Although some of this resonated with me in positive ways, I think it needs to be pointed out that it’s really easy to work with the milk fed exChristian portrait, but this topic should get much more difficult once you focus on the character who went far beyond being the milquetoast believer; one who went in deep and came out affirming that evangelicalism and possibly even the Bible itself ultimately can’t be harmonized with reality in a way that gives Christianity trustworthy merit.
In my multifaceted journey to exvangelical/exChristian status (I’ll use those terms even though I kind of loathe them) I did eventually land on one particular counter anchor in opposition to the anchor of Christ that left me having to finally drop the thin layer of cognitive dissonance causing me to bite my tongue which had been covered in myriad of doubts.
This counter anchor is of course the current darling of atheists known as 1 Samuel 15. For well over a decade I dealt with this passage and others like it in significant depth; always coming so close, but continually leaving a layer of cognitive dissonance and unfulfilled accounting for the god given command to kill children and infants.
Finally, through the force of life circumstances I’ve reached a place where I’m not afraid to look at an account such as the command to murder the Amalekite babies and say that if “you shall not kill” is inapplicable to the same god who supposedly revealed himself in Jesus, then that god sees the killing of the most innocent of humans as a relative thing and exposes that particular god depicted in the Bible as relative and inconsistent in character with the prince of peace the Bible tells us that Jesus is.
Although some of this resonated with me in positive ways, I think it needs to be pointed out that it’s really easy to work with the milk fed exChristian portrait, but this topic should get much more difficult once you focus on the character who went far beyond being the milquetoast believer; one who went in deep and came out affirming that evangelicalism and possibly even the Bible itself ultimately can’t be harmonized with reality in a way that gives Christianity trustworthy merit.
In my multifaceted journey to exvangelical/exChristian status (I’ll use those terms even though I kind of loathe them) I did eventually land on one particular counter anchor in opposition to the anchor of Christ that left me having to finally drop the thin layer of cognitive dissonance causing me to bite my tongue which had been covered in myriad of doubts.
This counter anchor is of course the current darling of atheists known as 1 Samuel 15. For well over a decade I dealt with this passage and others like it in significant depth; always coming so close, but continually leaving a layer of cognitive dissonance and unfulfilled accounting for the god given command to kill children and infants.
Finally, through the force of life circumstances I’ve reached a place where I’m not afraid to look at an account such as the command to murder the Amalekite babies and say that if “you shall not kill” is inapplicable to the same god who supposedly revealed himself in Jesus, then that god sees the killing of the most innocent of humans as a relative thing and exposes that particular god depicted in the Bible as relative and inconsistent in character with the prince of peace the Bible tells us that Jesus is.