Skip to main content

Love Is Not Christian - It Is Human

By Fernando Alcántar ~

I’m sorry. I used to challenge the veracity of your love and doubted your understanding of it on a regular basis. I believed you didn’t really know love, or understand the fullness of love, because you didn’t know Christ like I did. At times, I’ll admit, I wondered if that hurt you—but to be honest, at times I also hoped it did. I figured that if you felt that way than somehow that would discomfort you enough into seeking what I considered to be the source of true love—Jesus.
But, I also did it for selfish reasons. I boasted of some proprietary rights on love because I considered that to be my greatest evidence toward the existence of an invisible being. That feeling inside my chest was really the one true “tangible” piece of truth I could sort of really hold on to. Let’s face it, not much else can truly be proven between Genesis and Revelation.
1 John 4:8 reads, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” This theme is narrated and strongly pushed forward at most Christian assemblies. They’ll preach and sing that, “They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love. They will know we are Christians by our love.” The most quoted bible verse of all time reads, “For God so loved the world…”. This persistent focus on the love of god made me and other Christians believe a number of things:
  1. That we had proprietary rights on love because our god gave it to us
  2. That we possessed a moral high ground because we truly knew love
  3. That any love outside of Jesus’ love is inferior
  4. That real love outside of Jesus’ was impossible
  5. That anyone who wants to experience true love must convert to Christianity
This produced an arrogance over our ironclad hold on love, but also a fragile faith on a lifeline connected to that hold. We saw non-Christians as eternally incomplete, and our emotional mechanism overworking itself as it tried to compensate for lack of evidence to our faith.
The more scientific discovery tried to convince me to listen to my mind, the more I made an intentional decision to quiet my thoughts and “only listen to my heart” because that’s where “god spoke to me.” You see, when life got hard, that’s when I struggled most to see evidence of my god’s existence. Facts were troubling and they were debilitating. But love had always been, though at seasons rare, able to lift me and give me a second wind on faith.
So I preached love as a tool to win an argument, and also as a way to maintain myself in this hope of a better life. When I testified of “Jesus’ love” I was holding on to a rope hoping that my public declaration of faith would lift me off the cliff of doubt I was in. I built my support system so strongly around it that the mere thought of losing it felt like a threat to my very existence.
And I wasn’t alone. Sermons were preached every Sunday about it. Posts on social media flooded our timeline as we thanked Jesus for giving us love, blowing our own horns of a special connection with him—through love. And I constantly assured you that you wouldn’t know “true love” unless you converted to my religion—I mean—“relationship.” At times I said that I respected all religions, or lack their of, but in reality I was preaching my faith with a pretense of respect for diversity.
But this public display of understanding of love only powerfully furthered a bias towards people who don’t ally with such belief—not just for atheists; but for Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and other members of the human family. This belief further promoted stereotypes and prejudice against those who believed differently because if ‘God is love,’ and ‘Jesus loves you,’ than if you are not a Christian you must not know true love or how to truly love. But I didn’t see that then.
I understand that some people use religious belief to further their value and love for humanity—I’ll take that any day over the atrocities done in the name of deities every day. But there is a point to be made about the virtue of being able to have such value and love for humanity, not because a deity told us to, but because it grew naturally from our connection to each other as members of this family floating around the universe in a pale little cosmic rock.
If someone chooses to believe their love comes from a creator—that is their choice and they have every right to make that choice. But human history has shown us that we don’t need gods to act in love or hate, though often religion will intensify both of these. Furthermore, breaking from the belief that love can exist just as powerfully and real outside of Christianity is threatening to Christian belief because:
  1.  It supports the troubling hypothesis that a belief in Jesus is nothing more than a preference (as preferring red over blue) and NOT evidence for a creator
  2. If non-Christians can love just like they do, they lose their upper hand and claim on morality
  3. It would bring a weakening unbalance to the emotional health many Christians are holding on to dear life
Believing in an all-powerful god who sent his one and only son to die for the sins of humanity is a beautiful story. It really can be inspiring in the voice of a powerful speaker. Christians admit that they’d rather believe they are the creation of a loving deity than the result of some “cosmic accident.” But preference doesn’t produce causality. Choosing to believe we arrived at work riding a magic carpet than by taking the bus may be uplifting. Fantasy is certainly more alluring and awe-inspiring, but it doesn’t make it real--quite the opposite. The fact that love and value for humanity exist just as greatly outside of belief in Jesus only strengthens the challenge that you do not need such belief to love or to value people.
As human beings we do need beautiful stories. It’s called inspiration and we need that as motivation. But I also feel it is beautiful to ponder that of billions of solar systems, and an even greater number of planets, we were the astoundingly lucky ones who got a crack at life. And not just life, but a diverse, colorful, and complex one at it.
I now value people because they hold me when I cry, because they cheer for me when I win, and because they give me a second chance when I fail. I hope my value and love for humanity is judged by my ability to do the same for another, and not over my preference of belief in a mystical source. Love is not Christian, it is human. Let’s act like it.
--  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  

Fernando Alcántar is a former evangelical missionary leader, now a gay atheist activist, and author of 'To the Cross and Back: An Immigrant's Journey from Faith to Reason," now available on audiobook. You can read more of his blogs on gospelofreason.com.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our
Post a Comment
Read more

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette
Post a Comment
Read more

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo
Post a Comment
Read more

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we
Post a Comment
Read more

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not
Post a Comment
Read more

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~  A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins  Accepting Christ as Savior  Frequently reading the Bible  Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules)  Attending church services  Partaking of the Lord’s Supper  Tithing  Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc.  Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro
Post a Comment
Read more