Tell me all your thoughts on God...

Okay, here it is. Blogging about religion. I think some of the most interesting discussions come from talking about the things you aren't supposed to talk about. How are you supposed to know what you really believe if you never explore it?

You all know me, I love my background stories, so here it is for the religion and God topic. I grew up in a very religious household. My family is Non-denominational Restoration Movement Christian. Non-denominational meaning not Presbyterian or Lutheran or Baptist or what have you; Restoration Movement meaning that it's strictly Bible based, the restoration being going back to the Bible and stripping away the things that were added by, oh let's say the Popes. This also means the belief is that the Bible is divinely narrated. Basically God wrote the Bible through the hands of man, but it's His word. As my mother sums it up, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. From here on out I am going to call the religion mine or ours just for simplicity sake. Because technically as a baptized member of the church it still is mine.

I was baptized when I was 6. This is actually really young for my church. The norm would be a teenager, if you were raised in the Church, or as an adult if you came later. But I was insistent on my baptism. The reason being I understood the teachings of my church to be, children were innocent and without sin but as soon as you knew the difference between good and evil, right and wrong you MUST be baptized or you were going to hell. I was not going to go to hell. So I pestered my parents, I pestered our minister (also my parent's best friend) and when the new youth minister started in the Church I pestered him as well.

I still remember the final argument I had that won me my baptism. I was sitting in the minister's office with both our minister and our youth minister and I asked about people that lived in parts of the world that had never heard of Jesus. What happened to them when they died? I was told that that was why we needed missionaries to reach those people. But I was insistent, what if the missionaries didn't reach them? What then? So I got the pat on the head and was told, God would protect them as he did little children who didn't know any better. Then this was followed up with, but if they are told about the Word and they do not follow it that is different. So I said, if you know that you should be baptized and aren't then no matter what you couldn't go to heaven? And they agreed. So I said, then you have to baptize me because I know that. And they knew they had lost the argument and I was baptized the next Sunday.

A typical week through my school years was church at least twice on Sunday, three - four times if you counted Sunday School and Youth group separately. Wednesday night Bible study. When I was in high school we had a Bible Bowl team (basically memorizing books of the Bible down to the number of times a word was used) and so we had BB study twice a week as well. One thing churches are good at is keeping kids busy and off the street. Summers were spent either working or being a camper at a Christian camp or touring with our youth group.

Now as a teen I had already been a baptized member of our church for ten years. At one point in time I would have put my Bible knowledge against anyone out there. Just for flat out knowing the verses, knowing the context and knowing what to use to back up any argument I might have. But like any other knowledge, if you stop using it on a daily basis you lose it. And I stopped practicing the religion I was raised in when I was 18. To be truthful I had been leaving the Church for a couple of years by that point in time.

You remember the argument I had with my ministers that won me the right to be baptized? Well I didn't stop having arguments like that as I got older and I stopped being satisfied with the pat answers of "it will just be okay". If it would be okay to die in deepest parts of the Amazon Forest without ever being reached by a missionary and as long as you lived a good life you would still go to heaven, then why did we need to be baptized? Or if you lived in the deepest parts of the Amazon and lived a good life but were never exposed to a missionary and you went to hell when you died what sort of God were we worshiping anyway? And what about the other religions? Because I wasn't sure if anyone had noticed, but they were all saying the same things, and couldn't it be possible that if God really is all powerful and all knowing he would know that certain people would respond to Jesus and others to Buddha, and others to Mohammad and as long as you found your way to him and to a good life what did it matter which book you were reading?

Then there was the growing feeling that the church's stance on homosexuality was just wrong. I have mentioned before that a friend of mine in high school brought the whole gay/lesbian argument to a tidy close for me, but I want to touch on it here with a little more depth. Stephanie (and oh how I wish I could remember her last name!)was a friend of a friend. But the first time we met we instantly hit it off. She was a complete New Waver (if you were raised in the 80s you know the look) and she was an out and proud lesbian. Tough choice for a 16 year old, and especially 25 years ago. Anytime we were at a party at the same time or she was visiting with Cami at the theater at school she and I would end up in these long meaningful discussions about life in the way only 16 year olds can.

Because Stephanie and I talked about everything and anything the talks eventually turned towards what I viewed as her choice to be gay. She looked at me and said, "When did you choose to be straight?" I said, "I didn't choose, I just am. I just like boys." and the light went on. She didn't choose any more than I had. She just was the way she was born and that was it. We talked more about how old she was when she realized she was different from her other friends. This was really important to me on a few levels. One of the main ones was that I was really starting to believe that my nephew was gay. Or would be gay, since at 4 I guess nobody has a real sexual preference. Stephanie was the first person I said the words to out loud. I believed my nephew was born gay. (again another blog for another day, but trust me we will talk more about my thoughts on this) But to tie this to my leaving the church, I was talking with someone I respected about who THEY were and they were telling me, it wasn't a choice, I was watching a person I loved deeply grow up and by all signs show that he was not going to have a choice in who he loved either, and the church was telling me that this was wrong. That choices were made. That God did not create them to be the way they were. Hunh...didn't make sense to me at all.

The final straw for me was my junior year I had a falling out with one of my Bible Bowl coaches. This particular year there were 16 of us that were on teams. There was a tournament at Cincinnati Bible College and only 4 team members could go. It was decided that the four oldest should go since we would be the closest in need of scholarships. Through some backhanded wrangling one of the girls that didn't get to go tried to get me kicked off the team. The coach called my parents with the accusation from this girl, my parents having raised one really problem child double checked the information before coming to me with it. What she had said was false, but if my parents had just believed the coach, like the coach had believed the other girl I would have been in huge trouble. But as it was, I was struck by the hypocrisy of the move and was livid.

See, that year one of the books we were studying was Matthew. There is a passage in Matthew that speaks to what you must do (by the rules of OUR church) if you have a problem with a member of your church. And as a baptized member of the church I should have been treated in the same manner. Matthew 18:15-20 if you are interested. :-) After a few more rounds of wrangling I ended up quitting the team. Looking back I should have quit when we got back from Cincinnati since the lesson the nasty little thing learned is that you can get your way by being awful, but that is my lesson, don't let the nasty people win!

But that was really the end of it for me. I was starting to not believe everything I was being told. I was starting to see that there were other thoughts and ideas in the world that needed to be listened to and weighed. And I spent the next year going through the motions, I lived under my parent's roof so that meant, church and youth group on Sunday, but I stopped anything extra. And since I have been married I think I have been in a church for Sunday services twice. That was my end of organized religion.

Sheesh and I have done it again, an entire blog of back story and not even touching on the points I had planned to make! Okay, a new one later going into what I had meant this one to be at the start! Stay tuned for more God talk later... ;-)