Easter Sunday

I woke up today a little earlier to go check out First Evangelical-Free Church, aka ev-free. I thought that things were going to be contemporary, but we ended up at the traditional service. The weather was nice and it definitely felt like a .. typical church experience. They sang hymnals and passed around woodgrain offering plates. Pretty quickly, the weekend caught up and i was knocked out.

maybe i dont find these services important anymore... that the direction of my life doesn't hinge on anyone's lips, except either God's or my own. I guess there's no urgency in my attendance. Maybe it was the old-school feeling i got from the service. who knows...

I don't know if i ever really articulated my beliefs. I seem to have this specific conversation a lot, so I might just put it out there in the hopes that I don't have to constantly explain myself.

I am currently unable to reconcile science and religion. Try as I might to believe in religion, the picking and choosing of which aspects of natural law to accept to substantiate one's theory of "how life began" is a bit annoying. I have a hard time believing that ethnicity was a by-product of a spiteful God who didn't like how tall a building was getting.

I also have a hard time relating to Christianity in this asian-american context anymore. It's been a similar experience for anyone involved, but I feel like it's just becoming ignorant. people aren't real about their business anymore--at least that's the vibe I get. And I'm embittered at the way I was indoctrinated into this faith from such an early age. I think i'm messed up psychologically from having been told that i committed the most grievous or wrongs by the time i was 5. I'm pretty sure by 7, I must have considered myself the most evil person in the world. I hate that feeling. Isn't it dangerous to so irresponsibly wield guilt in context of children? To lord over fiery eternities and gnashing of teeth to kids who didn't share their fruit snacks? it sucks that that's what happened.

God feels like an imaginary friend to me. An imaginary friend that everyone i seem to know knows about, but not someone I know personally--at least not anymore. People say that He talks to them, but "talking" just seems to be a synonym for "arbitrary assignment of outcomes to vague suspected causes." God's use of dreams and inner monologues, things that are ridiculously subjective, ambiguous, or inconsistent, makes it difficult for me to think that divine communication exists-- as much I want it to.

If you could erase all the times you heard that "God is love" or that God is the arbiter of love and all things good, and evaluated Him simply as a character from literature, would you see him as loving as you've been told to? Or would He come off as one torn between moments of incredible compassion and moments of unprejudiced destruction? It seems the more I think about things, the less perfect they are.

With that out of the way, let's continue our lives.