Growing up in the evangelical church, I was trained to believe all sorts of doctrines based on my denomination’s ideas of what the Bible says. We were taught that people who didn’t become Christians before they died would suffer forever in hell. We were taught that having sex is pretty much the worst thing that someone can do unless one met very specific requirements such as being married to the person you were sleeping with and being the opposite genders of each other. We were taught that drinking alcohol is wrong if it isn’t during communion. And we were taught that, every Sunday, people should gather in a building to sing and listen to a presentation by a pastor or elder and then give money to the people running the building.

What most rarely did, however, was ask why we should believe and do (or avoid) these things. If one of us did happen to wonder aloud about any of these doctrines, we were simply told that the Bible teaches these things and we were possibly shown a passage or two of Scripture that seemed, at least on first glance, to support these ideas. What we weren’t shown were any contextual reasons for interpreting the passages the way we were told we should, or given any proof that the English versions of the Bible we were using were translated accurately. And, perhaps most importantly, we were never told why we should consider the Bible to be inerrant, or even the basis of spiritual truth, in the first place.

Most people in the churches I grew up in were happy to take the doctrines they were taught for granted, trusting that their pastors and teachers must know what they’re talking about and believing that their leaders wouldn’t lie to them (even unknowingly). A few of us, however, weren’t content to simply accept “because the Bible says so” as gospel truth. We got right down to the foundations of our faith and questioned the validity of ideas like biblical inerrancy, and even if we accepted that there is truth in Scripture we didn’t blindly trust that the translators were without bias or error in their English versions. And, after much investigation, we concluded that many of the doctrines we had been taught were actually being read into Scripture based on the presuppositions of our church leaders as opposed to legitimately being interpreted from Scripture without bias.

Of course, coming to theological and spiritual conclusions contrary to those that we’d been taught didn’t make us popular. Despite what you might hear, Christians don’t become heretics to win friends and influence people. Rather, we become heretics because we’re more interested in truth than in dogma. Because if truth is what you’re after, questioning your assumptions is not enough. You’ve got to actually be willing to accept that you might have been lied to and be able to handle the consequences that will inevitably arise when it becomes known that you’re not blindly following the leader anymore.

To those brave few who do make this uncomfortable, but ultimately rewarding journey, I congratulate you and wish you godspeed on your travels. To the rest of you, I also wish you well and simply ask that you go easy on those who may not agree with you 100%.

Why?

Well, most evangelicals, aside from certain Calvinists, believe in a doctrine called “the age of accountability.” A child reaches the age of accountability when they are old enough to understand the difference between right and wrong and can be held accountable for their sins. Up until they reach this age, children who die apparently go to heaven (or so the doctrine goes) because they’re too young to understand the consequences of, and hence be held responsible for, their actions. However, once someone reaches this age (which supposedly varies from individual to individual) they will end up in hell forever if they happen to pass away without first becoming a Christian.

Now I’d estimate that 90% or more of the human population will go to hell forever, at least according to the traditional view that this is the fate of non-Christians who die in their sins, so if everlasting torment in hell for non-believers past the age of accountability is true then perhaps abortionists should be considered the greatest missionaries there are as they’d probably be responsible for helping more souls avoid hell than all of the missionaries alive today combined. Not only that, shouldn’t those traditionalists who have babies be thought of as the greatest monsters there are, seeing as they’re willing to risk the eternal souls of their offspring simply to satisfy a desire (either for children, or simply for sex for those who believe that birth control is wrong)? Since there is a greater than 90% chance that your child will end up in hell if they reach the age of accountability (depending on where and when you happen to live the odds might vary, but they’re still pretty grim), wouldn’t you be much better off killing them before they get that old? If you believe in everlasting hell for those past this age then would not someone like Andrea Yates, who killed her children so they would be sure to avoid such a terrible eternal outcome, be one of the best examples of good motherhood we have? Sure, it might be a sin to commit murder, but sins can always be forgiven while you’re still alive and her children are now guaranteed a place in heaven (or so the logic should go if traditionalists are correct).

If a parent allowed their child to participate in any activity where their kid has a 90% or greater chance of dying, or even just getting seriously injured, one would (rightly) consider that parent to be negligent and report that parent to the child protective agencies, and yet how many Christian parents are willing to gamble their children’s soul with a fate far worse, and far longer, than simple death or injury?

No matter how horrible this might sound to you, I challenge you to show me where I’m wrong. I’ve made this challenge before and have yet to have anyone correct my logic, and I don’t expect to have it happen anytime soon either.

Just for the record, since I’m a Christian Universalist I obviously don’t believe that anyone ends up in hell for eternity so I am not promoting murder here, nor is this a post in favour of, or against, abortion. This post is simply to challenge yet another inconsistency in traditionalist Christian ideology.

There are various sorts of distractions in religion. One major type is “true doctrine,” beliefs that aren’t allowed to be questioned. Of course they are questioned, and debates occur and new denominations are formed (and heretics are persecuted in various ways). Meanwhile, in all the fighting for doctrinal purity, people miss out on what is really real and actually happening and not bothering to help change the things in the world that need changing.

Along the same lines, religious leaders (and certain scriptures) will often teach conflicting and contradictory beliefs (and often absurd stories and doctrines that logically can’t be true) and insist that we must believe all of them. This creates cognitive dissonance in a religion’s followers and induces compliance in them. Deep down they realize that what they have been told doesn’t seem to make sense, but they trust that their leaders (or the writers of their scriptures) must know what they are talking about and decide that if these things don’t make perfect sense then they must not be smart enough to think for themselves and that they’d better just continue blindly doing and believing what they’ve been told.

Another type of religious distraction is “morality.” Religious people are led to believe that God actually cares about things like what sorts of clothing you’re wearing or what you’re eating or drinking or whether certain synonyms come out of your mouth or whether you’ve watched a certain TV show or movie or read a certain book or had sex with a certain person or seen images of someone without clothing or whether you’re working on a particular day of the week or whether you’ve attended a particular religious service or participated in a particular religious practice, to name just a few of the many hundreds of examples I could give. Religious “morality” is particularly insidious because it causes those who live (or try to live) “moral” lives to think that they’re actually doing a good thing while keeping them distracted from what really matters.

Ultimately, religion is one of the biggest smoke and mirror games played by the powers that be (human or otherwise). It keeps people so distracted from reality that they end up thinking harmless things are evil and harmful actions are good. It asks people to persecute heretics, apostates and other infidels in the name of their religion or deity (sometimes just in small ways like marginalizing them, but all too often with more violent methods as well), and to ignore (and sometimes even look down upon) those who are hurting and need assistance. I don’t believe that any deity who was actually good would ask these things of us. Instead, I believe that any religion asking us to take these illusions seriously is a lie and should be carefully avoided.

What does this mean? It means that I look at what believing or practicing a particular theological belief or practice tends to lead to in its followers. When a religious belief causes people outside of that particular orthodoxy to be belittled, insulted, ostracized, persecuted, fired, censored, expelled from their homes and hometowns, beaten, robbed, imprisoned, tortured, raped, or even killed in the name of that religion (all things that do happen with the approval of certain religious leaders and teachings) it makes it pretty easy to determine that this particular viewpoint isn’t at all positive and should be avoided. Also, if a religious group doesn’t allow people inside that particular orthodoxy to think for themselves, but rather insists that they let their religious leaders determine what is true for them, I know that something is fishy and that I should probably not have much to do with that particular group. If openly questioning (or even disagreeing with) a particular doctrine will get a member of a religious group in trouble then I know that this group is probably not to be trusted. And if a particular denomination insists (or even just asks) that someone do physical harm to them self or somebody else, be it some form of bodily mutilation or even suicide, run as far away from them as possible and never look back.

When it comes down to it, there are two sets of fruit that a theological paradigm tends to lead to. The first is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self-control. The second is fear, selfishness, peer pressure, intolerance, hostility, anti-intellectualism, arrogance, hypocrisy, and misery. If a doctrine or practice can be demonstrated to lead to the former then it sounds like something that should be embraced. If it has been shown to lead to the latter then I would think that it should be avoided if at all possible.