Random musings

This morning I read the featured Mystery Worshipper on the Ship of Fools site, who went to the New Life church in Colorado recently (which was the church Ted Haggard was pastoring 'til it turned out he was pretty pro-gay after all).

Somehow it brought back a number of conversations I had with various people over the weekend. Mostly, they ran along the lines of them bashing the hell out of Christianity and then saying, "But not you of course, you're one of the nice/normal Christians." Perhaps a compliment of a kind, but still...

It's like mentioning you're Christian makes you the whipping boy for the tirades people unleash about the bad experiences they've had with Christians. Or the experiences they haven't had but they're sure that they would have, had they ever met a Christian like the evangelical ones on TV in the wee hours of the morning, crammed between 1900-call-me-while-I-languish-on-a-car ads, and even though they've met loads of Christians who are great, they're sure there's someone out there who's going to pounce on them and try to ram a Bible down their throat because "all Christians are like that, aren't they, but not you, of course..."

It annoys me that people are happy to be equally as ignorant of Christianity, criticising and condemning it without bothering to find out more about it, as many Christians are happy to be ignorant and do the criticism/condemning thing about other matters. Unfortunatley, most of us like to cling to our pre-fab opinions and learning more about an issue that's outside of our opinions is too much effort... And that applies for those on all sides of an issue.

But there are some Christians out there who definitely don't do themselves any favours. And they don't do other Christians any favours, either, because we all end up getting tarred with the same brush (in much the same way as Muslims are often painted as all being fundamentalists, I guess). The actions of a few who go down the slightly nutty path always end up being the ones everyone else gets lumped with, though.

I know why I have issues with loads of things within "Christianity" and I'm not surprised that people on the "outside" of it would rather grate their elbows over rough concrete than go to church. You know, all the fundamentalist Christians, the evangelicals who ram their brand of Christianity down other's throats, the God Squad people, those using Christianity as their excuse to push ethnocentric or nationalistic views, to attack others instead of caring for them, to promote the invasion of Iraq or other wars (such as supporting Israel's invasion of Lebanon, because of some misguided pish-tosh), the kind of things that I'm expecting to see in Andrew Denton's documentary if I catch it on the weekend, Jesus Camp, my-way-or-you're-going-to-hell-
but-Jesus-loves-you-and-did-I-mention-you'll-be-burning?, Hillsong-style prosperity gospel, hurting others instead of helping them with what Jesus and God had to say...

Not that there aren't many, many sincere Christians who fit into those kind of things and who are absolutely lovely and committed to telling others about Jesus, but it's the overall picture that people outside of Christianity are seeing that's putting them off. And frankly, the picture is often scary to sad to jargonistic to very outdated to plain ol' deeply, deeply odd. All of the people who are there being the "nice/normal" ones every week sort of get ignored because it's much more fun to look at the other ones who are getting up there on the nutty-as-a-fruitcake scale.

And as one of the apparently "nice/normal" Christians, quite frankly, I have no idea what on earth can be done about any of it *sigh*