Forgiven Yet 2.5: The Potential Church

Hm!

I wrote this in my own comments (if you’re not following the discussion on "Forgiven Yet?" then you really should be!) and, I’ll admit, surprised myself.

One of my favorite things about writing:  I do it so fast — type so fast and think in words so quickly — that sometimes my Self will say things that my Psychology wouldn’t admit no matter what you tortured it with.  Fiction is better for that usually — writing "fake" stories removes even more barriers — but this is one of those rare cases where just blathering lets out a surprising truth:

I miss the idea of community and faith myself sometimes, but in my mind that’s no longer associated with religion, since I spent so much time looking there, and never found what I wanted, which was people to learn and talk and argue and commiserate with, and maybe even act with to change the world a little. (I live right by Detroit. I have NEVER once been to a Church in the suburbs that in any way encourages direct action to take care of the local poor or homeless, and all the churches downtown are either a) racist (usually the opposite of the way you’d think) or b) only interested in using food and shelter as a method of coercion to convert people.)

If I ever did find a church that did those things, though, I would probably join up, even if I didn’t agree fully with their beliefs. (And by definition they would let me, I suppose.) So maybe my problem is with modern middle-American churches in actuality, not religion in potentia or as a concept.

…Usually I balk at the suggestion, made by many, that religion itself isn’t at fault for how I feel about it.  And I think that’s understandable, because nobody wants to hear, "Oh, you just had a bad experience or ten" (and therefore, by logical extension, your point about the thing as a whole is invalid).

I don’t think my points about religion are invalid, because I think they say a lot about religions in the real world, and one simply can’t ignore the real in favor of the theoretically-better.  Maybe there are better religious groups; maybe even ones that would fulfill my own stingy requirements.  Maybe the problem is mostly American, or mostly modern, or mostly Christian or maybe even just mostly Detroitian — I’ll be the last to argue that my home-region is in freefall on its way to post-industrial wasteland.  I don’t, personally, think the problem is mostly any of those things — I think a lot of it is endemic to religion itself, due to its habit of putting authority where there shouldn’t be any, and discouraging the actual discovery and living of truth as an individual goal.  I think that a lot of religion, everywhere, across history, has a habit of "creating a present Hell in the pursuit of a future Heaven", exactly like nationalism, racism, and other closed-concept "isms".

But, looking at the above, I do have to grant that what I’m looking for is possible, and that maybe my long-held "religion is one of the world’s evils, period" argument has a bigger hole than I’d previously admitted.

Gods, don’t tell my husband though.  Not only may I never live it down, but it would deprive us of endless evenings of screeching diatribaceous entertainment.  ;)