chosen paths

I've never made any secret of the fact that I'm a christian, despte my deep misgivings about the modern day church. But today I read a blog post that really crystallized some of what I felt about the church. I've been reading Tym's blog for some time now, enjoying the vignettes about her life and work but today's post really made me sit up and think.

She's right in some ways though. I may be christian, but I'm not blind. I quote from her post

"Then there's the plain fact that the moment anything gets institutionalised --- education, social assistance, healthcare, exercise, religion --- it tends to go straight to hell in a handbasket"

A sentiment I thoroughly agree with. Everything always starts out well in terms of ideology, its when it comes to applying it to real life that mucks it up completely. Anything that becomes systemised or institutionalised just basically seems to calcify and rot from the inside eventually. There was so much bad press about communism that I didn't find out what it was really about until I went and read Marx's manifesto and realized the dream had nothing to do with the reality.

I left church for very much the same reasons she did. I was in university receiving a liberal arts education and all those new ideas just led to the questions no one in church could or would answer. In fact, one tended to be villified for asking too many questions. Churches, like all other institutions, need tame followers, not potential trouble makers. For me, the end was when a cell leader openly declared her admiration of President George W Bush as a christian leader and voiced her support for the Iraq war. As I recall, she could not answer even simple questions about his other policies and grew annoyed when I harped on about the Kyoto Protocol.

I doubt I'll ever resolve my problems with the current stance of the church over contentious and possibly incendiary issues such as gay rights, gay marriage and abortion. I hate the fact that christians are associated with abortion clinic burnings and small minded homophobic men.

But all this being said, I still went back to church in the end. I can't quite bring myself to abandon my faith altogether and most of Jesus's actual teachings still have as much attraction for me as they did when I was 14.

I'll never be able to swallow everything churches tell me wholesale, because that's who I am. But I know that with all institutions, you have to accept the good with the bad. I survived three years in NUS after all.

I'm back in there because despite what everyone says, I really do believe in God. No matter what evolutionists tell me( and yes, I have read their arguments) I refuse to believe in a non creationist view of life in general. I suppose for me, God and the church will always be separate in my mind. The church can go ahead and claim it speaks for God, but I for one, will never really buy it.

In the end, my view is that everyone has to find their own way to God. I'm glad I took my time with it and didn't cave in to well meaning but pushy friends.


I'm generally still meandering my way around, having come to the conclusion that I want to stick with being a christian and I won't claim to know "the way, the truth and the life".But I guess that finding out your own raison d'etre is part of growing up, part of the experience of life itself.


All I really have to say to non christians who like trashing christianity( and no, Tym's not one of them) is for them to just leave it alone. Trashing it won't make it go away and there are more constructive ways to spend your time. I don't feel the need to apologize for pesky evangelizing people, having never been one of them, but I do have to say that pushy, annoying, no-respect-for-boundaries type people exist in every race, culture and religion. I've frankly met just as many pushy annoying atheist 'evangelists' and except for a slight difference in phraseology, they're both equally irritating.