Are you religiously serious?

Yesterday was Easter. Or, as I call it, “Pretenders Day”.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not an atheist. I am not a disbeliever. While I am not an active churchgoer anymore, and I do have questions that are not always viewed favorably by the more devout, there was a time that I went religiously (no pun intended, lol), primarily in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I’m good with people attending church, and I do not feel one has to be inside every time the doors are unlocked, but I do feel that if one is sincere they need to put forth some level of honest effort, and that means attending more than only on Easter.

Even when I went I would routinely stay home on Easter. Why, you ask? Because Easter is the one day of the year that everybody and their brother dusts off their “Sunday Best” and heads to church. The place is packed. Can’t find a seat. Can’t find a place to park. The place is filled with what I perceive as “pretenders”, people who delude themselves into believing they are doing enough, doing something meaningful… and yes, I am being judgemental. It’s an unpleasant experience for me.

That long-winded intro notwithstanding, this begs the question: How serious are you to your faith, really? Not just factoring in attendance, think about it this way…

Let’s say you proclaim to belong to Religion A. Religion A believes in tenets X, Y, and Z. You fully buy into tenets X and Y, but you reject Z completely.

Are you truly an adherent of Religion A, or are you only kidding yourself?

I believe you are kidding yourself. I believe that religion is an “all or nothing” proposition. If you reject ANY tenet of a specific religion, then you simply do not believe in that religion.

Taking it farther, by cherry-picking which tenets you approve and which ones you reject, you have essentially set yourself up as more than the expert on said religion, you have set yourself up as above said religion. And don’t get me started on, “That’s not what MY God says…”, as if you have your own person God. You have set yourself up as God. You know better than anyone else. It might as well be the “Religion of <insert your name here>”, at that point.

Religion is not about what you like. Religion is not about what you deem proper. Religion is about truth. Absolute truth. Somebody else’s truth, God’s truth, not yours. Sometimes the truth is unpleasant, and quite often it is unpopular. You don’t get to discard the unpleasant aspects and then think of yourself as a good person, faith-wise.

So, are you religiously serious in your religion?

We could also talk about how and why religion changes with the times and popular opinion… if it’s the truth, it should always be the truth and never change, right?… but I’ll save that for another time.  So many ways to go with this topic.