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Goodbye Jesus

Fundies aren't the only "bad" Xians


Checkmate

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Liberal Xians are just as bad as their conservative, Fundamentalist counterparts. Perhaps even worse.

 

How can I say such a harsh thing? Easily.

 

Because Liberal/modernist Xians claim to embrace only the “good” parts of the bible/religion, while rejecting the “bad” or “offensive” parts (i.e. hell, intolerance, genocide, etc.)

 

And while this may fool some people, I’m not buying it.

 

This Liberal Xian position of “nice person, who doesn’t embrace bad doctrines” reminds me of the story of the military chaplain and some soldiers.

 

The chaplain was new to the base, and he had been warned about three troublesome soldiers. They made it a point to give the base chaplain grief concerning his religious views. But he was a LIBERAL chaplain, and he suspected he knew what annoyed the soldiers so much.

 

One day he encountered the three soldiers. They boldly confronted the chaplain and asked him if he believed in hell.

 

The chaplain replied, “Do you mean a real, literal place of fire, brimstone and eternal suffering?” They answered, “Yes.”

 

The chaplain, sensing that this was the bone of their contention with Xianity, figured to placate them with his modern, liberal view on hell.

 

He responded by saying, “Why no, I don’t believe in a literal hell of fire and eternal suffering. I believe that hell is merely a separation from God, and those in this state have a ‘burning thirst’ to be near God, but are not satisfied.”

 

One soldier then replied to him, “Then what good are you?!?” The chaplain was taken aback as he continued, “Sir, if hell is NOT real, then where is the danger? Just what are we being ‘saved’ from? As ‘sinners’ we’re ALREADY separated from god, and I must tell you, it ain’t that bad. So if hell isn’t real, who needs you?

 

“But if hell IS real,” he continued, “and you don’t believe in it, then you won’t warn us of the danger that lies before us. That makes you an evil person, who is misleading us. Either way you cut it, you’re useless and of no good to anyone. Have a nice day.” And with that they marched off, leaving the bemused chaplain behind.

 

(I first heard this story from a Fundamentalist pastor who supported preaching hellfire and damnation. Surprise, surprise.)

 

In my estimation, the Liberal Xian is more dangerous than the Fundamentalist, because they are deceitful. They attempt to pass themselves off as “good”, “nice” members of a “bad” or “misunderstood” religion. Insisting all the while that we simply ignore the “rotten apples” of the bunch. There is SOME good in Xianity, after all. “Don’t throw out the baby Jesus with the batismal water”, is what some of them will say.

 

With their “good” nature fully ensconced, the Liberal Xian seeks to bait the unwary person into an ugly trap. A trap, that once sprung, is incredibly difficult from which to extricate oneself.

 

“Surely,” the Liberal Xian will argue, “the good portions of the religion must be enough to offset the bad?”

 

Really? Well, allow me to use yet another favorite church story to refute the illogic of this position. The Tale of the “Poo-poo” Brownies.

 

(Some of you are probably familiar with it. It’s used to refute the notion that even a little sin is bad for your health, and shouldn’t be tolerated.)

 

The story goes something like this:

 

A father tells his children he doesn’t want them watching TV. He says it’s all bad and evil. His children reply that TV isn’t ALL bad, there’s some good stuff too. Besides, just a LITTLE bad TV surely won’t damage them.

 

The father disagrees, and to make his point he bakes his children some brownies. Some very special brownies, with a special ingredient. Just a little dog poop.

 

He offers the brownies to his kids, telling them he made them with some doggie-doo. They immediately recoil from them. The dad asks, “What’s the harm? It’s only a LITTLE poop. Surely the little poop I used won’t harm you?”

 

Of course his children refuse to eat the offensive brownies, and the dad smiles in triumph as he has successfully demonstrated that even in small doses, “bad” is not be acceptable.

 

Well, my Liberal Xian friends, THAT door swings both ways. Just as with “poo-poo brownies”, I refuse to accept a “poo-poo religion”. Don’t waste your time trying to convince me that the “little” evils caused by religion and inherent within religion (in this case Xianity) should be overlooked and accepted because of the “good” notions found elsewhere.

 

This position of overlooking the bad by the Liberal Xian makes them more evil than the Fundamentalist.

 

At least the Fundamentalist doesn’t try to whitewash or excuse his dogmatic position. “God’s way or the highway!,” is his motto. And I’m glad for that honesty. At least you can KNOW you should avoid this lunatic!

 

Meanwhile, the Liberal (“nice”) Xian will piss down your back and tell you it’s raining! “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Like the good little Judas goats they are, the Liberal Xian leads many innocent sheep to the slaughter. Smiling all the way.

 

Liberal Xians are more dangerous and full of shit than Fundamentalists, and we should not revere them, nor applaud them, for their so-called moderate and “nice” position. They are fully deserving of the equivalent scorn and derision we normally reserve for the “rabid Fundies”.

 

So that is why Liberal Xians piss me off, and why I say they are JUST as bad, if not worse than their Fundamentalist brethren.

 

 

 

P.S. – If you’re a Liberal Xian, and you find yourself embarrassed by the “bad” elements of your faith, to the extent that you try to deny them or rationalize them, why, then, do you continue in the faith? Why continue calling yourself a Xian, if you go so far as to deny the bible and argue against popular, received church doctrine?

 

Why not simply quit? Call yourself something else. Join another group. Become an atheist/agnostic/deist, etc. Stop trying to cling to the name of Christian.

 

Why bother with a belief system that requires this much maintenance, mental manipulation, defending and disingenuousness?

 

The Truth doesn’t need to be explained nor defended. It just IS. And it is plain for everyone to see and understand.

 

Can you honestly say the same about your religion?

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Sigh...

 

Most people are liberal Christians because they feel they have no other choice, or are not brave enough to leave, or feel like their families will hate them when they leave. I used to be a liberal Christian. I personally held on as long as I did because I feared total and complete rejection from everyone I knew. When you have that kind of fear, you do whatever you can not to face it. It was only when I realized it was all a myth and that if my family and friends hated me, they weren't my true family and friends, and that I had to leave Christianity behind.

 

I will not endorse hatred of liberals. Christianity isn't going to die for a long time. Change happens slowly. If it is to happen at all, the fundies must first take the baby step of becoming a liberal Christian before they leave the nest and become ex-Christians.

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Ah. Well, my progression was fundie brainwashed Lutheran child --> moderate Christian --> liberal Christian --> neopagan/deist --> agnostic

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Well, my Liberal Xian friends, THAT door swings both ways.  Just as with “poo-poo brownies”, I refuse to accept a “poo-poo religion”.  Don’t waste your time trying to convince me that the “little” evils caused by religion and inherent within religion (in this case Xianity) should be overlooked and accepted because of the “good” notions found elsewhere.

 

Valid point. But then, of course, I'd say that the liberal christian is the one who does not try to convince/convert others, who remembers "live and let live"... and yes, maybe even "judge not". So maybe, depending on the specific definition of a "liberal christian", your point can be right... or wrong.

 

Sorry couldn't resist posting that. Please continue with your daily business now. ;)

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Valid point. But then, of course, I'd say that the liberal christian is the one who does not try to convince/convert others, who remembers "live and let live"... and yes, maybe even "judge not". So maybe, depending on the specific definition of a "liberal christian", your point can be right... or wrong.

 

Sorry couldn't resist posting that. Please continue with your daily business now. ;)

 

Point taken. I will mull that over.

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I will say that I can't join in the detestation of liberal xtians, but I do find the concept of liberal xtianity to be much more confusing than rabid fundyhood. The wrap up portion of your intial post, TK421, was more of what I think about liberal xtianity. Much of my family is of the liberal variety, and I have several friends who are. I personally stepped directly from rabid pentecostal fundy to agnostic theist to agnostic atheist.

 

I really don't understand how one can justify belief and labeling as a specific religion if you discount the accuracy and authority of said religions basis (meaning that you give up on inerrancy of the bible or other books). I think that most of the liberal variety of xtian are basically deists who can't let go of the christian label and they like Jesus, so they just sort of go with what they were taught to a certain extent.

 

I don't like to put words in people's mouths or thoughts into their heads, especiaslly when some of them may read this, but this is really how I think about it.

 

Libertus

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Poop-brownies....classic. I'll have to remember that one.

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Perhaps this little article will get a better response if I post it here, in this thread.

 

Yeah, it's a good one. :HaHa:

 

The Virus of Religious Moderation

by Sam Harris

PERHAPS it should come as no surprise that a mere wall of water, sweeping innocent multitudes from the beaches of 12 countries on Boxing Day, failed to raise global doubts about God’s existence. Still, one wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it.

 

God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the earth. Given the degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, this is not the good news that many of us imagine it to be.

 

One of the greatest challenges facing civilisation in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest concerns — about ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering — in ways that are not flagrantly irrational. Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed.

 

Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims v Christians)and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

 

It is in the face of such pointless horrors that many people of goodwill now counsel “moderation” in religion. The problem with religious moderation is that it offers us no bulwark against the spread of religious extremism and religious violence. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don’t want anything too critical to be said about people who really believe in the God of their forefathers because tolerance, above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world — to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish — is antithetical to tolerance as moderates conceive it.

 

In so far as religious moderates attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, they close the door to more sophisticated approaches to human happiness. Rather than bring the full force of 21st-century creativity and rationality to bear, moderates ask that we merely relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos.

 

But by failing to live by the letter of the texts — while tolerating the irrationality of those who do — religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. As moderates, we cannot say that religious fundamentalists are dangerous idiots, because they are merely practising their freedom of belief. We can’t even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. It is time we recognised that religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

 

Religious moderates imagine that theirs is the path to peace. But this very ideal of tolerance now drives us toward the abyss. Religious violence still plagues our world because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and secular interests have restrained the most lethal improprieties of faith. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

 

Moderation in religion has made it taboo even to acknowledge the differences among our religious traditions: to notice, for instance, that Islam is especially hostile to the principles of civil society. There are still places in the Muslim world where people are put to death for imaginary crimes — such as blasphemy — and where the totality of a child’s education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. Throughout the Muslim world, women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed.

 

And yet, these same societies are acquiring arsenals of advanced weaponry. In the face of these perils, religious moderates — Christians, Muslims and Jews — remain entranced by their own moderation. They are least able to fathom that when jihadists stare into a video camera and claim to “love death more than the infidels love life”, they are being candid about their state of mind.

 

But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation — because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.

 

Sam Harris is author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

 

FROM HERE

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Guest JP1283
I find myself with deist beliefs.  However, I don't know nor can I prove that there is a god.  Is it possible to be a deist and agnostic?

 

Of course. I think that's what I'm leaning towards. I can't believe that everything happened by accident; however, I don't claim to know who or what exactly "God" is. Ahhhh, sweet agnostic deism.

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um....I disagree with the OP...I don't give a fuck what anybody does or believes as long as they don't fuck it up for other people.

 

which can include ANYBODY.

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I find myself with deist beliefs.  However, I don't know nor can I prove that there is a god.  Is it possible to be a deist and agnostic?

I think so. I'm Agnostic in my opinion about what I can know, but I currently hold an Atheistic view. See if I can explain it...

 

I don't think we can prove either or if God is not, but in my opinion most things in science points to that there is no God. So in a sense you could say my belief is that there is not God, but I can't be 100% sure.

 

And you could hold the other view, that you believe that there might be something "up there", but you're not sure, and you know that there is no way of proving your believe.

 

Does it make sense?

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'eh. I think Christians are as deluded as any adult who still believes in the Easter Bunny, but most, to a point, don't "pick my pocket, nor break my leg," as Jefferson put it. Most who know I'm athiest generally view me with amusement, just as I do them. It's the fundies that give me problems, not the liberals, even if both are equally idiotic and condemning me just as easily. Just like my roommate; he's practically deist, except for his unfailing belief in Jesus. By just stating his belief in the fly-on-the-cross, he condemns me to Hell without saying directly. But it's implied, even without him recognizing it.

 

By the way, never watch "What the ^&% do we know?" with a near-deist-who-thinks-he's-psychic. Bad, bad thing to do. :Doh:

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Having a Liberal Christian sister, my guess is that the LCs are trying to make something good out of Christianity. That they see a potiental that could make the world a better place and salvageing it. I'm not saying it's without flaws, but I have more respect for them than the fundies who I find callous, hateful, and frightening. At least a number of the LCs actually give a damn about their fellow man.

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Having a Liberal Christian sister, my guess is that the LCs are trying to make something good out of Christianity.  That they see a potiental that could make the world a better place and salvageing it.  I'm not saying it's without flaws, but I have more respect for them than the fundies who I find callous, hateful, and frightening.  At least a number of the LCs actually give a damn about their fellow man.

 

Yup.

Let's imagine for a moment that christianity was all about Jesus being a good role model for his pacifism and about believers striving to be as good has he supposedly was. Nothing more. And let's imagine that the scripture of that faith wouldn't say anything but "Jesus was a wonderful person, try to be like him". Would that be that bad? I don't think so.

Alas, we know it's not like that... :vent:

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Liberal/moderate xians (Or muslims, or whatever) can say all the pretty words about their religion they wish. What really counts is action. If they are willing to stand against the fundie agenda, then maybe they have a little value as human beings. If they let the fundies go unopposed, simply because they are "Fellow Xians", then I count them among the enemy.

 

To my eyes, most liberal xians are hopelessly naive.

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Fweethawt, thank you so much for post #10! It's a perfect, and well articulated argument that supports where my thoughts are headed.

 

Religious beliefs, no matter HOW benign they are made to appear, are STILL a cover-up and a platform for horrible behaviors.

 

It has been said before, but it bears repeating: "Simply because you hold to an ideal, AND you're considered a NICE person, that does NOT mean your IDEAS should be accepted and treated with respect."

 

How many of us respect the IDEALS of slavery? How about Apartheid? Or Nazism? We typically HATE these ideas, and USUALLY respond to them with venom. AND WE USUALLY VILLIFY THOSE WHO EMBRACE THESE IDEALS EVEN IF THEY ARE NICE.

 

My point is: Why should "Liberal Xians" (the believers of what we all consider to be a horrid religion) be treated with kid gloves? Why is it that THEIR ideas are considered "tolerable", when it still supports the religion we despise?

 

Why should we "hate the religion, but respect the GOOD possibilities of this filthy religion"? (To paraphrase a phrase.)

 

I am NOT advocating that we begin killing or even hating Xians of any stripe. I'm all for kindness, respect and decency. But I prefer to treat the IDEALS of Liberal Xians with the same flamethrower of disgust we use for Fundie IDEALS. (Sort of like burning some diseased rag doll your child has embraced. We do it out of love and caring for their welfare, NOT out of malice.)

 

These IDEALS are fucking dangerous! And YOU all KNOW this, or else YOU would still be Xians yourself!

 

THAT is all I'm trying to point out.

 

This is NOT some call to rudeness, or disrespect, as some people are apparently leaning towards.

 

P.S. - Please feel free to disagree with MY ideas on this issue, but please try to hold your contempt of ME in abeyance. I'm merely expressing my opinion. Just trying to create some food for thought.

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I come from the fundy baptist background.

 

My wife's sister is a liberal xtian.

 

We attended christmas eve church with wife sisters family and I was appalled at the service.

 

It was SOoooooo diluted. I dont know if Jesus was even mentioned. The pastor (?) spent the sermon reading a childrens' book about love and shit and golden rule stuff, out loud to us. What the F kind of sermon was that???

 

If I had cared more, I'd've been insulted. Xmas eve is supposed to at least be about the baby jesus fable (like we really need to hear it again :rolleyes: ) and the purpose of coming to earth with sin and redemption and all that. But a friggen child's book??

 

At least the fundys DO say what they stand for, and they DO actually believe it. These liberal xtians are either dishonest or just deluding themselves with their "cafeteria" style bible reading--i guess that was my point.

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Liberal/moderate xians (Or muslims, or whatever) can say all the pretty words about their religion they wish.  What really counts is action.  If they are willing to stand against the fundie agenda, then maybe they have a little value as human beings. If they let the fundies go unopposed, simply because they are "Fellow Xians", then I count them among the enemy.

 

To my eyes, most liberal xians are hopelessly naive.

Makes perfect sense to me.

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The Liberal Christian thing amazes me. I have heard that these churches die quickly. That makes sense to me. Why plan your life around a church where the expectation is that you do NOT actually believe in it? Why go to church to fellowship with non-like-minded people? (seeing how everybody will get to believe their own way)

 

I think that these churches fall into two categories.

 

1. "Read a children's book for a sermon" type churches. As mentioned in Bongo's post. It just ends up being all about the pastor's intellectual fetishes. These pastors need a real job. Those members need to sleep in on Sunday.

 

2. "Liberal politics hangout" type churches. Same criticism as above. But these churches are a little more honest and conformist than #1.

 

Why don't churches like these just break away from their denominations????

(I know that many have.)

They think that they are going to change their denomination???

They are such reformer/radicals!!! They are sticking it to the man!!!!

They need to change their platform to something concrete or disappear.

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But I prefer to treat the IDEALS of Liberal Xians with the same flamethrower of disgust we use for Fundie IDEALS.

 

If we do this, they will be turned off and leave the site, and the potential of them deconverting will be gone, at least with our help.

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