"The Abrahamic religions were originally formed upon a martial, violent god with a perceptively nasty streak and a tendency towards promoting genocide. There have been developments since and finer impulses have emerged but that nasty god is still there, hovering around like a perplexing bad sore...It's absurd to build a religion on a supernatural thug."~ Stanley Wilkin, University of London
He's not wrong. Have you read the OT from which all of the Abrahamic faiths branch? I am of the opinion that there is something inherently patriarchal, misogynist, and bigoted rooted deeply within the faith begun by Abraham and his descendants. And the fact that it has been co-opted by ⚪ supremacists is nothing less than to be expected because the NT is built on a foundation of woman-blaming, war waged against Those Who Are Not Like Us, and literally the destruction and murder of other lands and people in the name of a thunder god of a relatively minor people group in Western Asia during a time when gods popped up like mushrooms after a rain.
I said what I said.
When I began this trip 35-40 years ago to understand what I believed I had no idea what I was even looking for. Folks on the inside said that being a believer would lead me to salvation and joy unimagined.
Not one of them mentioned the gaslighting...
the victim blaming...
the requirement that I be happy all the damn time (that's mostly ev-Prot; Orthodox want you to be miserable about your sins all the time, which is just plain confusing)...
the triumphalism...
or the holier than thou attitudes that often accompany those who believe that, in spite of the fact that literally millions of people lived and died prior to and after the advent of their particular belief system, they are the ones destined for eternal life because they believe...
...those millions of other folks by the way are being eternally, consciously tortured for being born someplace outside of said thunder god's range...
And that last part is something I cannot wrap my brain around. Because, if you are all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving why do you go around creating folks only to torture them eternally for the crime of being born before you offered a Get Out of Jail Free Card in the form of human sacrifice or for not hearing about said Get out of Jail Free Card before you died? That strikes me as abusive as fuck.
And I know I am not the only one to ask these questions. Nor am I the only one to be told I'm not allowed to ask them because "why are you questioning the Lord!"
But those questions never actually went away. They just got suppressed.
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