Weak

There have been few times where I’ve felt like an absolute idiot for believing what I do. One of these times was in a philosophy class. It was Philosophy of Religion at CU Denver. Cu Denver is located on the metro campus in the heart of downtown Denver right next to the Pepsi center where the Avalanche and Nuggets play. It is the sister of the yuppie, trustafarian CU in Boulder. We were reading Nietzsche at the time and for those of you who haven’t read him, he pretty much claimed the death of God. He held great contempt for Christianity, and wanted to create a new moral world order without the idea of God polluting our thought processes.

I like Nietzsche. I disagree with almost everything he said, but the dude had some balls. Other philosophers sort of hinted at the possibility that maybe we should rethink the God thing but Nietzsche just came right out and threw down the hammer. Now I have to say that even though most philosophy classes supposedly bash Christians and get accused of being secular, liberal and lost by conservative Christians, I agreed with most of their bashing. I never got offended because the gospel they presented as Christianity was not the gospel that I ascribed to.

Whenever a professor went off on a small rant about God, it was not the God I knew. The God I know did not create a religion based on guilt. The God I know does not will for bad things to happen. He is not some cruel, angry parent nor is he an ancient, caveman concept. The God I know willed a perfect world and a relationship with us and it was good…for about a day. Then it all went to hell because this guy named Adam and this girl named Eve had a weird fetish for fruit. Ever since then though, the God I know has been trying to redeem the mess created by us.
The Christians they described in my philosophy class made me sick. It was as if someone was describing an encounter with your crazy uncle and they thought you were similar because you both hailed from the same family, and all you can do is shake your head and try and convince them that you are really nothing like your uncle. The problems they had with Christians were the same problems that I had. Very close-minded people, judgmental, self-righteous and yes, often times very ignorant. Through class after class I would hear about an angry God that only cared about obedience to some ancient, out of date, ritualistic type of morality. I would hear about a God who kept people in cages of rules and morals. A God who cared only about rule following. A Bible that was for the sole purpose of moral instruction. A Jesus who was nothing more than a good teacher. Christianity was shackles to the feet of the intellectual, the free, and the independent. It was a system of symptomatology. Meaning that Christianity was a symptom of an even greater sickness, weakness. A sigh of the oppressed, a coping mechanism. How could the strong buy into such a system of humility, selflessness and powerlessness? How could the intellectual and the scientific but into such a system of mysticism and faith with no rational basis? How could the independent chain themselves to a system of interdependence and dependence on God and others. It was because of these things that Christianity is symptomatology.