If you are Christian you struggle constantly to understand and explain all those Christians who seem to purposefully take the Lord’s name in vain as they use it and much more to justify their greed, power needs and more by putting a Christian title on them. They not only justify but redefine what is right and live by a set of ethics, as Christians, that would make Jesus recoil.
If you are in the other group of Christians trying to live by the Gospels and more, you struggle constantly trying to explain and understand what this first group believes and how can they call themselves Christians. They have been doing that since they were slave owners, climate change deniers, genocidal to those not culturally and physically like them.
If you are not Christian you look askance at what you see and use that first group to say – Thank God I am not a Christian.
From what we have seen it all comes down to Love vs Sex. Reach out to someone in “love” and they will almost always translate that friendship overture as sexual. A friendship in this society based on love is practically non-existent. We don’t know such and can’t understand such so we push it away.
It took us many years to understand how love and sex are used in religion generally and Christianity in particular.
To a Christian – God is love! The beginning and end of the theology.
But the problems begin there because what does “love” mean? We think we know, but actually we define love to be what is most convenient to our lifestyle and generally that is using the term “love” to actually mean and talk about “sex.”
Love covers everything. Male/Female/Animals/Insects, etc. But we limit it to covering humans – male and female – and then we define and segment love into love of family, love of another human being and more. We then define sin by using love – defining the ‘wrong kind’ and then making those who fall into the categories we set up as living in sin.
It is quite a society we have created and we have blamed God or claimed our society is ordained by God and comes from God. Christianity blames Jesus.
We are just coming out of a huge fight over marriage. We claim marriage is of God and by God and more. Don’t know where that came from because marriage is clearly a state phenomena. You are married by the state. Even ordained ministers have to get a special license to marry people and those who are not ordained can apply for a license to marry others without being “ordained.” But we, this glorious society, which has defined everything in varying degrees of good or evil (sinful) according to that things’ cultural background, have been part of a fight to keep “marriage” as an institution only available to a “couple” defined as one man and one woman. That fight has pretty well ended, but others are beginning over “love”.
We have “illicit love”, “illegal love”, and so much more, which if we look clearly we would find none of what we talk about is what Christ defined as love in the Scriptures.
Christ talked about love – we denigrate the term by meaning the feeling we get when we are sexually attracted and we have used that belief to destroy, demean, discredit others. Love in our society is about power and control. It is about who is better than others because of who they “love” and who is less then and to be demeaned and sometimes even jailed for who they “love.”
Think about your use of the term “love” and the next time you have to deal with that concept see if you can seek out and destroy the “sex” that is there as a part of what you mean. Doing that over time one can come out with a pure love which follows biblical teachings.
Most people marry because of a sexual not a love connection. People come together in culturally defined groups because of a sexual attraction – “love of self”. How strong is it to bond with people who are like you. How difficult to maintain a friendship bond with someone who comes from a very different cultural background and has different physical features. How strong is it to feel a love for the other and the superiority of you and others in the group over those unlike you physically, politically, financially. Take a look at what those feelings really are about and sex is hiding in the corner.
It is no accident that the issues of the group of Christians who fight to take power and control to have their ethical base be universal generally look alike, think closely similar thoughts, and need to enforce their feelings, their ways of being on others under the guise of the superiority of their Christianity. What strips them of their cover and claim that they are taking the Lord’s name in vain comes from the fact that most of their issues within that group of Christians are about sex. Who can have sex with who and how. What does love mean and its existence only true amongst certain groups. The miscegnation laws came from that need. Abortion is the current issue and it is promoted with great vigor and lots of emotion. An issue claimed to be a Christian issue about love and what Christ ordained is really about power and based in sex?
A friendship between a man and a woman is suspect because if it is a close love relationship we don’t believe it exists without sex. In fact, very few of us believe there can be a love relationship between a man and a woman without sex. With the opening up of relationships we don’t believe there can be a relationship between same sex people without sex being the motivator or being involved.
It is sad that we are going further down the rat hole of abusing the term love to mean whatever we need it to mean to either sway some people or destroy others. May we repent our abuses of Christian love and live a life which moves us closer to being what God has called us to be – totally in love with one another without sex hiding in the shadows to destroy that love potential and grab it quickly to turn it into power, jealousy, destruction and more.
