"So what?"

by Astreja

Yes, we’ve heard these before:

•  “Even if God appeared right before you, you wouldn’t believe.”

• “You just want to sin."

• "I used to be {a drug addict | angry at God | a pagan atheist Cthulhu-worshipping gay prostitute who traded junk bonds on the Internet}…”

That could lead to even more dangerous questions –

I just have this to say about that:  So what?

What if it were true that the sudden arrival of a god would not move us to belief?  So what?  What do you propose we actually do about it – pretend to believe?  Wouldn’t your all-knowing deity see right through that ploy?

As for wanting to sin – generally by preferring wine to water, chocolate to carrots, or heavy metal to contemporary Christian praise music – so what?  Thank you for the brilliant observation that our tastes are different from yours.  Thank you also for a heads-up that life in heaven may not be to our liking.  (If it helps, we’re also sparing you an eternity of hearing us complain that we haven’t heard any good tunes in literally aeons.)

As for your claim that you were once very much like us, but became a slain-in-the-Spirit, on-fire-for-Jesus True Christian™, so what?  Either we were never like you and your testimony just doesn’t resonate with us, or we were very much like you and lost faith anyway.  We remember all too well how we used to be, and a total stranger professing familiarity is not going to bring us back to something we no longer want in our lives.

In fact, if you value your faith at all, you might want to just quietly leave the stony ground of Ex-C while you can.  If your most cherished beliefs and experiences can be dismissed with “So what?” you might find yourself questioning if your god really does have the power to soften hardened hearts. 

-- But so what?  Do you really need a faith that you can only express in tired clichés that you got second-hand from your pastor or from a Christian website?  Maybe you should aspire to something greater.  Stay here with us and ask the questions that disturb you, not the ones that you hope will disturb us.