(no subject)

[derien]

Feeling ridiculously wrung out and weak, this morning. I'm inclined to want to eat to try to make myself feel better, although I don't feel particularly hungry. I've had my oatmeal. Come to that, I didn't feel hungry all day yesterday. Maybe I'm coming down with something.

I got a forwarded email from an ultra-Christian friend - a smear campaign against a book called "Conversations with God." I started an email back to her, because at this point I don't think I can care if she stops praying for me. We were friends in high school and really I don't think she has the slightest clue what sort of person I am, now, if she ever did. But I don't have the energy to finish this email properly right now.

Argh, I've got to run. I just realized I'm going to have to make some sort of sandwich for lunch, and that might involve having to stop for bread on my way to work. There's no cooked carbs in this house.

Comments

[dr-lumieres.livejournal.com]

If it's the Conversations with God I'm thinking of, it's been published for 10-15 years, so a bit late to start a smear campaign maybe?... It's also the one that made me realise I wasn't a Christian any more, so she's probably right to want to campaign against it ;) Not that I think in retrospect that I would take the book seriously now... It's funny how much a person can develop in a decade.

It sounds as though something in that email made you snap. I hope your honesty with your friend is ultimately liberating. (And that the parking nonsense gets sorted out!)

[derien.livejournal.com]

It made you decide you were NOT a Christian? That's interesting. I had sort of thought that the author probably intended to bring people ~to~ Christianity, even if the Fundies don't like it.

Not that I think in retrospect that I would take the book seriously now...

I think I might have to include that in my email to my friend, if I ever finish it. "Don't worry, I hear that book can't really be taken seriously by anyone with an adult reading level. Kind of like the Bible." No, no, I won't say that. I know that many people find the Bible quite interesting as allegory and for historical reasons. It's just the whole "this is the inviolable word of God!" thing that I don't get. Seriously, when we KNOW that the Bible has been translated with varying discrepancies numerous times - sometimes because the actual word or concept was just too offensive to society at the time, so they substituted something slightly off - when we KNOW that people who translate it from ancient Hebrew now come out with some quite different connotations... I just can't see how anyone can say it is somehow correct in every syllable. And what sort of hubris makes anyone think they could know God's mind? If you posit the kind of God who knows when a sparrow falls, who's plans are ineffable, etc, etc, how can you then also claim to know what that sort of a being wants? I can't believe my tiny, human brain could even conceive of the smallest part of such an understanding. (If I were to posit such a being, which I don't claim to do. ;) I'm happy with waiting to see what I find out after I die, and trying to be good and kind to others and my planet while I'm here, not because someone tells me I should but because it makes me feel better about myself.)

[dr-lumieres.livejournal.com]

Yes, well... I was quite young at the time, but I was coming at it from an angle where I thought I was Christian and I read the book and thought (at the time) that various things in it sounded quite reasonable, but then realised that they were not really compatible with Christianity. I don't remember any specifics now, I'm afraid, but I have a vague feeling it had to do with the divinity of Jesus. Anyway, now I wouldn't take it seriously because I would be too sceptical about a person having a private revelation from God in the first place, which is what the author claimed.

Your thoughts on the Bible and human presumption in claiming they know what their God is and wants?... I'm with you all the way. Man created religion in his own image, and any superior being there may or may not be must be so far removed from anything we could even conceive that I don't see the point in theorising about it, much less claiming to know anything! That said, I'm willing to believe that some people have mental and emotional experiences that feel like spiritual revelations to them and that they genuinely believe in and want to share them with others.