My daddy always told me "don't make fun of someone else's religion, it might be better than yours." I think he said that it was something his daddy had told him. I've tried to make that one of the guiding principles of my life, although I do admit to being pretty hard on Southern Baptists from time to time. I say all that to let you know that I am not criticizing anyone’s religion, per se, but I am criticizing the assumptions, processes and procedures that accompany some of them.
One of the hardest things for me to understand is how anyone can, in the name of their deity, kill someone of another religion, just because they are of another religion. I don’t care what your holy books or holy men tell you, I don’t think taking the life of someone else just because they believe differently from you is justified.
Another thing that really gets up my ass is for someone to assume they know what your religious beliefs are without ever asking you. One of my relatives came by recently to give me “one more opportunity to accept Jesus.” Granted this relative has some brain chemical imbalances that cloud his judgment when he foolishly neglects to take his medication, but I have known others of his sect that were just as obnoxious and did not have the excuse of mental illness. These assholes assume that I’m not saved because I don’t go to church. Not a one of them has ever taken the time to draw me out and find out what my beliefs are. They just set in trying to save me using their standards.
Don’t get me wrong, when I say that the aforementioned types assume without asking, that doesn’t mean that I necessarily want them to be asking. It has been my observation that most of the people that are inquiring about your religious beliefs are just trying to find out how yours are different from theirs. Then they will attempt to show you how yours are wrong and what you need to change. Its really strange to me that people who would never come up to you and ask you if you screwed your wife last night, won’t hesitate a minute about questioning you about whether or not you love Jesus. What are these people thinking? I suppose they think you won’t mind sharing the details of your religious beliefs with them. After all, they are the ones that drop Jesus’ name in every other sentence. I sometimes wonder if they are testifying or if they are just trying to convince themselves that they believe.
Some other folks that I am troubled by are what I like to refer to as the “bible cultist.” They are the ones that come along behind you and provide annotation on everything that is happening and all their sentences begin with “The bible says”. Sometimes it seems to me that these people think that God and Jesus exist just so the bible will have something to talk about. I have got news for them; the holy trinity is made up of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, not the father, the son and the holy bible.
People that are certain that members of their cult are the only ones that are going to make it to heaven also trouble me. It seems to me that the God of the Universe is great enough to find a way to accommodate different faiths. If life is so narrowly scripted that only a handful of souls are gonna make it to heaven, why not just send the whole bunch to hell to begin with and save a lot of time and trouble.
I suspect that all of these people are completely sincere in what they believe. I’m also sure that they will make it to heaven, but like I once told a fellow with whom I worked, "if heaven is gonna be full of all the folks like you, then hell might not be as bad has I had feared."
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