I Believe

Organized religion is very hard for me.    Having lived with people who look at me and my disability with the moral model, I’ve sinned or my parents have sinned.  Its very hard to believe in a system of spirituality that condones and practices intolerance.     To my naive view of the world I’ve never understood religious wars.  Don’t they all preach peace and tolerance.  Killing in gods name or shunning others for their beliefs doesn’t make any sense to me.   There have been times I’ve been asked to go out and actively recruit people from other faiths since according to my faith their faith has to be wrong.  I won’t do it.  I can’t.
Faith healers / Evangelists have taken their toll on my tolerance for organized religion.  I’m supposed to heal myself or they can heal me if I just believe and I’m bad and a non believer for still being blind.  Its all crap to me.
I am not unique there are others in my family with the same genetic disorder causing visual impairment or legal blindness.    I used to think I was like “Tigger”, “I’m the only one”.   There are those in my family that have an issue with the word “special”.   I don’t think I’m special either.   I’ve come to realize we are all different all unique and its our diversity in capabilities and talents and beliefs that make the world a cool and interesting place.
My current thinking about organized religion is that churches and their leaders fall into three categories.   I’ve given up trying to focus on a faith as the instantiation of that faith is dependent on the practitioner at the church level.    The churches themselves in my opinion fall into three groups.

• The Dammers, you’re a sinner your bad, or you can’t be healed or heal yourself your bad.
• The Forgivers, got is your savior and will forgive your sins.
• The Abusers, the ones that use conditional love the carrot and the stick, “God will love you or forgive you if?”.   Striking some kind of bargain.

I don’t like the dammers.  I can flagellate myself better than anyone and I don’t want any more help thank you.  Learning self forgiveness was hard enough and now your going to tell me I’m bad.   Forget it.
The forgivers are cool as I think that we are all diverse and we all sin.   This group does a better job of accepting diversity and embracing the uniqueness of the people.   Very cool
The Abusers are exactly that.   Telling someone that you well love them if you do something is wrong.  Its abuse, its conditional love which is so distructive.  Telling me that god won’t love me unless I do such and such is no different.    While we are at it I can appreciate your passion about your faith but DON’T yell at me.    Either.
I heard a sermon the other day that talked about love and love from a person and godly love.  Gods love is exactly that gods love.    Its like my love for my children.   I love my children and even if they did or do something I’m not happy with I still love them.   Maybe not the behavior but I do love them.    I’m sure God feels for all of us that way as well.  God loves all of us perhaps not what we choose to do with the talents we have been given.  I’m sure God loves us all none the less.