Post-Christians: Why aren't you Christian anymore?

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I'm looking for logical reasons why the Christian religion is out there like Pluto. Please oblige me...

-- ann monroe (monroe@chorus.net), April 28, 2000

Answers

Out there like Pluto?? What did Mickey let him off the leash?

Anyway, I found too many inconsistencies (sorry about spelling, no spellcheck here)in the way my local diociese was run. The parish I grew up in was a very active, youth oriented, populous and popular church. In our Northwest suburban Chicago area, we were mostly republican and white, with Christian churches outnumbering others by about 20 to 1. But the churches that flourished all had a youthful flair to them, guitar masses, sports programs in the buildings, and volunteer opportunites galore. We prayed before everyone of these, openly and loudly, and were reminded every day of how important our input was, that our ideas and opinions mattered. Except that the decisions never seemed to follow what the popular opinions were. The decisions were made above our heads, and we were often told that there were complications that we didn't know about that made thus decision the best one. We figured that Father knew best (the local bishop, archbishop or maybe even the pope) and let it go. Women were OK to read the readings,and lead us in song and even help distribute communion (with 1900 people in the parish, and 6 masses on Sunday, even 4 priests weren't enough to handle the crowds) they just couldn't cut it as priests. And when our great pastor who led us forward and kept us focussed retired, the bishop replaced him with a priest who had worked in the diocese office for 20 years and who in his first sermon talked about bringing back the latin mass because of it's "beauty and divinity". The 30 years of building a community at Mary, Seat of Wisdom came crashing t a halt. Within 2 years 75% of the parish was attending a different church. I never went back, and switched to episcopalianism when I got married, and found community there, until a personal and financial crisis left us hanging, and no one in our community could spare us the time. since then we have floated around trying some churches, but really only disillusioned with the whole thing. so we stopped altogether.

-- Pete (PLeMay816@aol.com), April 29, 2000.


I grew up in a small, rural, white, poor, 99.9% Babtist town. My parents didn't go to church, but virtuously everyone else did so I went with some friends for many years. At 16 I was pro-life, engaged to a guy in the service and pretty devout. People really did marry that young there. I know...what happened? Well, being the bookworm that I am I actually read the bible, straight through. No one could answer a lot of my questions, and we never even discussed the whole book, just genesis and the gospels mostly. No one wanted to talk about the rape scenes or God's permission for men to poison certain naughty wives...I started to doubt the knowledge of my youth ministers. I never questioned the lowly status of women much, but I did kind of wonder why I should be subserviant to my future husband when I was pretty sure I was smarter. (not arrogance here, just honesty) I also did not buy into the crap that segregation was justified in the bible. Lots of people in the town tried to justify racism through religion. The final straw of course, is when I fell in love with a girl I had horsebackriding lessons with, and started asking the churches views on homosexuality/bisexuality. I then kind of transformed, I didn't marry the service guy, started reading my parents books on Taoism and Buddhism, and basically turned into someone my former self found unrecognizable. But I really used to be pro-life, christian, and republican, way back when!

-- AJ (joijoijoi@hotmail.com), April 30, 2000.

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