Let’s get something straight here.

Your church does not make you happy. Your church makes you unhappy. It makes you unhappy so often that you’re used to it. Like a bad haircut, after a while you forget that it’s not normal. But this starts from age zero. It’s a precept of your church that you do something wrong every day–you break the law–and if you somehow manage to go a whole day without doing something wrong, there are an infinite number of things you could, and therefore should, be doing right–“sins of omission”–and you aren’t doing them. You can never win. You are a SLAVE to The Law. Your church is built around the idea that YOU ARE A LOSER. Your church is making you a loser all the time. You are so used to your church making you feel bad that you think feeling bad is your normal state. You feel bad by default and you have become OK with that.

And then, once in a while, your church has a moment where it stops making you feel bad–through the invocation of grace, or the Atonement, or of repentance–and it lets up, and all the crap about you being wrong, doing the wrong things, or failing to do the right things subsides for a minute, and it leaves you alone. And not feeling bad for that moment is so disorienting, since you’re so used to feeling bad, that you think you actually feel good. You don’t really feel good, you just don’t feel bad. And it’s been so long since you didn’t feel bad that you think not feeling bad is the same as feeling good.

Your church does not care about you. It REALLY DOESN’T. It never did before, and it’s never going to. PEOPLE in your church MIGHT care about you, but I doubt it. More likely, they’re just doing what they think they’re supposed to do in order to avoid feeling worse than they already feel. They’re just as scared of not being good enough as you–maybe even more. Your church only cares that you continue to support it, and it does not, in reality, support you at all. It never has. It never will. It’s a one-way relationship. It is not in the design of churches to support the people in them. The rare moments in which a church supports an individual exist solely to justify and to excuse the inherent nature of the church, which it displays plainly the rest of the time.

Judaism managed to exist without the concept of grace for thousands of years.

I postulate that the appearance of Jesus Christ was a social and mathematical inevitability given the way things were going: Grace and mercy became necessary as justifications for the continued oppression of the people by The Law. Since we, as a species, started to believe that we are all sovereign, Christian churches have become more “liberal”. People won’t put up with a church that disrespects their sovereignty. It’s taking more and more grace, mercy, and love and the like, for a church to successfully justify its mistreatment of its people. For example, we see a racist church, and we decide we’re not okay with that. Alright then, *POOF* a new church is formed which isn’t racist–this is only done to shut the people up, to get them back into the pews and paying their tithing so the church can get back to the business of making you feel bad.

I propose that rather than having another More, Better or Different church, that it’s time to undo the entire underlying context of church–to undo what it means for a church to be a church–and create something that actually serves us. I think that’s worth doing. Do you?

Really folks, just one simple question: is everything that you believe actually true?

First read this.

Any shred of belief I might have had before that we are children of a loving God just went out the window. All this about the natural man being an enemy to God unless he yields to the spirit is crap. We are specifically designed to not yield. What a cruel joke an omnipotent being would play on his billions of subjects, especially when the stakes are so high.

Global warming is a hoax.
Gay people can be ‘cured’.
Raping a virgin will cure you of the ‘thinning disease’.
Tax cuts stimulate the economy.
Giving people unemployment doesn’t.
Reagan ended the cold war.
Obama was born in Kenya.
Black people are inferior.
Fluoride in our drinking water is a communist mind-control plot.
Elvis is still alive.
And so on.
And so on.

What does God do with the unrepentant? Throw them out because they’re no good? Says something about God’s ability to create something, then, doesn’t it?

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. I was sold a bill of goods. So were you, in all likelihood. I was raised to believe in and hope for the Kingdom of God (Zion) to come someday, and it looks pretty hopeless right now. The predictable future for humans is not Zion. We aren’t on our way there. We are on our way to 1984. Humans would rather lie to themselves in order to be right about something–“we have always been at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia”–than to confront the truth and build a utopia. We would rather die than tell the truth.

This is why we don’t have any utopias. Humans don’t want utopia. We want the pain, misery and conflict that comes with believing things that are demonstrably untrue. We love suffering. We wouldn’t trade our suffering for anything in the world. And that’s not hyperbole: we really could have anything we want in the world if we just gave up our stupid lies, and we don’t! If we wanted to, we could, and we don’t, therefore the only logical conclusion I can see to draw is that we don’t want to live in Zion! We want to live in hell, and we’re doing a damn fine job of making that way for ourselves! Damn us all!

This week would have seen Robert Heinlein’s 103rd Birthday. I love this quote:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.”

I’m 13 for 21…

I dreamed last night that I went to church, to my geographic ward. They just got a new bishop, a nice man who’s very risk-averse. At least that’s my read of him. The hymnbooks were new and there were new songs in them, and we tried singing one of the new hymns for the opening song. It didn’t go very well, partly because the hymn started with a rest and people couldn’t figure out where the downbeat was, and partly because the bishop, the music director, and the chorister were all trying to conduct at the same time. It didn’t work well.

Normally I try hard to forget my dreams as soon as I wake up; I’ve found it helps my mood. But this dream managed to drop anchor before I had the presence to cast it off; and while dreams are empty and meaningless, I found the imagery interesting enough that I thought I’d post it here and let you all pick at it.