Originally posted by Coletti
This is not the Christian faith, but the stereotype of what anti-Christian's project onto Christians.
Christian faith has no "ego." The ego is a modern invention.
The Christian does not sacrifice for rewards - that is the path to destruction - when one believes they can earn bonus points.
The Christin prays vigorously for his enemies - and is de ...[text shortened]... ernity is most humbling position.
(I'm half asleep on the post, hope it came out legible.)
This is not the Christian faith, but the stereotype of what anti-Christian's project onto Christians.
It may be a stereotype, but it’s one that some Christians project themselves (including a number on here: you’ve surely read their posts, so I don’t need to bother to name them). They project it not only to non-Christians but to other Christians who don’t share their particular set of beliefs—literalistic Biblical inerrancy for example—and who are therefore declared to be not “true” Christians.
If bbarr’s description fits, wear it; if not, declare that it is not a description that properly applies to all Christians (which you seem to have been trying to do—bbarr would agree with that). But do not play that game that “anti-Christians” simply make this stuff up out of whole cloth and then “project” it onto Christians. I spent far too many years of my life in the “institutional” church (40 or so) not to know better. And it is not the bbarrs of the world that have driven me from it—it is all those “you’re not a true Christian so begone” folks; maybe you’re one of them, though I have not thought so until now.
And I am not the only person on here who has tried to live their life “in Christ,” who has sought to find Paul’s
ouketi ego and the grace of
en emoi Christos, who has suffered such attacks—from Christians—because they belong to the wrong church, or they refuse to proclaim their certainty of a particular set of dogmas, or have refused to condemn all others of another faith. You know who they are as well as I do, unless you just selectively read before you post. Listen—listen with an open heart—sometime, to some of those on here who have left the Christian faith because they were denied the ability to use their brains, because they were stifled in their personal search for meaning, because they were inflicted with demands for a false humility that denied their personhood, because their fellow Christians tried to turn them into little more than Bible-quoting clones….
And here is the unbelievers response - he does not want his path laid out before him, he wants to make his own rules, route his own course, with no guidance. He wants to go out and find himself, to embrace his autonomy.
This kind of knee-jerk generalization is unworthy of you. And it does not reflect bbarr’s position; I thought you would’ve read enough of his posts in other threads to realize that by now (maybe not; if not, you assume too much—or too little). When Christians slander non-Christians this way, when Christians “project” the very characteristics that bbarr outlined, what?—what do you expect?
Enough. Bbarr can defend himself. I, personally, recognized far too much of myself in his description, and I thank him for that. Anyone, of any faith, ought to ask him/herself how much of bbarr’s description all too uncomfortably fits—
that would be a stance of humility. And if I’m not a “chosen one” in someone else’s eyes, so be it; and if I’m not a “true Christian” in someone else’s eyes, so be it; and if I am left standing with bbarr and others when the churches are done with their purges of all those who don’t “think right,” so be it—as Luther so eloquently said: “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God have mercy. Amen.”
Are you easily mislead?
13 Jun '05 19:11
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