Tag: religion

I guess.

Don’t mind me. No, really, don’t.

I’m just here to suss out a few things for my own benefit. If you want to come along, you’re more than welcome. As always, grab your favorite beverage and put your feet up you may be here a while.

**To Anyone from My Job Who May Be Reading–don’t take any personal offense at the following. I happen to like all of you. I just don’t understand you and I’m trying, I’m really trying. So…read on if you want but read what’s here and not what you think is here, don’t believe for a single second I am talking about any of you individually/covertly because I’m not and above all else…keep it to yourself, I know how that Church Grapevine is.**

On we go…

One more time for the record I am a Recovered Catholic, Practicing Pagan for 20+ years, and I work in a UCC Church for the past 3 years. Every single day my job throws full in my face exactly why I walked away from Catholicism and being a Baptist…yeah, I don’t forget I got the double-whammy growing up. In the process, makes me so glad I had the courage and the strength and the intelligence to see for what it was is and then to walk at a young age.

Yep, being around so many “Open and Affirming” yet oh-so-closed minds can make my job very frustrating and today it almost made me sick. Honestly, it did. Not because of anything anyone directly associated with the place did or said. I’m responsible for putting together the monthly newsletter and in so doing I also must cruise ucc.org and sneucc.org for articles that may be of some direct interest to the folks at the church.

I cruise those sites a few times a month looking for anything relevant to the folks at my job and timely. I hate putting old stuff in a new publication so I like it to be as recently posted as possible. I found a few nifty articles over the month of November and this one which immediately turned my stomach. If you’re interested in a ton of totally blind, hypocritical bullshit…read it. Don’t mind the missing words and grammatical errors. If not, don’t.

Suffice it to say, it’s shit like this that drove people away in droves.

Another thing one might say is That Which Does Not Change and Evolve Dies.

That goes for absolutely every living thing in the Cosmos as we know it. Think of all the changes just your own body has gone through over the course of your life. If that never happened to you, to me, to everyone, well….What would it be like to, say, have the brain set of a bratty teenager but the body of an 80 year-old?

How attractive is that?

Yet that’s exactly what’s happened when it comes to churches everywhere. They have the mindset of a bratty teenager and the body of octogenarian. Want proof? Read the article and look at his picture.

What really pissed me off about this trite crap is that the author, Mr. Charlie Kuchenbrod, obviously loves to shoot off his mouth all the while believing himself intelligent and relevant but he lacks enough courage and conviction to leave any contact information…at all. Yes, I did go to the Almighty Google and look for him so I could give him a piece of my mind instead of you having to sit here and read this BUT…he doesn’t really have any…any…anything. There’s a LinkedIn page that he’s never used. That’s about it.

Don’t you love people who throw stones from behind walls?

Chicken shit.

I mean somebody might come along and disabuse Mr. Kuchenbrod of his ill-fated, outdated, reason everything is going down the shitter notions. That’d be a shame, huh?

Whatever. People like him cannot be helped and they’re so stayed in their ways they’re of little use to 2023. I should just leave him in his misery, his befuddlement, and his blaming everyone and everything but the church itself for its own demise.

No, Charlie Dearest, people didn’t actually become “church shoppers”. The church wasn’t dumped in favor of “individualism”. It created a whole bunch of problems for itself but I don’t expect you realize that because your entire religion is based on not taking any personal responsibility at any time for anything at all. Things go good, well, ‘that’s god’. Things go bad, well, ‘the devil made me do it’.

Did you ever think people got tired of that and you know…the kids. It was a bad thing for all of you. Very difficult to recover when that very well kept secret was finally blown open.

I could go on with all the problems people like you, Charlie, created for yourselves and those around you but, you know what? The actual bottom line is this: The world got smaller.

Over the last 100 years technology has made leaps and bounds in just communication alone never mind traveling and…changed…everything. During that time, we’ve gotten to know each other far beyond our own little physical communities. As an American, which I am though the same cannot be you said for you which is evidenced by your article, I am honor bound to respect the religions of others especially when they are not my own. Other people got that message too as their neighborhoods changed…oh that damn word again…changed. People who didn’t look exactly like each other started living next door to each other and sharing their cultures and ways. Including their own–what I’m sure you’d like to call backwards–religions.

It became damn near impossible to look at said neighbor and tell them their God (capital fucking G motherfucker!) is some how inferior to the one who (never ever did) help write two moldy books, one of which has been changed…damn again…rearraigned according to the wants and beliefs and whims of whatever egotistical male was in charge at the time for hundreds of years and then had a ton of crap left out of it. Your book is not now and never was sacred. Had it been, no one would have dared change…shit again!…a single word of it.

Earth to Chuck…that is so not a history book either. You will never find in the non-fiction section of any reputable bookstore.

Charlie, you and others like you, are the reason this…institution quickly turning to outright asylum… has failed and will continue to fail until it finally dies off with people like you crying something like; I did everything I could!

Yep, everything except Change. Everything except realize you are the problem. Everything but come to the miniscule realization that you are not “right” and everyone not like you is not “wrong”. Your god does not deserve a capital ‘g’ while everyone else’s gets a small one because he is no more or less important than any other God, most of which are in fact are probably his older siblings.

In the end, Chuck, that One True God stuff is just utter bullshit. It’s nothing more than a control mechanism put in place by those egoistical males we spoke of earlier. To keep you in line and make you feel somehow ‘just’ and ‘right’…while putting a hefty chunk of change in the plate, of course. I mean, come on, without that single line…think of how many wars would never have been fought. How many people who would never have been maimed, tortured, and killed by…oh yeah…your institution. The Dark Ages? The Spanish Inquisition. The burning of every major library and the destruction of all that knowledge? What if they never happened? How much further along would this entire planet be without that stinking idiotic one line?

No one can change the past but it’s definitely something to think about, Charlie. So is this….We’re all just different. That’s not “bad” and it’s not “good”. It just IS. It should be respected not belittled by small minds like yours.