Couldn't help myself from necroing this 2 month old thread. Typing up "Christianity" on this forum is basically a 'post here onestep!' call.
Anyway...
Okay well let me step on my podium and begin my religion elaboration... religion, heck, let's not even start there.
...the problem here is capitalism and the philosophy that we are consumers first, not
human. This is why to many of the people on this forum, religion is some sort of way of fine tuning the consumer for the needs of capitalism, for example, a fine tuning of the mental being or our psychological health so you can be "living to the full" which in itself is an upper room concept which touches on the boundaries of religion itself. But the world we live is of the consumer world, so even if we go to the 'upper room' we come back down to the temporal life of the consumer, basically our worldviews are too cluttered with the indoctrination of the secular. And adding on, we flirt with qusai-religious concepts while we bash religion itself, especially organized religion. The base line is that we are a consumer, and that sometimes we cross the line into our religious aspect of 'human' to somehow quench our spiritual thirst; basically a spiritual curiosity, and because since we only flirt, we come up with other ideological conceptions to try and solve our spiritual needs, which often come off as or actually are, scams or psychological bullshitery.
Spiritual needs are only quenched by spiritual forces, which is what religion is supposed to equip ourselves with. Of course to may of us this may sound like ludicrous, because before we even get into the subject of religion, there's a secular, irreligious, or more plainly an anti-religious worldview that veils religion for what it really is. I don't speak for other world religions such as Judaism, Islam or Buddhism, but for Christianity we squarely look at the spiritual reality of our world and say that it's broken, that it's broken beyond repair (the fall). It's just how our nature is. Other religions state the same thing, and offer an escape from it, that chiefly being Buddhism. The world is an illusion, thus to eliminate desire is the way of escape, or Nirvana. To a Christian we seek to redeem the world through Christ, because Christ has redeemed us. The Creator, Judge and Father came down from the heavens or whatever realm or dimension where God sits so that he may acknowledge our sin-filled reality and the brokenness of the world, to even taste death and to rise from it, so to say that even in death we have a point in life, our existence.
So on some level, the people who bash Christianity from the view of the secular, those who are downtrodden and pessimistic, are in some sense a Christian, because this person knows the world squarely for what is it, that there's no answer, that there's no cure for the meaningless dribble that is existence. What point is there if Death comes along with an eraser and erases everything? The fine line that divides a Christian from an agnostic or an atheist is that to a Christian there
is hope, that there is a
God. Christians often say God is love, but God is also hope in some sense as well.
Anyway to those who say Christianity is a way of systematic abuse or a way of exploitation, I simply have no reply to your disdain or your anger towards our 'religion'. The only thing I could say is that God is
faithful to his people, his creation, and that as a part of humanity he died to redeem those exact qualities which you abhor which you see within Christianity. We know our sins, and because of our awareness of our sins we fall even deeper into despair sometimes.
To finish, we are not so much different- after all, God created us all, is steadfast to us all equally, and equally has given the price for our failures.
In some sense, God is a socialist... a spiritual socialist. He basically shits grace on everyone, to parody the profane ;]
