they "follow Jesus" is because the bible has the most logically viable worldview or that Jesus had the most loving ideals or moral code. There is nothing spiritual or personal there.

This Spiritless religion that is out there is based on "Make Believe" in 3 different ways.
1. It is false, it is made up, not true.
2. It requires us to imagine its descriptions of God such as viewing our feelings of guilt & shame as "the Holy Spirit's conviction" or viewing our sense of obligation to "biblical" teachings as "God's guidance."
3. Its main goal is for you to MAKE yourself believe & MAKE others believe. Often "believe" means nothing more than to mentally agree.

The image of God we've been sold has almost nothing spiritual or fatherly about Him yet those were the aspects Jesus emphasized. I hate that churches have turned so many head thinkers into orphan lawyers fighting about the book of their make believe father & heart thinkers into children that are manipulated into being convinced that their perfect father abuses them for not meeting his expectation of flawlessness.