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#2 is increasingly a problem for my wife, who wasn't raised in church yet follows Christ as best she can because she loves people.
My parents balked the first time they wanted to play Bible Trivia because my wife didn't know who Samson or Jehu or Aquila or Ananias were or where Paul was bitten by a viper.
Yet as she pointed out (later, because even after five years of marriage she's still uncomfortable voicing a contrary opinion about religion around my parents), how would that knowledge make her better at loving people and living selflessly, as Christ commanded and lived by example?
Yet church people treat it as VITAL to living a Christ-like life, and have built up such a store of platitudes and insider cliches over the past hundred years, in addition to the various over-quoted Bible verses, that it seems to require concentration to speak in everyday language.
I've learned from experience that because so many Atheists and Agnostics in this country are former church kids, throwing Bible verses at them in an attempt to witness is exactly the kind of buzzword-based (hehe) platitude spewing that sent them running from church in the first place, yet so many church people refuse to say anything in their own words (God forbid their personal testimony carry more weight than a four thousand year-old collection of writings), and when outsiders don't respond positively to platitudes blame it on the outsider "not really listening" or "living in sin."
#2 is increasingly a problem for my wife, who wasn't raised in church yet follows Christ as best she can because she loves people.
My parents balked the first time they wanted to play Bible Trivia because my wife didn't know who Samson or Jehu or Aquila or Ananias were or where Paul was bitten by a viper.
Yet as she pointed out (later, because even after five years of marriage she's still uncomfortable voicing a contrary opinion about religion around my parents), how would that knowledge make her better at loving people and living selflessly, as Christ commanded and lived by example?
Yet church people treat it as VITAL to living a Christ-like life, and have built up such a store of platitudes and insider cliches over the past hundred years, in addition to the various over-quoted Bible verses, that it seems to require concentration to speak in everyday language.
I've learned from experience that because so many Atheists and Agnostics in this country are former church kids, throwing Bible verses at them in an attempt to witness is exactly the kind of buzzword-based (hehe) platitude spewing that sent them running from church in the first place, yet so many church people refuse to say anything in their own words (God forbid their personal testimony carry more weight than a four thousand year-old collection of writings), and when outsiders don't respond positively to platitudes blame it on the outsider "not really listening" or "living in sin."
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