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In reply to the discussion: So question: how can Christians support the death penalty since the Prince of Peace [View all]Tsiyu
(18,186 posts)and each is sure their own answer is the correct one.
I know people who have spent years reading the same texts over and over and over, their "Word" becoming an obsession, parsing paragraphs down to phrases down to words down to letters to try to find the answers that will make them feel safe today.
"The Word" is then the foremost symbol of their particular deity. Their gods are books, pages and conflicting rules.
For those who feel out of control and for the unimaginative, this contradictory nature of their chosen "Word" becomes very agitating. Once again, to resolve the inner conflict, they bury their faces in their books, continually ignoring all of the life around them just to gain some smidgeon of a clue of what "god thinks."
Or they spend half their lives enmeshed in the drama and constant activity of a religious organisation, ignoring their own families and friends with constant volunteering and shaming and shunning family with insistence on rigid dogma and behavior that has nothing to do with today.
Imagine if all that time were spent visiting lonely people and planting gardens. Or if all that time were spent taking kids to museums and libraries and state parks. Or mowing elderly people's lawns and painting their porches. Or teaching teenagers carpentry or web design.
Imagine if they pulled their noses out of their books and spent all that futile word-crunching* instead in loving their neighbors as themselves, by doing something for their neighbors? You don't need to constantly reread what you're supposed to do if you're a good person.
As for answered prayers and the effects of any given faith system, if you trace your answered prayers to their source, people made things happen, your own will and actions made things happen.
WE can answer one another's prayers if we want to.
*The math is more valuable than any parsing of words as far as Christianity goes: Jesus spoke of caring for the poor hundreds of times. Never said a word about pot, birth control or gay people.
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