psalm_onethirtyone | Nov. 1st, 2006

I think maybe the saddest thing in the world right now is how much people hate each other. I don't know. It just makes me want to sit down and cry, and then go out and find someone to show around and love very much.

I'm sad because there are people who would look at my cross and hate me, and have a fairly good reason for it, because so many people who say they're my religion hate them. I wish that religion wasn't such an excuse to hurt other people. I wish that we tried harder to love, because we have such a miracle of a world to love in. I mean--for goodness' sake, so many things are coincidental just so that the earth is beautiful and wonderful and just perfect for us. We have wonderful trees, we have rain, we have enough nitrogen with our oxygen that we can breathe it. The sun is beautiful because it's not too close that it makes it so we can't live. I mean, isn't it amazing?

We have a world that's made to be loved in. I want to love people. I want to love as much as I possibly can, as many people as possible, as many things. I just don't know.

And the worst part is that Christianity is supposed to be a religion of love. We have so many prayers--I've been reading my prayer book through--for every possible thing you could think of, and almost every one of them talks about love. We have prayers for our enemies, prayers that say 'let's us both be reasonable and kind; let's neither of us hurt the other, even though we don't like each other'. Why can't we practise that more?

Why do we have to assume that we're perfect, that we're exactly the right religion? Maybe we are, but maybe we're not. We don't have that certainty or that right. The whole point of being Christians is that we believe the New Testament and follow it more closely than the Old Testament. The Old Testament says to hate people and kill them if they don't do things right; the New Testament says to love people and not judge. Furthermore, the Old Testament is eighteen kinds of not totally accurate and certainly not the final authority. We don't have to assume that everything in it is true. Beautiful or awful stories are part of all religions. We have our stories; the Buddhists have stories; the Jewish people have stories; the Muslims have stories. None of our stories are better than anyone else's. They're good to read, and sometimes you learn important things from them, and they're mostly interesting, except for the ones in the Bible that are just long lists of who's whose son and how far back &c &c &c BORING HI, but they're not the written history of the world. They're the history of our religion. They're the stories we use to form our magic and our God and prove Him to ourselves. One more time, because it's so important--they're not the history of the world. They're metaphors, they're backgrounds, but while there is a God as far as I'm concerned, and I love Him, He so did not make the world in seven days.

And we're just so condescending and self-important. If we really think, we might remember that the Jewish people are God's chosen people; we're the disciples of Christ.

And as disciples of Christ, we really ought to remember the things He taught. Love people. Accept people. Don't judge. Tolerate. Take care of strangers, forgive people who hurt you, never kill. He's the one who went to a wedding party and made extra wine for them. I like imagining that that means He loves families and people coming together in love and celebration.

Love is the message all through the New Testament, and Christians really, really need to stop dwelling in the Old Testament, or they might as well call themselves Scary God-People. Christians means Christ, means believing in Christ. Before we call ourselves Christians, we need to work a lot harder at the whole thing. We need to try to love more, forgive more, accept more. We need to take care of each other. We need to take care of people we don't like. We can't just go around telling people that everyone we don't agree with is not only wrong but going to hell. That's like playing some kind of cheating card. It's totally bad logic. It's like we're saying we have the power of God to smite other people if we deem them bad. That's ridiculous.

I'm not really a true Christian, because there are people I don't like and who I don't try hard enough to love. Sometimes I'm just as mean-spirited as all the loud ones, and I always pray for forgiveness, but--it doesn't change the fact that to be a true Christian, you have to love everyone regardless. The Amish are a lot better at this than most of us. Frankly, the loud people could learn a lot from the Amish.

Jesus told His disciples to love each other as He loved them, and He was really good at the loving thing. We need to work a lot harder to get to that point, but I think the first step would be forgiving the people we're angry with, forgiving ourselves especially, and loving the people we love really, really hard.

We have an absolutely wonderful world for loving in. We should love in it. ♥ And I love you, and I think we can do it, okay?