Stop Feeling Ashamed Of Being Human.

How do you feel about Westboro Baptist Church and the things they do?

ASJDFGHJKLKJHGFDSTYDERTGVBHYGTF THEY MAKE ME SO ANGRY.LEVITICUS IS NOT THE ONLY BOOK IN THE BIBLE! READ THE NEW TESTAMENT!  

THE GOD YOU CLAIM TO FOLLOW IS NOT A GOD OF HATE! HE IS A GOD OF LOVE! HE LOVES EVERYONE AND HATES NO ONE! Ugh. I must admit, they drive me to violent urges. They infuriate me beyond words because they preach literally the antithesis of EVERYTHING my God is and yet they say that they follow the same God as I do. How is that even possible? How can someone spew hate and vitriol and say that it’s of God? Rest assured, it is not of God. God is love. Overwhelming, unconditional, infinite, scandalous, inclusive, all-consuming, all-effacing, sanctifying, redeeming, love. LOVE is literally the closes thing to the character of God that we have here on earth. Therefore, I ask you, how can someone be so absolutely full of hatred and be in line with God’s will? They cannot. Having said that, it is my personal belief that though they claim to be Christians, they are not Christians. Allow me to share with you one of my favourite quotes: 

Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he had truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. 

That’s a quote from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. Aslan represents God and Tash represents the devil. I think this quote is extremely applicable to our current discussion, and the cruelty committed by the Westboro Baptist Church, though done in God’s name, is not done in the service of God, but in the service of the devil. That goes for all the evil deeds of misguided, blinded churches in the past, including the Spanish inquisition, the Holocaust, etc. It saddens me greatly that the one philosophy which should be completely pure of hatred and dissension - Christianity - is so incredibly corrupted and perverted in so many of its divisions. I maintain that people who truly know and love God are people of love, grace and acceptance, not of hatred and violence. How such abominations of the faith occurred is due entirely to prideful people who filter the word of God through their own (WRONG) worldview. And the saddest part of all this is that God loves the people of the Westboro Baptist Church. He loves them desperately, and He wants them to fully realize and understand the power of His transforming love for them, and for everyone, because when you know, truly know the love of God, you are never the same again. And if they actually knew God, they would not behave the way they do. My hope is that someday they will know the God they claim to serve, and that their acquaintance with Him will change everything. Sooo…there you go. Peace and love! -Katherine 

The Names of God

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sermon on II Corinthians 12:9 (via bonniekristian)

Your answer about suffering was beautifully written! I'm actually curious, you said that suffering is unnatural, that it isn't a part of this world since God loves us. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

thank you!! suffering is unnatural: God did not make the world with suffering in mind. he also did not make the world with death in mind. last year i took a course on death and this was the consistent theme in it: death is not natural, because God did not create the world with death in mind, he did not create death, but rather death is imported into creation after the fact, by creation, by our choice. it is the same with suffering. when the world is created, God declares it טוב, tov, what scripture calls "good." God makes the world with this in his mouth. among other things, tov means agreeable and sensorially pleasant, ethically good, well knowing, valuable, better (than another thing), capable of pleasure, morally good, ethical goodness. the creative word exits the mouth of God and brings creation into being and it is good, so good is incapable of suffering because suffering does not exist. suffering is a human creation. if we believe that the real is God, then suffering is not part of the real: the real is goodness, which is God, and it is incapable of being inhabited by suffering. suffering enters the real through our own experience, as suffering enters the world through human choice. this is the profundity of the crucifixion: that God, the real, chooses to endure suffering, when he is so far from the concept of suffering that he is incapable of creating it. he is capable of loneliness, though. which is suffering in its own way. and isn't that the root of all suffering? loneliness? but that's not the point of suffering being unnatural. God was also not lonely until he created a creation to miss.

Out of all the things I’ve received at pride parades, as a Christian, this one is my favorite.

simone weil said "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." to pay absolute attention to the injustice in the world is to recognize the absence of God in the world. to pay attention to God's absence is to manifest his presence in the places where he is most needed, for the most vulnerable, for those who need him the most, for those he loves: the ones to whom he gives attention.

Why worry about pleasing "God" and living your life to his standards instead of living for yourself and fulfilling your dreams and desires? I can't imagine living by someone else's rules and standards for a spot in an afterlife that i'm not even sure exists. I understand how strong faith can be, but why live by God's standards for a potential afterlife instead of living by your own standards now in the definite life you've been given.

As a Christian english geek, I am severely suspicious of your use of quotation marks. Because your entire question, in fact your entire world view, can be summed up by your usage of quotation marks in that question.

First up, do you know this “God” that you condemn to dubious ideology with your intellectually patronizing punctuation? Is “God” a lie or a fairytale to you? Is He a made-up story you tell kids, like Santa Claus or the Easter bunny?

Is He a vague, nebulous idea, filed away in your repertoire of knowledge, to pull off the shelf in time of crisis for some warm fuzzy feelings, like Love, Peace and Destiny? Because if you call Him “God”, it’s no wonder that you “can’t imagine living by someone else’s rules and standards for a spot in an afterlife that [you’re] not even sure exists.” Let me tell you about God. GOD cannot be contained to a cute little pair of quotation marks. GOD cannot be banished to history books and fairy-tales by academic snobs. He’s not just an idea made-up by people to control other people’s behavior. He’s not a historical figure in a book written thousands of years ago. He’s not a story or a religious figure or a symbol of the power in all of us, or a name for the forces of good and evil conflicting in the universe. And He’s not even just “someone else”. See, I don’t worry about pleasing “God”. I have the immense, undeserved blessing of knowing GOD:The architect of space and time. The composer of the stars’ song and the choreographer of the planets’ dance.The sovereign ruler of all that was and is and is to come. The infinite, almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, transcendent orchestrator of the universe. He who wove strands of DNA into a person. He who breathes life into our bodies.He who supplies our very power of thought. He who commands the winds and waves to fall silent and they obey. He who can stop the earth spinning on its axis and start it again. He who said “Let there be light” and there was.Because He is light. He is life.He is love. Before you were, or I was, before Jacob was, before Isaac was, before Abraham was, God IS. He always was. Always is. Always will be.All of what we know exists in the mortal world sprang from His imagination.  So I know who He is. And I know that He loves me. Wait…what? He loves me? He loves me! He loves me!!!! I know that He loves me in a crazy, scandalous, outrageous, incomprehensible, all-consuming, unconditional, inclusive, tidal-wave kinda way. Not only that, but as one person out of 7 billion on a planet that is only one millionth the size of the sun. The sun is only a small star among billions of stars in the Milky Way. And the Milky Way is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. Okay, so just take a second to grasp the scope of how massive that universe must be. And then stop and try to grasp that the God who created that universe out of His head knows me and you personally. He knows the number of hairs that are on our heads. He pays very particular and very close attention to our lives and knows the intimate details of our hearts. He saw our unformed bodies before we were even a thought in our parents’ minds. He knit together our unformed bodies in our mothers’ wombs. He knew every single second of every single day of our whole entire lives before we were conceived. That’s how important and precious we are to Him. Okay, so not only do I know WHO He is, and HOW MUCH He loves me, I know what He DID. He died. He stepped out of heaven, out of paradise, out of light and love and perfection…into the dirt and dust and disgustingness of our world. Into the rape and the murder and the genocide and the abuse and the poverty and the injustice and the pain and the shame and the guilt and the ugliness and the wretchedness. Why? For all those reasons. For all the crap and the gunk. For all my mistakes. For every time I hurt someone I cared about. For every time I hurt myself. For every time someone else hurt me. For every single careless word we wish we could take back. For every sleepless night ending in shame and guilt and fear. For every panicked feeling of helplessness. For all the bitterness. For all the anger. For all the feelings of worthlessness. For “every daughter whose innocence was stolen by every son who couldn’t help himself” (Jason Gray). For all the fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and friends who betrayed the trust of a young girl and left her despoiled, abandoned, feeling like garbage. For every affair that shattered a marriage into painful, jagged shards. For every child who was left on the streets because their parents died of AIDS, sniffing an oil-soaked rag to numb the hunger pangs in their stomach. For every child who was abducted in the middle of the night, had addictive opiates ground into cuts on their arms, handed a gun and told to shoot their mothers and brothers and sisters. For every child who was packed into a shipping crate and sent across the ocean like worthless cargo to a brothel where they were assigned a number and put on a menu for people to choose from for their perverse desires. For the thousands tortured and killed in the most inhumane ways by people who thought they superior beings. For every scar on my friend’s arm. For my friends porn addiction. For my friend’s eating disorder. For my pride and arrogance. For your broken heart. GOD, the architect of space and time, transcendent, perfect being, who need not even concern Himself with us, stepped right smack dab into the middle of our colossal mess. And He allowed us to mock Him, whip Him, put a crown of thorns on His head, nail Him to a tree, and let Him suffocate under His own body weight, when He grew too exhausted to lift Himself up to inhale. He could have commanded angels to rescue Him, but He didn’t. He suffered a humiliating, barbaric death and the complete human experience when God the Father turned His back on His son and dumped ALL our sin on His shoulders. So you know that huge list of terrible things I listed back there? That was ALL dumped on Jesus. He felt it ALL. Generations upon generations of pain and hatred and hurt and shame of all humans since the beginning of time and until the end of time stacked on top of each other. More psychological and emotional agony than you or I will experience in an entire lifetime, or even billions of lifetimes. All of it, on Him. Can you imagine the immensity of that soul-wracking Hell on earth? Nope. None of us can. By that point, Jesus was probably BEGGING for that physically-excruciating death. Whose fault is it? Who put Him there? We did. We didn’t mean to. We’re just trying our best. But we don’t really know what we’re doing and we screw up a lot. And we’ve messed up our world, so we can’t go to heaven when we die cause heaven’s perfect and we’re imperfect. But God is like “I know a way. It hurts and it’s terrible and awful and painful but it’s the only way to save these pitiful human creatures that we love so much for no reason other than that we created them.” And Jesus is like “whatever you say, I’ll do it. I love them. I love Katherine and Rebecca and Joshua and Anna and Daniel and Rachel and Kate and Laura and Jessica and Emily and Jonathan and Adam and….” …and all of them. Every person who every existed. Even for a second. Even if they didn’t make it past their mother’s womb. Even if they had no human name, all of our names are written on the palm of His hand. The same hands that took the nails. And so, instead of being bitter or blaming us on that cross, He remembered the names on His hands and He remembered what the nails were for. And He said “Father, forgive them, for they know now what they do.” THEN, not only that! But He went to Hell. Heck yeah, He went to Hell. This is like the Disney Hercules movie for goodness sake! He went to the Devil’s turf, his territory, his playground. And HE TOOK THE FREAKING KEY! He took the key to death. He went and trashed the place! He stole victory from the devil. He conquered life AND death. He broke every chain the devil ever had on us. Then He came back, and now we can live forever with Him in Heaven. My point is that if you’re still putting God in quotation marks, you DON’T understand “how strong faith can be” because you don’t even know what my faith is in. 

If you’re still putting God in quotation marks, you don’t know God. And now that I’ve tried to explain who He is and what He did, it has NOTHING TO DO with “[living] by God’s standards for a potential afterlife instead of living by [my] own standards now in the definite life [I’ve] been given.” I live a life of complete surrender and worship to the God who made me and saved my soul because it’s the ONLY LOGICAL COURSE OF ACTION. If you knew what I know, you would live your life the way I do too. Once I understand what He did for me, I can’t help but pour my whole entire life out as a living sacrifice of praise. Every breath I take, every move I make, every thought I think, every word I say, is only by the grace of God and I am aware of that. I’m just trying to give back all that I can for a debt that I can NEVER EVER repay. So yeah, that’s why I “worry” about pleasing “God”. Ha. Because He’s the only thing in the whole world that matters. Also, the bible says that what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18) so I would say that the afterlife is more definite than this one. If I accept that God is real, I accept that heaven is real, and I accept that He loves me and died for me. Therefore, worship is the natural, instinctive response of this wretched human heart responding to His love and grace. On a side note, from a purely human point of view, living by God’s standards sure as heck hurts myself and other people a lot less. It gives me a moral code that saves me from addiction and heartache. It makes me a kinder, more generous, more compassionate, more loving person. It gives me empathy and a passion for helping the less fortunate. It gives me hope and peace. And it has been scientifically proven to improve my health and extend my life. Why the heck wouldn’t you live life by these standards? They’re awesome! If everybody actually lived by these standards (instead of twisting them through their own corrupt worldview, ahem WBC…), this world would be a beautiful place, and not the terrible place it is today. Jus’ sayin’. ;) To wrap this up, if He was just “God”, I wouldn’t bother trying to please Him either. So I can’t really blame you for your question. But your misunderstanding comes from a place of ignorance. I hope you understand a little better what I believe now. He’s NOT just “God”. I know I may have sounded vicious in this post, but I’m not mad, just passionate. Always, Peace and love!-Katherine 

It seems strange that I haven’t written anything about Ferguson here, given the degree to which race has occupied my mind since Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson three and a half months ago. I guess it is because I felt like what I had to say wasn’t that well thought through; that my role in…

RANT Warning: indelicate language and imagery. Okay, so apparently as much as 54% of men and 42% of women are STUPID. I'm sorry but I'm not gonna be all politically correct about this. Anyone who answered yes to any of those questions is STUPID. STUPID AND WRONG.  For anyone out there who's a little bit confused....

RAPE IS NEVER OKAY. 

No matter what. No matter who long you've been dating, no matter how much money he spent, no matter what her level of sobriety, no matter what he's seen of her or done with her, no matter what mixed signals he's gotten, NO MATTER WHAT. It's not okay to force sex on a woman who does not want it.  And let's just stop and examine two of the conditions up there:  a) He is so turned on he thinks he can't stop. b) She gets him excited sexually. 

Ohmygoodness. MAN UP. Newsflash: Guys get turned on all the time. It's not exactly a novel thing. Guys can get turned on for no apparent reason. 

As a guy, are you seriously gonna try and tell me that you couldn't help it?  (This is where it gets graphic) ...That your dick was hard so you just HAD to ram it inside of her? That's bullshit! (I get vulgar when I get angry).  Oh, you were horny. Oh you poor baby. My heart bleeds for you, it really does.  MAN UP.

You're not an animal. You're not a robot. You don't HAVE to do everything your body wants you to. As a human, you SHOULD have morals. And you are able to reason and make choices. If you know that rape is ALWAYS WRONG (which it is) then you CAN walk away. You are not so weak that you are helpless against the primitive desires of your flesh.  So when I hear someone say something like "he's so turned on he thinks he can't stop" or "she gets him excited sexually", you know what I think? I think that "he" is a cowardly, lazy, spineless, weak, pathetic BOY. Because any man who cannot master his body and decide to respect women despite his physical urges is no man at all. 

Hate in the name of God is still devil worship.