Unthinking

So we're back to where we started, with a generation of Christians "deconstructing" their faith for the simple reason that the world told them how it thinks and they simply like that better. 

If you pay attention, you'll see the troubling truth about all of this deconstruction: it's happening in exactly the same way as the faith that they are now renouncing. 

These deconstructing Christians will talk boldly about how they didn't have a choice but to believe in God because that's what they were taught. The adults in their life told them about it, showed it to them in books, put it on flannelgraphs for them, hung posters, created curriculum, made them color pictures of Jesus and the disciples in Sunday school. They lament that they just accepted these things without thinking much about them, that they didn't have a chance to think about them. The faith was just handed to them as truth, and they took it. 

Then, they say, they discovered that maybe it wasn't exactly the truth that it was cracked up to be. 

Because the world came along and gave them a different truth. A truth at odds with everything that they had learned as children in the "clustered" world of religion, "cut off" from "real" learning. 

But...check this out: the reason they believe the truth this world gave them? It's because the grown-ups in the world told them about it. Because they showed it to them in books. Because the world created presentations and lectures and curriculum. Because the world hung posters and gave them pretty pictures of a forest in bloom to color. 

These wannabe former Christians hate the way they were "indoctrinated" into the faith through lessons and teaching and books and propaganda, and as a result, they have traded the truth of the Christian faith for the metanarrative of the world, which has been presented to them through lessons and teaching and books and propaganda. 

And they don't see it. 

They don't see that they've taken the world's truth exactly the same way that they once took the church's truth. They don't see that the tools the world uses are the very same ones they rail against being used in the church. They don't see that they've taken the world's truth in just as unthinking a manner as they claim they took the church's truth. 

They hate that they weren't given a choice, but were expected to just believe what was handed to them, and in reaction, they have gone to...just believe what was handed to them. 

They rail against the "authorities" that gave them the faith - the church, the pastors, the priests, the elders, the parents and grandparents - but they have gone on to worship the authorities that give them the "truth" - the doctors, the politicians, the media. They worship them so wholeheartedly that even when the narrative keeps changing, they still accept and embrace what these authorities say. 

And they don't see it. 

They don't see it because they have bought hook, line, and sinker into the most fundamental statement that the world has made, while at the same outright denying and refuting the church's exact same fundamental statement as invalid. What is that statement that changes, somehow, everything? 

I'll tell you tomorrow.