RE: Ask, Seek, Knock
October 12, 2012 at 3:56 pm
(This post was last modified: October 12, 2012 at 4:00 pm by Ryantology.)
Quote:What I am saying is God always answers His children in the positive when they A/S/K.
Absolute horse shit.
There was a point in my life where, having been scared away from questioning the God I'd been brought up to accept as real, I was guided by a Christian friend (who was entirely sincere and remains my friend) to seek God anew, as I saw that he was happy and fulfilled in his life and I wanted that for myself. I've battled serious problems with depression and a negative self-image my entire life, so the idea that the greatest being in the universe might love and accept me in spite of all that was of enormous appeal to me in my early 20s. I tried attending various churches. I studied scripture and tried to understand it (my Christian upbringing had been of the lazy variety). I sought fellowship. And I was as sincere about the whole thing as I could have been.
In the end, I got nothing from it. I was never any happier than I was before, and in spite of the message of salvation and love from my co-religionists and contemporaries, the book by which I was supposed to draw inspiration I found to be full of the same exact sort of negative reinforcement which made me a self-hating and depressed wreck in the first place. I am unworthy. I am a bad person. I live in sin. I can never measure up to my Heavenly father's greatness just as I could never live up to my earthly father's expectations. The more I read, the less I liked what I read.
That's what I got when I ASKed. I got a Sky Daddy who held me in perhaps worse contempt than my actual father did, with the added insult that my actual father apologized to me in my adulthood without demanding anything further from me.
A significant (though probably not the largest) part of what has transformed me from a sincere, if failed, Christian in my early 20s all the way into the vitriolic antitheist I am at 30 is a matter of understanding (in retrospect) out how much of a waste it was to try ASKing for love from a deity whose entire history is one of blood-soaked hatred and sadism. I feel as if I was badly suckered by the modern PR campaign which paints this monster as the goodest of good guys. The God of Scripture is not a god of love, but a god of divisiveness, hatred and monumental pain for humanity as a whole and crushing destruction of self-esteem for the individual.
If I did not meet this supposed standard of sincerity, it is sure as hell not for want of my trying.
