Let’s talk about Gawd…
I grew up not attending much church. Not that I didn’t believe, mind you, but the whole ritualistic thing was lost on me. I was just told there was a guy up there that made everything, and you had to be good, ‘cuz if you screwed up, there’d be Hell to pay.
My mom tried her best to give me a home life after she divorced my dad. She eventually settled on a guy who was Lutheran, which my mom’s family jokingly referred to as a ‘pissed-off Catholic.’ I eventually figured out what that meant. Her Lutheran husband was a total jerk, but that’s another story.
ANYway, in the Lutheran school I then attended, we had church every morning…no fire and brimstone, mind you, but at least a basic concept including such memory assignments as the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed, the Catechism, and Sunday School verses. The pastor, and most of the congregation had German-sounding names, and I remember him as having a huge head. If you could name all the 66 books of the bible in fifteen seconds or less, he’d give you twenty bucks. That was a LOT of money in 1966. I only witnessed one classmate successfully completing that challenge, and the look on the pastor’s face when he had to fork over the cash.
Fast-forward many years, the Lutheran experience a distant memory, and now I’m a performer in a large local rock band, living a pretty hedonistic lifestyle. We went on the road for 8 years or so pretending to be stars, then came home to “settle down.”
In the meantime, my (now) ex-wife had gotten wrapped up in the Pentecostal movement, and her insistence that I join her was her way of getting me to stop playing music. So I checked it out a few times and wow, this church preached the FIRE. But they had a good band…
Much to her dismay, it only took a couple of Sundays before I was up on the church bandstand, playing drums, guitar, whatever they needed…LOL
But I digress. It was at this church where I actually started reading the bible…all of it. And that’s where I lost my faith. The church was judgmental, clique-ish, and if you didn’t toe the line, you were shunned.
One of the singers in our little church band was even kicked off the platform because someone in a local store heard him say the word “hell” in slang terms, in public…wow.
But, digging in, there was a lotta stuff in that book they don’t teach you in Sunday school. A LOT.
You see, the bible, in all its glory, condones slavery, (Exodus 21:7–11), (Ephesians 6:5), murder, (Deuteronomy 13:13–19), rape, (Judges 21:10–24), (Zechariah 14:1–2), and proves that god is NOT Pro-Life (Hosea 13:16) …what the HELL? And these are the very tip of the iceberg. There are MANY more verses.
How about the pregnant women of Tiphsah being “ripped open” (2 Kings 15:16)
Back when I was deep into the Pentecostal realm, I gave a auntie a modern English Bible, trying to “save” her…she read it, handed it back to me and said, “I can’t finish this…this book’s got too much sex and killing in it.”
Indeed.
