Thursday, October 22, 2009

Is Christianity Really Any Different?

2:26 PM by Christi Bowman

Seth Barnes, CEO of Adventures in Missions, posted on Facebook today that three of their missionaries are being held in Muslim jails for testifying about their faith in a Muslim nation (the AIM missionaries were released). My husband, Kevin, also posted about Christian missionaries in Africa who are responsible for the torture and murder of THOUSANDS of Nigerian children who were considered to be witches (the children were not released).

I'm sorry, but I find the timing of these two posts extremely ironic! Can we expect religion, by whatever name it calls itself, to be tolerant? Isn't a religion by its very nature intolerant? Is intolerance ever ok? If intolerance is ok for some than it must be ok for all; and if intolerance is not ok than no one should participate in it. How is it ok for one people group to say to another: "It is ok for me, by my very belief system, to not tolerate you, but your system of belief is irrelevant and not only must you tolerate me, but you must accept my belief system as your very own or in some cases die!" That sounds like oppression to me no matter whose name you do it in!

Are religions, because of their very in-tolerate nature, oppressive? How can the religion of Christianity call the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (the God of the oppressed) their God when they oppress? I realize that Muslims call the God of Abraham their God too, but Christians claim that they are different because of their God. I do not know what claims Muslims make; I did not just claw my way out of the Muslim religion so I can not begin exposing Muslim hypocrisies. You may rest assured that I am an equal opportunist when it comes to religion and hypocrisy and believe that Muslims have plenty of their own hypocrisies.

My issue is that the Christian religion claims to be different and it absolutely is not! I know that some of you who associate yourself with the Christian religion will want to argue that the behaviors of the Christians in Africa don't speak for you; I urge you to read I Cor 12:12-26 with an emphasis on verse 26. If you claim that the religion of Christianity is the body of Christ and you claim to be part of that body of Christ than by the very words of your Bible, which you claim to be absolute truth, you stand condemned of these atrocities and so many more. Maybe we need to rethink associating the body of Christ with any particular religion.

The God that the religion of Christianity claims as its own is the God of the oppressed people not the God of the oppressor. It seems to me like the religion of Christianity may be in trouble with its own God...though you could make the case that He is not the God they claim at all. It doesn't really matter because it seems The God of the oppressed gets pretty hot and bothered by all people groups who oppress whether they claim Him or not.

Christianity as a religion is no different than any other religion and in the name of everything that really is Holy I sincerely wish that it would stop claiming to be. People who can't except the religion of Christianity are those who see right through the fear it uses as its weapon of conversion into the reality that it really has no better way to offer.

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