“Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” by spoken-word artist Jefferson Bethke has received more than 10.2 million YouTube views as of Saturday night since it was posted just four days ago, eliciting more than 100,000 YouTube comments and plenty of debate elsewhere on the Internet.
From his YouTube page we read: “In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it‘s core Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can’t do your own list of rules and feel “not good enough” for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don’t represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God!”
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Through various Christian resources, I’ve run across this line of thinking before. This is watershed type stuff, and can be very therapeutic. There are some movies and half hour TV programs produced by another Jefferson, Jefferson Moore, called “The Stranger”. These are something you wouldn’t run across unless you watched Christian TV, and are based on the premise of “What would happen if Jesus were walking amongst us as a physical human being in our modern times?” Kind of brings it all into the contemporary.
In the first feature length film, Jesus meets with a young professional mother, taking her to dinner. It turns out to be quite the enlightening theophany, resolving many crises and issues for the woman, (and the viewer of the film). In the second one, set at a time years later, Jesus actually encounters this mother’s teenage daughter, who is going through a crisis as she leaves home to travel to a college which she hopes to be admitted to. At one point, during a plane flight, Jesus tells the daughter that he hates religion, and cites the same reasons as you’ve published above. When I saw this film, to me, that became one of the core guidelines for my own re-emerging Christianity. It was something with which I identified immediately, as would many who have shared our past experiences with “religion” in the WCG.
For years, my mind was just totally closed to anything about God or Jesus.
As it softened up, and as I began to listen, revisit, and carefully consider, I have encountered a number of resources which have been very healing, because they corrected various embedded prejudices and errors from my past thinking. Let’s face it, Armstrongism made so much of this so repulsive, that who in their right mind would not have been totally turned off to the spiritual?
BB
Bob wrote: “Armstrongism made so much of this so repulsive, that who in their right mind would not have been totally turned off to the spiritual?”
That is why I wrote the following quote on the main page:
“Armstrong was a man utterly without honor, without principles, without a shred of genuine decency or patriotism. He was the ultimate exterminator of religious life for thousands, and the grand compelling creator of a vast army of atheists.”
The man destroyed the capacity for the former members to embrace religion.
Cults as a general rule, destroy absolutely every aspect of faith. Some of us formers are thankful to be done with religion, others such as yourself are more forgiving and continue their quest for some semblance of religion in the mainstream churches across America.
To each their own. What ever gives you peace, (or the peace you can have without religion) in a group that embraces the Jesus theology without the guilt and duty bound and endless law following dictated of a heavy handed mind control cult led by a tyrannical money grubbing brain dead leader.
As I’ve said many, many times, its summed up in Matthew 24:23. Can’t get any simpler. “Then if any man says to you, Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not”.
Somebody’s always going to jump in and say, “But he meant to follow him”.
Follow him how? That becomes the problem because once you start thinking about how to follow him, you have to start defining, and then you have to start judging and organizing, and separating “tru” ideas from “false” ideas. And then you run into 38,000 versions of christianity. Therefore, you arrive at only one logical conclusion: don’t believe anyone.
Of course Paul completelyt supports this with Romans 8:7. if that is true, the natural result can ONLY be continual splintering and speciation in God’s name. The logic is simple, always has been. The problem is, we just didn’t see it, because we tend to need leaders.