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Why You Christians Will Never Convert Me

 

 

For years, my Christian friends and coworkers have been trying to convert me.  I find this annoying and frankly disrespectful of my beliefs (as I would never try to convert them to agnosticism), but I respect their attempts because I know they truly do believe they’re trying to save me from eternal damnation.  If I really, really believed you were going to burn in a pit of fire, I’d try to save you too—anyone short of a total asshole would try.  So I respect these attempts to “save” me, as annoying and pointless as they are.

But I’d like to take a moment to explain to my Christian friends why it’s never going to work.

 

And it’s not because I don’t have respect for religion.  I’m agnostic—I don’t know if there’s a god or not—but I hope there is one, because I think the universe would make more sense and life would have more meaning if one did.  And if a god does exist, I hope that he is a fair, just, loving, forgiving god, who understands how complicated life can be and forgives those of us who can’t follow his mysterious wishes to the letter.

 

Because after all, how the hell is anyone supposed to know what his wishes are?  Sure, it’s easy if you’re a member of an organized faith.  There’s the Bible, or the Koran, or some form of documentation that establishes exactly who god is and what he wants.  But if you’re an agnostic raised by an atheist, with no religious indoctrination under your belt whatsoever, god’s will becomes an assortment of possibilities.  Look at all the religions in the world.  Look at all the different ideas about god.  How am I supposed to know which one is right?

My Christian coworkers are perfectly normal people—they swear and drink and know how to have fun.  This is all perfectly okay, apparently, because they are “saved.”  The blood of Christ washes away all sins.  By accepting him as your savior, you go to heaven, automatically.  By rejecting him as such, you burn in hell forever—automatically.

 

And they just don’t understand why I can’t accept this at face value.

 

One reason, obviously, is that I’m agnostic and don’t know if there is a God or not.  But like I said, I hope there is a god and I hope he is fair and loving, just as the Christians claim he is.  When I examine a religion, I’m trying to see if it conforms to my idea of what god would be like if he does exist.  But when I examine Christianity by that standard, it just doesn’t make sense to me.

 

My Christian friends suggest that earthly deeds have no bearing on passage into heaven.  Nothing we do here matters.  As long as you accept Christ, you will get into heaven, period.  So uh…what the hell is the point then?  Our actions on earth have no bearing on anything?  I can blow up a busload of nuns and still get into heaven as long as I’m saved?  If this is what they’re arguing, then they’re saying god doesn’t give a damn about morality.  I find that hard to accept.  They’re also saying that there’s no point whatsoever to this existence, and I don’t see that either.  We are here, aren’t we?  We are born with souls and with free will, right?  We all struggle with morality and values, don’t we?  If God created us and put us in this struggle, it must mean something.  It must have some bearing on what comes in the next life.  It just doesn’t make sense otherwise.

 

More importantly, no god who is loving would damn two-thirds of the world’s population to hell right off the bat.  It’s bogus to claim we all have an equal opportunity to accept Christ.  That’s simply a load of crap.  The majority of people have no chance at that whatsoever, because they’re raised in other religions.  Christianity is more effective than any faith at converting people, but still, ask yourself, my Christian friends: Is anyone, with any argument, going to convert you to Judaism?  Islam?  Most Christians will say no.  You believe in your heart of hearts that you know the truth about god, and nobody can take that away from you.  What you don’t seem to get is that people of other faiths believe in their concept of “truth” just as much as you do.  It will be impossible to “save” most of these people.  God must know this.  If your interpretation of God is right, then he’s automatically damned these people to hell from the moment they were born.  You can claim they make a “choice” not to accept Christ, but it isn’t really a choice, is it?

 

Hmm?

 

It isn’t for me, I know that much.  I was raised by an atheist—agnosticism was about as far as I could ever hope to come.  A belief in god was not instilled in me at a young age.  Short of some overwhelming, irrefutable miracle, it’s hard to see myself ever coming to believe, for certain, in god.  Harder still to see me accepting Christianity.  I’m never going to believe it like Christians do.  I can’t.  It’s not a choice—it’s a condition of my birth.  And you’re telling me that God’s going to damn me to hell, eternally, for how I was born?  That’s crap.  It has to be.  I refuse to believe any just, fair, and loving god would design the universe so badly.

 

Maybe god is a Christian god, but if he is, you’re wrong about this savior stuff.  If he is a loving, forgiving god, then he has to be capable of forgiving those of us who tried to understand and embrace faith, but simply couldn’t, through no fault of our own.  After all, if god is in the mix with everything, all the time, everywhere in the universe, then he is responsible for creating me—and my father…he’s responsible for twenty plus years of my father arguing that religion is nonsense.  He’s responsible for the very conditions that assured I’d never be able to accept Christ as my savior.  Which means your loving, forgiving god predestined me to hell.  He arbitrarily assigned me to burn, for no reason.  That doesn’t sound like the god you folks believe in.

 

I don’t much care for God having all these rules anyway.  Religions are always trying to make God about rules.  Christians might have gotten it down to a single rule, but it’s still a rule.  I’m sorry, but life is too complicated for God to be so arbitrary.  I’ll tell you what I think: God created the world, right?  He’s responsible for this beautiful chaos—this varied mosaic of beliefs that make life so interesting and so terribly complicated and dangerous.  There must be some purpose to it.  Some reason we, as a race (and as individuals), struggle so hard to understand God.  Maybe nobody’s right—and maybe nobody is supposed to be.  Maybe the point isn’t to pick the right religion and follow the rules.  Maybe the point is to be part of the struggle—the struggle to understand the nature of existence.  Maybe that, ultimately, is the task God has set before us, and maybe in that context, we all have something to add to the discussion—some little piece of the puzzle that is God. 

 

If God created this mosaic, then God, himself, must be a mosaic. Each of us, then, are pieces in the puzzle.  The Christians know part of him—the Muslims, the Buddists, we all have some fragment of the truth.  I say even the atheists have some piece of the truth.  It’s all out there—all the ideas swirling and mixing and bouncing off one another, and I think what matters is the struggle we all must undertake to understand god, and to answer our questions about the meaning of life and purpose of the universe.  I think even if the answer you come to is the atheist answer, it’s still meaningful—you were still a part of the struggle, and you’re still a voice in the mosaic that is god—even if you think I’m completely full of crap right now.

 

I can’t find God in books or miracles or the blunt assertions of people who believe in him, so I try to find him in the world around me.  And when I look at the world to understand God, this is where I end up.  And I can’t believe a God who created a world as confusing as this one would decide the eternal question of damnation so arbitrarily…that’s why the Christian argument always fails for me.

 

If your God is really so wonderful, then I hope he can find it in his heart to forgive me for being wrong—if I am.  If he’s as great as you say he is, I think he’d almost have to.

 

 

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