Wandering in the desert

Nothing raises my ire quicker than righteous Christians. I can find myself foaming at the mouth with anger in mere moments. In my mid twenties, thanks to the writing of C.S. Lewis, I developed a more nuanced understanding of Christians. They aren’t all Fred Phelps. I spend more time reading about Christians and Christianity than any other religion. Why do I spend so much time reacting to Christians? Doesn’t that make me Christian in some sense, despite the fact that I would tell people not only do I not believe in the divine origins of the bible but have no belief in a benevolent divine presence concerning itself with the day to day lives of humanity on Earth.

Imagine if you will a vase on a pedestal. The space surrounding the vase is called the negative space. If you take away the vase you remove that negative space created by the vase. I seem to be in the Christian negative space. If Christianity were gone I don’t know what would happen to that part of me. I just want to voice my dissent to Christans. Even in Jesus’ time he had doubters. Heck, Jesus himself disputed with the Christian Right of his day, the Pharisees, over honoring the Sabbath and associating with sinners.

I admire people like Delay, Inhofe, and Armey and so on to a degree for putting their beliefs into action. However, I find their dispensationalist beliefs to be completely unacceptable. Why are some Christians so ready to selectively enforce Levitical rules? Why isn’t a more progressive Christian voice prominent?

Why do I anchor myself to Christianity, even if just in the negative space around it, when it doesn’t provide any guidance, solace or refuge for me.

While T.E. Lawrence wrote about Arabs in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this quote seems applicable to some Christians as well.

Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades. The quote is from one of my favorite chapters. Listening: Blind - TV on the Radio