Parallel Spirituality

Many people may remember when I first became a Christian...

I've since apologized for my behavior to them all.

No, I don't regret becoming a Christian, far from it...but I handled it all very immaturely, and I hurt a lot of dear people who deserved better.

On the plus side to this debacle, I learned that there are instances in Scripture that echo each other spiritually vs physically; they parallel each other, where one situation here on our earthly plane will mirror one spiritually, and vice versa.

The link between my earlier immaturity and this example is this: It's not a coincidence that new Christians are referred to as "born again", or "born anew"...and in fact are often called "baby Christians".

Consider this:

Babies are born helpless; they need to be fed, protected, and nurtured.  They're often loud.  They make stinky messes.  They spit up on people.  They can't walk on their own, nor can they even stand alone.  They can't handle real adult food; in fact, not only can't they chew it, they can't break down the stuff for the nutrients with their immature organs...in short, it would kill them to try to handle adult food, among other things.

Now, let's look at a new Christian, generally speaking:

Spiritually, they're helpless...they don't know much about right and wrong from their new world-view; they need more knowledgeable people to nurture them and help them walk through their early days.  They're telling EVERYONE about their new life, whether they want to hear it or not.  They try to "help" people, and often muck things up in their inexperience.  They "spit up" on people, metaphorically speaking.  They need support in their Christian walk, so they don't walk alone.  Paul said that new Christians need "milk", easy teachings to make a foundation, but once they mature need to put that aside and move on to more solid spiritual food, and again he says something like it in an earlier book.

So you can see how one is an example of the other...and it's a fine way to drive home the point that we always have much more to learn!

This being said, here's a point I'd like to bring up as a counter-point to my very first blog post; I realized something tonight that in all my life I never considered...and it also means that I have to admit when I'm wrong.

And that sucks.

Sadly, I'm wrong a lot.  *sighs*

For most of my life I could see no issue with polyamory or polyfidelity; from the perspective I had, it was based in love, and what's wrong with love, right?  I looked at it from a perspective that was distinctly colored and biased from my past experiences in high school and college.

Tonight though I was discussing this topic with a close friend, one of the guitar players in our band, and he made a comment that tripped a memory in my head, and I remembered how Jesus often compares the Christian church (as a body/single entity) to a bride and Himself as a groom, with the goal of illustrating to the Jewish people He was teaching in a way they could identify with.  See, in Jewish culture back then, the groom would go to build a house for his bride, and his bride would wait for him.  The groom's father would be the one to determine when it was good enough, often prompting him to going above and beyond.  As a result, only the father knew when the groom would return, and the bride would have to be ready, because it was ALSO tradition for the groom to come and "steal her away" at some odd hour.  This is exactly how Jesus described His predicted return, so His fellow Jews listening to Him would get the concept.

Now, expanding on that marriage concept, all throughout the Bible, Old and New Testaments included, God has said that He wants no gods other than Him...really, it's the First Commandment, and it's also the first of the summations that Jesus delivered to the people:  "Love God with all your heart, mind and spirit".  To have another god before Him is idolatry, a big no-no for Christians and Jews.  He wants us separate, clean, and faithful, ready for His return, just like the bride in the example above.

And that's why I "get it" now, that polyamory and polyfidelity are just not right for Christians.  Being an Aspy, just being told something is wrong never works; I have to know why, because every situation is different, and a hard/fast rule doesn't always work.  Knowing WHY helps me to adapt to new situations; it gives me a litmus to apply.

Those relationships are the marital equivalent of spiritual idolatry, in essence.  You're being unfaithful to the ONE you chose to be your mate, in place of all the others you COULD have been with...and that's just not the model.

So kids...choose wisely.  Pick the right one.  It's disrespectful to your mate on many levels; even if it "works" outside of a Christian belief system, once you CHOOSE to be in that system, you're willingly forsaking other gods for the One you chose...and that's how you should choose and treat your spouse, too.

Dogma Sucks

I have a dogmatic question I don’t understand.  Let’s say you have two people involved in some kind of church ministry; both are actively participating in things the Church at large considers sinful.  One person is remorseful and tries without success to change their behavior and is allowed to still take part; the other sees nothing wrong with what they’re doing, and is asked to step down until they see the error of their ways.

The way I’m seeing this, both people are engaged in wrong behavior without stopping…the only difference is in their thought processes, or as the Church calls it, their heart:  So if I’m understanding this right, it’s not sinning that gets you in trouble, it’s the way you think about it?

Please understand...this isn't a facetious question.

There are some things that I STILL don't "get" after being married for 20 years, and my poor wife just shakes her head and tells me, "It's an Aspy (Asperger's) thing; don't worry about, let it go..."

This might could be one of those things.

For example, this one is perfect.  Since I've been a teenager, I've had no moral issues with polyamory or polyfidelity.  While not socially acceptable almost anywhere, there are subgroups in this country and others that not only practice it, but it works for.

However, from a Christian perspective, this encompasses fornication and adultery AT LEAST.   From this Christian perspective, I can understand from reading that it is considered sin.  Jesus corrected the Samaritan woman at the well about her marital screw-ups (gently, of course), and there is the famous story in John 8:3-11 with the woman caught in the act.

Now, toss in my Aspy brain...in every instance where Jesus deals with adultery, it's the WOMAN that is at fault.  It's not until Paul that the issue is brought up in 1 Corinthians and a male is actually specified as the offender.  In every other case, it's generic with no mention of who is at fault, or it's the woman.

So to my Aspy mind, the definition of adultery hinged upon some definition that only affected women, not men.  Plus, it's never said WHY it's wrong...it just is.  Well, why is it wrong?  If a man lives with two women, and they're all in harmony, taking equal burdens emotionally and physically and even financially in the relationship, what's the big deal?  Or a woman with two men?  Or (scandalous thinking approaching!) two bisexual women and a man? Or two bisexual men with a woman?

Aspy's don't do well with "do it because", because when something happens that doesn't fit the precise circumstance, BOOM, confusion and disarray, questions and chaos.  We need to know why, so we can learn to do things when the norm doesn't fit.

I have to say...Christianity SUCKS for Aspy's.  Everyone is always saying, "The Bible says this, that, and the other thing"...ok, fine, that's great until a little digging shows that it either A: Doesn't say that, B: Is taken out of context so it APPEARS to say that, C: Actually means something else because of translation errors, or D: remembered incorrectly so as to say something else.

So then what?  You dig for the truth, and WHOA, it actually means something else!  Great example: Onanism.  What's that, you ask?  Spanking the monkey, jerking off, choking the chicken...masturbation.  The prohibition comes from Genesis, but the early translations were off, and the church leaders, largely uneducated in many cases in those early years of using that newfangled King James Bible, took the passage (heh) to refer to masturbation, focusing on that "spilling his seed" bit.

Let's see it in a more modern translation:  Genesis 38:8-10 "8 Y'hudah said to Onan, "Go and sleep with your brother's wife - perform the duty of a husband's brother to her, and preserve your brother's line of descent." 9 However, Onan knew that the child would not count as his; so whenever he had intercourse with his brother's wife, he spilled the semen on the ground, so as not to give his brother offspring. 10 What he did was evil from ADONAI's perspective, so he killed him too."

It wasn't the "seed spillin'" that he was struck down for...rather, it was the disobedience of not doing his directed duty that he was killed for.  At that time, if a man's brother died childless, it was his brother's duty to impregnate that man's wife so as to carry on the family.

Do you have ANY IDEA how much less stressful my childhood and early life would've been if I'd known THAT?  That learning the WHY of it, and not the "Don't do it, and just accept it" aspect?

So, yeah...dogma sucks.