Christianity‘s vision is often misguided.
Christianity is about your individual salvation.
Christ wants to know what you are going to do as an individual.
Christ wants to know how you are going to treat other people.
What Christ doesn’t care about is what we are going to do in the Middle East or the Ukraine.
There is no “we” in Christ’s message.
Christ speaks to you as an individual.
Yes, I understand the reference to “our” and “us” in the Lord’s Prayer. Many pastors and theologians have seized upon these words as tools to marshal Christians toward collective action.
Many pastors believe that Christ does not exist without the Church.
I disagree.
Christ was not a commie. These words “us’ and “our” in the Lord’s Prayer are literary tools not calls for collective action.
A group is not a person and thus has no sense of shame or guilt. Without a sense of shame or guilt, a group has no need for God or God’s forgiveness and so acts accordingly.
Now, in today’s modern world we have many preachers who take Christ’s message and evangelize for war.
I must’ve missed the lesson in my Sunday school class where Jesus implored for us to go out into the world and beat the shit out of people.
These ministers work with the CIA and rev their followers up for war.
They cozy up to politicians at prayer breakfasts.
They agitate for war.
As if we haven’t had one for the past 15 years.
The basis for this warmongering is Christ’s missionary zeal.
The logic, I suppose, is that because Christ preached while walking from town to town we are to do the same.
How can we sit back and do nothing, zealots ask, as they point to “primitive” cultures.
Look at the poverty, they scream.
And their backward way of life, they add.
The misery is heartbreaking, and something must be done.
Christianity is then viewed as a fighting religion.
The goal then is to force our better, “superior” Christian way of life upon the barbarian beast.
And what this has led to is nonstop American warmongering overseas for over one hundred years.
The path we take is false.
Christians spread their faith best by practicing it as individuals, not by cramming their faith down the throats of the nonbeliever with an army.
There is no “we” in Christianity.
By joining a group, even a Christian one, I forfeit my morality to the group leader who has been seduced and excited by Corporate America through private visits with the President, flights on Air Force One, and the other dog biscuits of Empire.
But if I turn away and ask what I should do as an individual, then the solution reveals itself. The group leader loses power and our leadership unable to sell war decides to work with other nations rather than exploit them.
As Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.”
True Christianity thus reveals itself.
Cowboy Archer 