Blog 870 – 01.10.2018

On Making Mistakes, Sinning

Forty-eight years ago I left my home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee as a Specialist Fourth Class in the United States Army for the Republic Of South Vietnam. Six days before that departure a couple of my dear friends, my girl friend, soon to be wife, and I drove from Chattanooga to Murphy, North Carolina where with a falsified life insurance policy, to prove she was eighteen, we were married by a little preacher in his home. We lied before the preacher, before the state of North Carolina, and before God. Was that a sin? Yes, it was but since the New Testament word for sin literally means “missing the mark” what it really was was a “miss”, a miss-take. And, oh boy, did we pay for it but that is another story.

I’d like to take a few minutes to write about mistakes. We all make them, we all sin. The Bible that so many folks worship says so. It says in my not so humble estimation a lot of crazy things like it is okay to own slaves, treat women and children like possessions, and mistreat and even kill all kinds of people who do not act or think like you do – all man-invented “bull slip” (I pulled that punch a bit) and I challenge any of you Bible thumpers to deny that the Bible does indeed teach those horrid things and hundreds more. The Bible is merely a collection of books that the established church of the day voted to include because they all had something in them that they believed supported their claim to be God’s special gang. I did not come to this understanding over night nor without considerable thought. Like many raised in the Bible Belt I was programmed from a baby to believe that the big black book on the coffee table that was rarely cracked except to look at the scary pictures i.e. God kicking an almost naked couple out of His garden complete with big bouncer angels with flaming swords to bar their way back in and the most colorful pictures having to do with the torture of His Son, being beaten mercilessly, nailed to cross, where he hung crying out for help and receiving none from God nor man. And you wonder why Bible Belt folks are so warped. It takes years for people exposed to such gory stuff as children to be de-programmed and re-programmed. One church I attended for several years in Texas used to revel in showing a fearful movie called The Burning Hell to large crowds of children believing they’d scare them to Jesus till some caring parents complained and they stopped showing it without saying why.

If you believe God did those things in the Bible pictures and would send millions, billions of people to a lake of burning fire that is some unloving God you follow. I wanted to use stronger adjectives but I think I said enough. I believe the Bible got the part about everyone sinning (making mistakes) right. But, as for all the judging and condemning that part is all wrong. Throughout all the bloody sacrifices and holy wars there is a thread of love in the Bible but it gets stretched pretty thin at times. And the part about God sacrificing his only son for us is really a stretch. Religious folks have been killing the people who did not buy that one for years, the Druids in Britain and most of the population of the Western Hemisphere at the time the “Christians” arrived here are just a couple of examples. Those and many more were pretty big mistakes (sins) and we are still paying for those but no church folks as far as I know are sewing any asbestos suits, KKK robes for week night services at the local Christian church perhaps, but no especially heat resistant apparel. I don’t think even most Christian really believe in a bogey man with a molten lake enough to scare them into following the “rules.” Especially since the intelligent ones know the rules are often if not always written to give those in charge a leg up over their less fortunate underlings.

My, Dave, you are really venting today. Where is the encouraging word? Here’s the best I can come up with regarding mistakes. I read some years ago a new angle for starting and growing a rapidly successful company. The theory proposed was, make as many mistakes and as fast as you can because in short order you will learn what does and does not work and be way ahead of the competition. Home schooling and church schooling scare me for that particular reason because when mistakes are called sins we hide them more and are less likely to learn from them.

I choose to be called a sinner rather than a Christian because although Christians sin (make mistakes) as much if not more than everyone else they have been taught to believe they have a free pass and at the same time carry tons of unnecessary guilt that makes them unbalanced and dangerous. The rest of us know we have to live with and others with all the consequences of our mistakes and are therefore more likely to learn from at least a few of the more painful ones. I love Christians, Jews, and Muslims most of all because they really need it for their idea of God is a mean, bloody, burning S.O.B. And they wonder why the percentage claiming “None” when checking the religious preference box has grown in recent years.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

Unaffiliated sinner and sometimes skeptic,

David White