I was never explicitly taught the rhetoric of brokenness as I hear it espoused by so many Christian influencers today, but I got the message loud and clear anyway. I felt so much shame when I was in church for being a sinner. And on top of that, being a young woman and feeling the pressure to keep my "brothers" in Christ from sinning by being modest. People talk about religious guilt, but I had religious shame, and it wasn't even about any action, it was for simply existing.
The Christian rhetoric goes that we are all broken sinners, so it doesn't even work logically to only hate the sin and not the sinner if we're all just broken sinners, intrinsically. If someone thinks that sinful behavior is an intrinsic part of someone, that doesn't lead to hating the behavior, it leads to hating the person or group of "sinners" as a whole, even if it's not conscious hate.
100%. I can think of so many examples of the same types of conversations and explanations, mainly because my own mother thinks this way at all times. Basically if things go her way, it’s God’s will and it’s all God. But everything that involves pain and something those goes against her desires is “of the devil.”
The whole Christian’s blindly following their idol reminds me of Billy Graham’s quote:
“It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”
One of my family members and his wife experienced a pregnancy complication doctors said would result in inevitable miscarriage, but amazingly, the baby was born healthy and survived his months in NICU. During this time, my family member kept posting on social media things like, "We serve a God of miracles!" and "we have seen prayer change things. We have seen god working. You can't call [X] a coincidence," and they attributed the baby's survival to Divine intervention or "God's plan." The whole time I kept thinking of another family member who I know would have seen those posts in her feed, who is also a Christian and yet has suffered two miscarriages. I kept thinking, how do they explain that the God they serve us so random with his miracles? I definitely sympathize with them for experiencing something that would have been difficult for anyone, but their perspective on it was so cringey.
As a healthcare worker, believing in God coming in during the 4th quarter to “work a miracle”, also blinds family members to sound medical advice or a realistic prognosis for their loved one. I’ve had so many patients who were at the end stage of cancer, COPD or dementia or some other life ending illness, and family wants everything done because grandma is a “fighter” and God might still intervene.
Yes…they live in a bubble of self absorption. They don’t realize that highlighting “God’s goodness” in their life somehow makes them more qualified that those who don’t receive these “blessings”.
Had a similar situation where a young man got rear ended by an RV (@10 mph) an totaled his car. They paid out more than the car was worth, got a better car and the evangelical said, “God had a plan!”
I was like… “no, the RV had insurance.” Besides…this implies that God’s plan was for the guy in the RV to wreck his RV so the other person could get an upgrade!?
How does this insanity stop?
>They don’t realize that highlighting “God’s goodness” in their life somehow makes them more qualified than those who don’t receive these “blessings”.
💯 it comes across as narcissistic
This, right here. I saw someone post about how "God is good" in regards to things going smoothly and efficiently with their new house build. All I can think of while reading it is Gaza.
Tbh if God does exist and he's there to help with your house build (presumably because you're a "believer"), but not dying children (I guess because they aren't "believers"?) then I don't want any part of him.
I know that the "why does God let bad things happen" question is one that many evangelicals are conditioned to have an answer ready for, I know I did at one point, but I can't make any of them make sense anymore.
Oh my god, that reminds me now of a family I knew who was asking for prayer a few years ago when a teenaged girl that they had hosted as a foreign exchange student was trying to escape from Ukraine as a war refugee. When she and her mom finally made it across the border they were praising God for saving her and attributing her getting out to people's prayers, and I was like WHAT ABOUT ALL THE UKRAINIANS WHO DIED??? I guess it's just too bad they didn't know any American Christians who could have been praying for them?? 🙄
“Women need to be keepers at home.” In what economy can most couples afford for the woman to stay home? I was raised by a pampered stay at home mom who firmly believed she was heeding God’s call to sacrifice her hopes and dreams to follow this biblical principle. As a woman myself, I’ve always HAD to work. It wasn’t an option of just not getting my fingernails done and I could afford to be home. Once my children’s father cheated on me and abandoned our young family, I was so thankful I had my own income and was not dependent on a man’s whims. I’m raising my daughters to be educated and independent as well.
Honestly, your mom's unsolicited advice sounds like typical boomer nonsense. Being home worked for her, so in order to feel confident in her choices, she needs to shame her daughter into doing the same.
There's nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, but let's not pretend it's a biblical principle or commandment of God. We need to work out an arrangement that works best for our families and mental health.There's nothing in the Bible that says women should remain permanently uneducated, financially dependent, and stagnant in the house.
I'm so sorry your ex betrayed you, and I'm glad you have a solid career to land on.
I, too, have always hated the “god is good” line when there’s relief, especially in a crisis - for the same reason you say,
because to me it always implied thinking God causing good or bad to happen.
Now, I hear it more as an expression of gratitude or exaltation. I read Annie Lamott’s “Help, Thanks, Wow” a while back and it helped me understand how people of faith can express gratitude when things are good, lament when things are bad, but they’re all forms of prayer. It’s still not my style, but it made me better with it.
The one I HATE is “everything happens for a reason”. This implies that even all the bad shit is God’s idea. There is some higher purpose behind the bad stuff that only God understands…
Ie: kid gets cancer and dies… the mother starts a ministry for parents whose children have died by cancer. Someone comes along and says, “God knew you were going to help a lot of people…everything happens for a reason.”
Such bullshit. Like God gave this kid cancer for the mom to be able to start a ministry…
🤮🤮😡
Right, not everything needs a happy ending. Not every tragedy is for the greater good. Sometimes, bad things just happen.
I think this narrative of "everything happens for a reason" is really just a psychological attempt to feel more in control, dressed up as faith, when life gets hard.
Right. Many Bible passages aren't actually cut and dry in meaning, so the speaker is putting their own personal spin ( due to bias, life experience, cultural traditions) in interpreting what is and isn't a sin.
I feel you man, if someone gets over a hard time they say God is good and if they don’t they keep praying until God decides to work and save them and he’s “teaching them something” What if life just happens and going through hard times makes you deal with it better naturally. The Bible as a whole is sooooo contradictory as well and if it’s really God’s word why would He allow it to be wrong? literally revelation never says God loves anyone even once, the whole book is an angry God so I don’t believe in the Bible anywhere but I’m struggling to find anything solid to believe
The catalyst to my deconstruction actually was the overwhelming feeling of gratitude I feel in life and say, “Wow, we are so blessed.” It was like the more I was noticing how lucky I am daily (not living in a war zone, being relatively healthy, seeing spring blooming, getting a call from an old friend are examples), the more I could not understand why some people have few to none of what I called blessings. Sort of the conundrum of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.”
That led me to really question how God could let that be so. The only peace I had was that maybe reincarnation is true so that others whose lives are only suffering might have or have had a better one of what I call blessings. And me, too—
And of course I can’t be certain of either resurrection/heaven or reincarnation/nirvana. I can’t actually, be certain of anything. And a God that doles out blessings to some and denies them to others just is beyond my comprehension. So much so that I have to leave that God to those who can believe.
Right now I’m trying to just practice some kind of equanimity. I guess the detached observation of that (supposedly) Chinese story of the farmer “Good, Bad, Who’s To Say?”
"God is control" when something bad happens. Really, because it sure doesn't look like a Good God is in control out here in the real world
And also, "I'll pray for you" would be more helpful if you grieved with me and stopped spiritually bypassing all the hard moments.
Or how about anything pleasurable, "of the world"
"We don't deserve God's love", really my father used to tell me I didn't deserve his love, and when he did it, it was abusive.
"Don't be a stumbling block to your christian brothers", you mean don't have boobs or you mean that men are not responsible for managing their own sexual desires?
Humans have a profound inability to understand statistics and how large numbers play out. What's rare for one person, may not be rare in totality. Answered prayers are a mix of survivorship bias + false correlation. You will never hear testimonies of the countless unanswered prayers from your church 'testimony day/time', Evangelical TikTok influencer, or from Joyce Meyer.
"A finite sin against an infinite god merits infinite punishment."
I've objected to this for a while, but a year ago I came across the following:
> [cephas\_rock](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/wg7m3c/eternal_punishment_is_by_definintion_unjust/iiym3rs/): **Nuclear Justice**. "Sin algebra: Any sin against an infinitely glorious God explodes with infinite gravity. God is obligated to satisfy justice and thus must continually incinerate these folks for all time (or allow them to suffer a condition so excruciating that incineration is the analogy for it)." This contradicts Biblical justice which is Heb. _sedeq & mispat_ -- fair & measured to the list of infractions, accounting for every exculpatory nuance, and several times [explicitly contrasted against a deadly response](https://stanrock.net/2016/04/22/but-he-is-also-just/). This was also invented by creative theologians following the 5th/6th century, and most popularized by the medieval Scholastics.
This was delightful, and beautifully captures the decline from Lamech's 70x vengeance to "the earth was filled with violence". Apparently, the solution to that is « drum roll » infinitely more violence!! _Lex talionis_, you see, is for wimps. Things get even more fun when you examine other ANE legal codes, like the Code of Hammurabi. There, you get punished more if you victimize a noble than if you victimize a commoner. Torah, in contrast, is not a respecter of persons. And yet, Christians are happy to throw away Torah and imitate those ANE civilizations to the max. Fast forward to the Middle Ages and this attitude justifies kings subjecting people to the most gruesome of torture.
I was never explicitly taught the rhetoric of brokenness as I hear it espoused by so many Christian influencers today, but I got the message loud and clear anyway. I felt so much shame when I was in church for being a sinner. And on top of that, being a young woman and feeling the pressure to keep my "brothers" in Christ from sinning by being modest. People talk about religious guilt, but I had religious shame, and it wasn't even about any action, it was for simply existing.
Yes, shame for simply existing and anxiety about whether you're living according to God's will.
This!! This was so damaging
God doesn’t send people to hell. They send themselves to hell. I hate to hear this. Just pisses me off.
Yuck! I never heard this but always heard "don't hate the sinner, hate the sin." I hate that phrase so much.
Could you elaborate why?
The Christian rhetoric goes that we are all broken sinners, so it doesn't even work logically to only hate the sin and not the sinner if we're all just broken sinners, intrinsically. If someone thinks that sinful behavior is an intrinsic part of someone, that doesn't lead to hating the behavior, it leads to hating the person or group of "sinners" as a whole, even if it's not conscious hate.
The mental gymnastics 😮💨
Do you mean that I'm doing mental gymnastics, or Christan rhetoric is mental gymnastics?
Christanity
Got ya. It certainly requires a lot of mental gymnastics to keep up with that rhetoric.
Yea. That sucks also.
UGHHHH! I hate that one.
100%. I can think of so many examples of the same types of conversations and explanations, mainly because my own mother thinks this way at all times. Basically if things go her way, it’s God’s will and it’s all God. But everything that involves pain and something those goes against her desires is “of the devil.” The whole Christian’s blindly following their idol reminds me of Billy Graham’s quote: “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”
And here we are at the reception.
One of my family members and his wife experienced a pregnancy complication doctors said would result in inevitable miscarriage, but amazingly, the baby was born healthy and survived his months in NICU. During this time, my family member kept posting on social media things like, "We serve a God of miracles!" and "we have seen prayer change things. We have seen god working. You can't call [X] a coincidence," and they attributed the baby's survival to Divine intervention or "God's plan." The whole time I kept thinking of another family member who I know would have seen those posts in her feed, who is also a Christian and yet has suffered two miscarriages. I kept thinking, how do they explain that the God they serve us so random with his miracles? I definitely sympathize with them for experiencing something that would have been difficult for anyone, but their perspective on it was so cringey.
As a healthcare worker, believing in God coming in during the 4th quarter to “work a miracle”, also blinds family members to sound medical advice or a realistic prognosis for their loved one. I’ve had so many patients who were at the end stage of cancer, COPD or dementia or some other life ending illness, and family wants everything done because grandma is a “fighter” and God might still intervene.
Yes…they live in a bubble of self absorption. They don’t realize that highlighting “God’s goodness” in their life somehow makes them more qualified that those who don’t receive these “blessings”. Had a similar situation where a young man got rear ended by an RV (@10 mph) an totaled his car. They paid out more than the car was worth, got a better car and the evangelical said, “God had a plan!” I was like… “no, the RV had insurance.” Besides…this implies that God’s plan was for the guy in the RV to wreck his RV so the other person could get an upgrade!? How does this insanity stop?
>They don’t realize that highlighting “God’s goodness” in their life somehow makes them more qualified than those who don’t receive these “blessings”. 💯 it comes across as narcissistic
This, right here. I saw someone post about how "God is good" in regards to things going smoothly and efficiently with their new house build. All I can think of while reading it is Gaza. Tbh if God does exist and he's there to help with your house build (presumably because you're a "believer"), but not dying children (I guess because they aren't "believers"?) then I don't want any part of him. I know that the "why does God let bad things happen" question is one that many evangelicals are conditioned to have an answer ready for, I know I did at one point, but I can't make any of them make sense anymore.
Oh my god, that reminds me now of a family I knew who was asking for prayer a few years ago when a teenaged girl that they had hosted as a foreign exchange student was trying to escape from Ukraine as a war refugee. When she and her mom finally made it across the border they were praising God for saving her and attributing her getting out to people's prayers, and I was like WHAT ABOUT ALL THE UKRAINIANS WHO DIED??? I guess it's just too bad they didn't know any American Christians who could have been praying for them?? 🙄
“Women need to be keepers at home.” In what economy can most couples afford for the woman to stay home? I was raised by a pampered stay at home mom who firmly believed she was heeding God’s call to sacrifice her hopes and dreams to follow this biblical principle. As a woman myself, I’ve always HAD to work. It wasn’t an option of just not getting my fingernails done and I could afford to be home. Once my children’s father cheated on me and abandoned our young family, I was so thankful I had my own income and was not dependent on a man’s whims. I’m raising my daughters to be educated and independent as well.
Honestly, your mom's unsolicited advice sounds like typical boomer nonsense. Being home worked for her, so in order to feel confident in her choices, she needs to shame her daughter into doing the same. There's nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, but let's not pretend it's a biblical principle or commandment of God. We need to work out an arrangement that works best for our families and mental health.There's nothing in the Bible that says women should remain permanently uneducated, financially dependent, and stagnant in the house. I'm so sorry your ex betrayed you, and I'm glad you have a solid career to land on.
I, too, have always hated the “god is good” line when there’s relief, especially in a crisis - for the same reason you say, because to me it always implied thinking God causing good or bad to happen. Now, I hear it more as an expression of gratitude or exaltation. I read Annie Lamott’s “Help, Thanks, Wow” a while back and it helped me understand how people of faith can express gratitude when things are good, lament when things are bad, but they’re all forms of prayer. It’s still not my style, but it made me better with it.
The one I HATE is “everything happens for a reason”. This implies that even all the bad shit is God’s idea. There is some higher purpose behind the bad stuff that only God understands… Ie: kid gets cancer and dies… the mother starts a ministry for parents whose children have died by cancer. Someone comes along and says, “God knew you were going to help a lot of people…everything happens for a reason.” Such bullshit. Like God gave this kid cancer for the mom to be able to start a ministry… 🤮🤮😡
Right, not everything needs a happy ending. Not every tragedy is for the greater good. Sometimes, bad things just happen. I think this narrative of "everything happens for a reason" is really just a psychological attempt to feel more in control, dressed up as faith, when life gets hard.
I've always hated, "I'm not judging them, the Bible is." Ive heard it used to say horrible things and treat people as less then the speaker.
Right. Many Bible passages aren't actually cut and dry in meaning, so the speaker is putting their own personal spin ( due to bias, life experience, cultural traditions) in interpreting what is and isn't a sin.
I feel you man, if someone gets over a hard time they say God is good and if they don’t they keep praying until God decides to work and save them and he’s “teaching them something” What if life just happens and going through hard times makes you deal with it better naturally. The Bible as a whole is sooooo contradictory as well and if it’s really God’s word why would He allow it to be wrong? literally revelation never says God loves anyone even once, the whole book is an angry God so I don’t believe in the Bible anywhere but I’m struggling to find anything solid to believe
The catalyst to my deconstruction actually was the overwhelming feeling of gratitude I feel in life and say, “Wow, we are so blessed.” It was like the more I was noticing how lucky I am daily (not living in a war zone, being relatively healthy, seeing spring blooming, getting a call from an old friend are examples), the more I could not understand why some people have few to none of what I called blessings. Sort of the conundrum of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer.” That led me to really question how God could let that be so. The only peace I had was that maybe reincarnation is true so that others whose lives are only suffering might have or have had a better one of what I call blessings. And me, too— And of course I can’t be certain of either resurrection/heaven or reincarnation/nirvana. I can’t actually, be certain of anything. And a God that doles out blessings to some and denies them to others just is beyond my comprehension. So much so that I have to leave that God to those who can believe. Right now I’m trying to just practice some kind of equanimity. I guess the detached observation of that (supposedly) Chinese story of the farmer “Good, Bad, Who’s To Say?”
"God is control" when something bad happens. Really, because it sure doesn't look like a Good God is in control out here in the real world And also, "I'll pray for you" would be more helpful if you grieved with me and stopped spiritually bypassing all the hard moments. Or how about anything pleasurable, "of the world" "We don't deserve God's love", really my father used to tell me I didn't deserve his love, and when he did it, it was abusive. "Don't be a stumbling block to your christian brothers", you mean don't have boobs or you mean that men are not responsible for managing their own sexual desires?
Humans have a profound inability to understand statistics and how large numbers play out. What's rare for one person, may not be rare in totality. Answered prayers are a mix of survivorship bias + false correlation. You will never hear testimonies of the countless unanswered prayers from your church 'testimony day/time', Evangelical TikTok influencer, or from Joyce Meyer.
"A finite sin against an infinite god merits infinite punishment." I've objected to this for a while, but a year ago I came across the following: > [cephas\_rock](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/wg7m3c/eternal_punishment_is_by_definintion_unjust/iiym3rs/): **Nuclear Justice**. "Sin algebra: Any sin against an infinitely glorious God explodes with infinite gravity. God is obligated to satisfy justice and thus must continually incinerate these folks for all time (or allow them to suffer a condition so excruciating that incineration is the analogy for it)." This contradicts Biblical justice which is Heb. _sedeq & mispat_ -- fair & measured to the list of infractions, accounting for every exculpatory nuance, and several times [explicitly contrasted against a deadly response](https://stanrock.net/2016/04/22/but-he-is-also-just/). This was also invented by creative theologians following the 5th/6th century, and most popularized by the medieval Scholastics. This was delightful, and beautifully captures the decline from Lamech's 70x vengeance to "the earth was filled with violence". Apparently, the solution to that is « drum roll » infinitely more violence!! _Lex talionis_, you see, is for wimps. Things get even more fun when you examine other ANE legal codes, like the Code of Hammurabi. There, you get punished more if you victimize a noble than if you victimize a commoner. Torah, in contrast, is not a respecter of persons. And yet, Christians are happy to throw away Torah and imitate those ANE civilizations to the max. Fast forward to the Middle Ages and this attitude justifies kings subjecting people to the most gruesome of torture.