Something I posted on facebook

Interesting thought: Christians hold the Bible as their source of morality, yet don't hold all of it as true (nobody seriously believes it's ok to wipe out an entire city just because God told you to a la Joshua). So how do you pick and choose? Catholics cite tradition in this example, but that's just as fallible as each person using their own opinion; tradition is, by definition, passed down over the course of generations--by individuals. Direct revelation is claimed sometimes, but still, that's coming from another person.

Any way you slice it, every religion-based moral imperative comes to us through a filter--a filter of humanity. How do we know it's true? I seriously cannot remember how I would have answered this question in my "Saved" days. Trust that God preserves his words? But the original words were given to people in the first place, if you believe in Christianity, so trust that God made sure that first guy got it right? How did he do that without infringing on free will?

Seriously. Can't remember.

I also want to discuss something I think my mom might say if/when I talk to her about any of these questions I'm coming up with. Clearly, I am struggling with my rejection of Christianity. It's not an easy task, and I am the first to admit it. She might say, "Well, doesn't that tell you something?" However, I don't think it tells me anything I didn't already know.

My internal struggle tells me merely that I acquired a belief in Christianity, much as I acquired the English language (language is acquired, not learned...it's an important distinction). The battle I am experiencing is merely indicative of how malleable a child's brain is, and is no different from what I would go through if I tried to literally replace English with Italian--and I did try when I was in Italy, and I did experience a taste of the fight. The fact that it's difficult to replace belief with unbelief doesn't tell me unbelief is wrong any more than the difficulty of replacing English with Italian told me that Italian was "wrong". The very idea is absurd, that one language is better than another.

And so what I am fighting against, the sense that I am destroying a part of my identity and replacing it with a foreign substance, is not indicative of the falseness of the ideology I am exploring. But by the same token, it does not lend truth to that ideology, either. It just tells me something about religion in general--that it is easy to acquire if you start at birth, but hard to give up in that same situation.