Against my initial intention, I'll go random. Again.

I thought my new approach to this particular blog would be chronological, relating the journey I've been on for the last few years in regards especially to matters of faith. Instead, I find myself wanting to post random things, thoughts, issues, making this more a "situational" blogging. So be it, I guess.

One situation I want to blog about is something that's been happening to a friend of mine in the last few weeks. My friend, I'll call him A, and his family, used to go to the same church I used to go to, which is also the same place where we met friend B and his family. We all lived in the same town up until recently. In the past year or so, A moved to another city here in the US and B moved abroad, quite far. In the last few years A has become an atheist (hence the move away from the Bible belt) and B has become a missionary (hence the move abroad)
Previous to their move and even when attending the same church, the friendship between A and B was not particularly deep. Acquaintances would describe their relationship better, and they didn't have any contact in the last few years they lived in the same town.
Let's get to these last weeks. B's wife has started messaging A through her husband's facebook account (A has B among his fb friends, but not B's wife) A doesn't recall ever having a conversation with B's wife (I'll call her BW from now on, if need be) in real life, but she started messaging him practically on a daily basis, and telling him that God loves him, that he shouldn't harden his heart to God and stuff like that. Constantly messaging him about such stuff. A has told her his position, he's even been willing to have a conversation, but BW is not into conversation as much as into repeating over and over how much God loves him and so forth, which drove A to say more than once, "Stop messaging me". Her response? "I can't. God told me to reach out to you and put on my heart to pray for you and your family". First, I'd like to say I'm very thankful that God decided to put him on her heart and not me.. But on a more serious note, I find all this quite disturbing, besides rude and disrespectful. It just blows my mind to think that she really believes this could have a positive effect on him. Doesn't she realize how counterproductive it is to be so insistent?
I mentioned this situation to someone, saying, "Does this seem normal to you?" "No, it's not normal. She feels led by God". That stumped me. I had the clear impression his response implied she had some kind of justification.
Seriously??
Let's talk about it.
First of all, I previously said BW was insistent. That's an understatement. It'd be more correct to define it stalking. If her messages had any other content it would be considered stalking. But since it's religious, and more particularly christian, it's considered, what? a divine calling, therefore ok? I have the feeling that if it was a Muslim bombarding a Christian with messages about Allah, the approach would have been quite different, and it most certainly would have not been justified, quite the contrary; it probably would have been used to demonstrate how Muslims are out to destabilize America or something to that effect, by trying to convert everybody to Islam.
Then, let's analyze a bit this "feeling led by God/God told me" issue. This particular thing makes me think of a couple of things. One is, how do we distinguish between God speaking to someone and just plain hearing voices. We do have professionals who medicate or institutionalize people because they are delusional and hear voices. So, why and how do we make a distinction between those and those who claim God spoke to them. The other thing is the content of God's speaking. You presume that if God spoke to you you should just obey and do it. So, since God (by christian definition) is sovereign and his ways are not ours, he could ask you anything. I have to wonder, therefore, if God asked BW to come back to the States and kill A, would she do it? Or if God asked her to kill her children, would she do it?
It's scary to think that there are people who would actually do it, or at the very least consider it (I know for a fact that some people say they *would*) But there are some people who say they wouldn't because they say God would never ask such thing. Yeah, that same God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever who ordered the killing of practically everything under the sun at some point or another, and for whatever reason (including a guy who happened to touch the ark of the covenant to prevent it from tipping over) For some people is unthinkable that God would ask to go kill someone and they'll jump hoops to justify when the Bible explicitly says of God actually doing such things. Why? why do they dismiss those things they'd consider facts recorded in the Bible? Because their own moral compass prevents them from doing such immoral things.

I'll close with something that I've seen in my life. One of the reasons I believed in God was that I had this idea of a benevolent God that was present and cared about us. That was one of the reasons that drew me close to him. The funny thing is that it's also one of the reasons that made me walk away from him. I realized that when I was thinking of god as a benevolent being, I was actually applying my ideas of what is good to him. I picked and chose what I wanted to believe about him, justifying, rationalizing, and doing a lot of mental gymnastics to dismiss all those Bible verses that were pretty obviously going against what I thought god and good should be. When I realized that, I realized that I basically was using my already in place morals to define and choose what is good and what not. God was just falling into place according to my beliefs. In essence my morals superseded god's. And I also realized that I was not the only one doing that. It seems to me that there are as many flavors of god and Christianity as there are heads in this world. Consider, for example, the over 40,000 christian denominations.
For a religion that claims to have an absolute truth, there sure are a ton of differing truths in it!

This little blog of mine.

I see many blogs that have a lot of success because they are focused on basically very practical things that ultimately we all are either using or doing. I think most of them are awesome and informative. Some are written by friends of mine and share lots of fun ideas that go from recipes to gardening, to art, and so forth.
I wish I were that creative. I feel I'd have a positive impact on people and would share something of some usefulness and value. But I'm not that person. I'm not hands-on, I'm not creative, I am not a great cook, and I don't have brilliant, innovative ideas on how to raise kids.
What I like and I end up writing about is usually "head" stuff. My head stuff. Mind over matter, if you will. I write about how I live my daily experiences, what I think about stuff, and how I process things.

So, I see this particular blog going in the direction of delving into the slow and fundamental changes I've been through in the last 5-8 years. It's gonna be a way to explore once again my beliefs (or lack thereof), what has changed and why, expose this new me like I haven't done before (a sort of coming out, if you will), and put into words what has been so far mostly a formless conglomerate of thoughts and emotions.

Welcome to my new, but just as crazy as before, world. Maybe?