#exchristian

Hello Willow! Thanks for the ask!

I'm not sure how to trace my worldview and philosophy (and I'm sure a distressing amount of that has come from random posts on social media) but here's three that come to mind:

How Jesus Became God and Heaven and Hell by Bart Ehrman: Really fascinating books about one of my favorite topics (learning facts that would upset most Christians (I have Christian trauma I'm allowed)). These books are about how Christians' beliefs developed respectively about Jesus' supernatural status and heaven and hell as a system of post-mortem rewards and punishments--neither of which Jesus probably taught himself. However, both ideas have a lot of complicated pre-Jesus precedent, so I left those books with more understanding of how we got here. (Which is to say, Christianity 1000% percent is the religion ABOUT Jesus rather than Jesus' teachings. No one gives a shit about what that guy said, lol. I made a meme about this.)

Fun fact while everyone's talking about the Odyssey: Odysseus visits Hades in the Odyssey (shown in the movie) and according to Heaven and Hell, this which spawned a genre which shows Odysseus' journeys to Hades in order to explore what it might be like in the afterlife... which led to Christian versions of this genre of afterlife journey. (The best known one is Dante's Inferno, though there were ancient ones as well.)

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson: The title seems very specific and niche but this book (and one of the follow-ups I read) really unlocked a new way for me to look at the world. I think a lot of the harm that I've seen or experienced, if I want to describe it as abuse, I feel like I'd have to make an argument to even justify to myself that's the appropriate word. But labeling someone in my mind as "emotionally immature" (compared to "abuser") feels like so much less of a burden to me.

That label makes it easier for me to go "Oh, you're underdeveloped emotionally--you're a teenager in an adult's body and you're lashing out. I'm not your parent; I don't have to parent you. I don't have to justify anything to you because you literally don't have the mental capacity to care about my perspecitve. I'm just gonna go."

and then for his divine message to humanity instead of putting the knowledge already in your brain he puts it as words on a page and vague phrases and parables that the human is supposed to understand and interpret, let humans put human errors in it (depending on who you ask)

and then only made one copy of each book thousands of years ago to one specific people and knowing that there's thousands of languages that will continue to change and evolve for millennia he just went "figure it out yourself lmao" and had humans do all the translating and copying and rediscovery and archaeology and transcribing themselves

Humans should be honored we get the opportunity to suffer when Jesus gave his life for us, humbled that our suffering is incomparable to his (as if comparing different peoples' suffering was ever a good idea). Suffering is supposed to be joy.

Now I have no perspective because nothing is eternal. There’s no grand plan. Everything feels like a lot because this is all there is. With that perspective even just a dropped ice cream cone is a terrible thing but then I’ll step back and try to gain perspective but I have no perspective without god (yet) so I’ll think about a world war or the heat death of the universe like “what does that even matter?”