for me, the end of my time in Christianity came when I was listening to a sermon on "thou shalt have no idols before me", delivered at a podium with the cross on it, a low table on either side of it holding a praying hands statue and a virgin mary statue respectively, a painting of the white jesus on the wall behind him on the right, and a painting of the crucifiction to the left.
for a "no idols before me" god, his followers sure had a LOT of idols and symbols and crap they prayed to. The idea is that these are all symbolically the One True God, but frankly the cross is just a wooden torture device, they could be anyone's hands, Mary may have given birth to Jesus but she herself wasn't part of god (nor were any of the saints, all of whom are worshiped in one way or another by MULTIPLE sects).
THat was kind of the last straw of blantant hypocracy inherent in the church that I could take. I left at the half-time of the sermon and was done. I had already done my biblical scholarship by then, and I did speak with the head pastor about my concerns (to his credit he told me that the church did indeed have a number of hypocracies and that I would have to decide for myself what I could live with; he had been grooming me to become a pastor myself actually), and ultimately decided that I just couldn't be at peace with all of it, especially given how poorly the christian sects treated anyone they could "other".
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chiming
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Date: 2023-05-26 03:50 am (UTC)From:for a "no idols before me" god, his followers sure had a LOT of idols and symbols and crap they prayed to. The idea is that these are all symbolically the One True God, but frankly the cross is just a wooden torture device, they could be anyone's hands, Mary may have given birth to Jesus but she herself wasn't part of god (nor were any of the saints, all of whom are worshiped in one way or another by MULTIPLE sects).
THat was kind of the last straw of blantant hypocracy inherent in the church that I could take. I left at the half-time of the sermon and was done. I had already done my biblical scholarship by then, and I did speak with the head pastor about my concerns (to his credit he told me that the church did indeed have a number of hypocracies and that I would have to decide for myself what I could live with; he had been grooming me to become a pastor myself actually), and ultimately decided that I just couldn't be at peace with all of it, especially given how poorly the christian sects treated anyone they could "other".