In Reply to: Re: Punk Christian son of a Preacher Man posted by susie on August 04, 2006 at 01:37:50:
I went through my most radical change in faith during a year-long period of getting sober and working the AA program. Before the program, I had a fairly conventional Christian faith. My conventional faith didn't help me to stay sober, I think, because it came packaged with so much guilt and fear. When I worked through the guilt and fear, I ended up letting go of some ideas that I consider fundamental to the Judeo-Christian belief system.
I won't say I've completely made peace with the wrath of the arbitrary father-god that runs rampant in my reading of biblical texts, but sometimes I can have a conversation with that "ghost" of religion past and know that I'm safe from the self-lacerating voices of guilt and fear he invokes in me.
For whatever reason, the person of Jesus has never had the fear effect on me. Guilt? Yes, I have had ALOT of trouble with the belief that Jesus suffered a horrible death as a blood offering to a patriarchal god, that Jesus' crucifixion was a necessary sacrifice to appease the Creator for original sin. I think Jesus died a horrible death to show us that such suffering is unjust and largely unneccessary, but that it can also be redemptive and liberating if we choose to make it so. We don't die because of sin; we die because we are part of the created order, where all things change and pass on. This is not orthodox salvation theology like you'll find in the Pauline epistles, but it works for me.