prixmium | (Reply)

I mean for sure. I am not really denying the latter part of the reply. However, I would say that while I can't really cite a lot of good research for you right now, not least of all because of my own emotional fatigue at the subject, I would posit that part of this has to do with the history of the practice of Christianity and how it has been adopted into the mainstream. In very early church history, Christians were persecuted and killed and oppressed, then some of their oppressors converted. And while that wasn't bad news for the Christians of the time, it has sociologically linked Christianity and mainstream secular power for centuries. Christianity is used as a bludgeon just as Islam is used in parts of the Arab world today.

Things like this even exist in India among some territorial Hindu people, but I don't know enough about it to say more. My point isn't that Christianity isn't "guilty" of this or that it is "okay" because other religions are used for it but that in all cases the faith of most religious people and the way in which their religion is being co-opted as a weapon is bad for them, too.

The thing that made me kind of angry about the article, though, more than anything, was the notion that Christianity is just one big guilt-trip and that it is "disgusting." Even when I vehemently disagree with a philosophical or religious stance, I try not to spit on it, and her whole "who asked him to?" rhetoric struck me as exceedingly disrespectful.

And just a note that at this point this particular vein of conversation is making me feel a bit like I am poking an exposed nerve over and over. It isn't that it isn't a conversation worth having or that looking at things critically is itself a problem. I just feel kind of emotionally exhausted from not fitting in anywhere.