I first heard about Christian deconstruction from an episode of The Babylon Bee podcast. The guest they interviewed, Alisa Childers, spoke on the importance of people understanding the reasons for their core beliefs, but was critical of the deconstruction movement for tearing apart beliefs without rebuilding their foundation. My own examination of Christian deconstruction found that it is essentially an apostate movement; a justification for discarding one’s faith in Christianity. While I have no issue with people examining, testing and discerning what is and isn’t true, many of the videos I’ve seen are people justifying migrating from their deeply held beliefs. Their revelations aren’t new or uniquely insightful. What I have noticed is that Christian deconstructionists are critical of their faith, while not being critical of the moral structures and belief systems they want to replace that faith with. They are often critical of the religion of their forbearers, without realizing the system they wish to replace it with, is also its own unexamined ideology.
Recently I was the victim of a robbery. Prior to this, I was debating if I wanted to leave my city. I’ve grown increasingly tired of office work, and thanks to some recently accepted publications, I’ve wanted to look into funding to pursue independent research and apply for PhD programs. I had originally thought to continue working for a year while applying for funding and graduate programs. I have no insurance for my stolen items, making the loss somewhat more absolute and has pushed me to the point of my previous option of leaving to work on my own research, regardless of monetary concerns. Although there is a solid methodology behind my decisions, the interpretation of my options in regards to certain probabilistic outcomes can easily be interpreted as a type of fate or destiny.
I was once an evangelistic Christian. I believed in this endeavour to the point where I went on a mission trip to my home country of India. Prior to the trip I only knew, and learned, what was wrong with Hinduism and why Christianity was the only truth. I did not bother to learn about the culture I’d be placed into nor did I attempt to objectively understand their beliefs of my own people. I truly believed I was doing the work of God in this country. What hurt the most is the memory my grandmother took of me, as being irreverent and intolerant, so much different from the misbehaved yet loving child she had known years prior, as the last memory of me before she passed.
Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician from the 1600’s, once proposed that people should live their lives as if there were a God, because by doing so, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Although Pascal never intended this statement as a proof, it’s often used by religious apologists as an argument for the belief in God. It places the assumption of a god and the afterlife into a weighted game around such beliefs, instead of first looking at the benefits of a good life in relation to the possibility of a god.
I recently got into a fight with one of my closest friends. It was entirely my fault and my place to apologize. We moved forward together from this moment as friends, for which I’m glad. At one point she told me she hoped the grace and forgiveness she showed would reflect that of her faith as a Christian.
I would hope that as human beings, the compassion we show for others is not a dependence or reflection of our faiths. For all faiths have text that can be taken to invoke both acceptance and indignance, pacifism and aggression, condemnation and redemption, devastation and hope. Never should religious ideology define us as people, but rather we as individual should define the role of religion in our lives.
Death (n.) — the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism
When human beings experiences death, all our functions of life end permanently. We can no longer think, act or make decisions that will affect the world. Everything that we were becomes a part of the past. We can discuss the contributions of those who have died, we can even write books about them and build monuments if we consider their lives sufficiently noteworthy, but their ability to contribute to the here and present now is at an end. All humans die eventually. You and I will one day cease to have the ability to use our minds, in conjunction with our bodies, to interact with this world.
In the old testament Bible in the book of Genesis, Chapter 20, Abraham was told by God to take his son to a mountain in Moriah and sacrifice his child. He travels to the mountain with his son, builds an alter and then binds his son and prepares to sacrifice him, but God sends an angle to stop the sacrifice and provides an animal to be slaughtered instead, telling Abraham that this was a test to see if he feared God by not withholding his only son.
Often you may hear devout followers in a afterlife based religion saying something to the effect of, “Though tough times may come, they will only last for a little while, heaven is our home.”
