I live in Jesusland. For me, it is just where I live. For everyone else it is Oklahoma.
I don't mind living here. The summers are too hot and the winters cold. The weather is generally okay, but sometimes deadly. The folk are friendly but only up to a point. They are little different to folk from other places, it's just that their "thang" is not mine, so it can be difficult to feel positive at times.
So today I am taking on their "thing". Their God, their religion, their belief.
I try not to be judgmental, but when I am I like the approached outlined in the "sig" of our Community Moderator.
"Don't tell me what you think, show me what you do, and I'll tell you what you think"
The religion here is Christianity. Mostly, it is the Southern Baptist version of that great world religion. The specific view of Christianity held in these here parts is not as widespread as those adherents may want to believe.
In fact it is generally confined to the southern States of the USA, most other Christians would barely recognise it .... But what about me?
Well if I had a God ....
My God would recognise goodness rather than sycophancy, My God would reward people based not upon the number of "Thank you Fathers" at Grace, but upon what you do between meals.
My God would condemn those who condemn others. A place in the Kingdom of Heaven would be available not to the religious oppressors, but to their victims. In America, lots of Muslims would be going to Heaven, and no small number of Christians would not.
My God would be very proud of his son, Jesus, who by all accounts was a man of great love and compassion. So he should be, he was the Son of God. Jesus threw the moneylenders from the Temple. The self-professed Christians here have made the Banks the Temple.
Jesus healed the sick ... free! Christians believe that healing the sick is the business of private enterprise, and if you can't afford it then you should die.
Unless, of course, you are pregnant, then the Christians want you to get superlative healthcare, all State funded .... until your child is born when you may then be left to fester alone. I hear few Southern Baptist Ministers railing against the injustice of this, yet they are first in line to interfere with the legal rights of women.
Jesus would not have approved of these Christians, and neither would my God.
My God would appreciate the vastness of all he created. A cosmos where the planet Earth is seven thousand miles diameter, give or take, yet there are Stars in the Heavens that could be one trillion miles across. Think about that. Try to reduce the scale to something we can actually comprehend.
One trillion miles is a sod of a long way. It would be like thinking about the Earth in terms of it's smallest sub-atomic particle, and then some. Who among us thinks about the "stuff" that makes up not things, not even the elements that things are made from; but the smallest particle that forms the elements we make things from?
That is us, and I promoted us, in terms of the Universe that my God created. The Earth and all it contains, less significant, actually, than the smallest sub-atomic particle thought about by no one who's surname isn't Hawking.
So in that context I find it hard to believe that my God would have any real concerns about a girl kissing another girl, or a man putting his willy in the bottom of another man. Yet the Christians around here had made it one of the centers of their Universe. Am I alone in finding that a bit odd?
My God would understand that He is omnipotent, and that there really is only one God. I rather suspect that he would also appreciate that different folk are quite likely to worship him each in their own unique ways. Christian, Muslim, Jew, it doesn't actually matter. There is only one God, y'all worship him however you want. What my God would be less happy about is that we humans keep killing each other in His name. Did he really create a race too stupid to understand that? That was a rhetorical question, of course he did!
My God would impose a religious test for Public Office, and it would go like this:
If you profess adherence to an organised religion, you are barred from Public Office.
My God understands only too well that Worship is a very personal, very private thing. It is between you and God, and has no place being imposed upon the lives of others. You do not act in the name of my God, only God does that.
You do not make laws in the name of my God either, whether that be Christian law or Sharia law. They are equally inappropriate. If my God wants a particular law he has, I feel confident, ways of making it known .... and none of those ways involve Glenn Beck.
There is probably a bunch of other things I could have included. If you are minded to comment, please feel free to include a few of your own.
My God would enjoy the discussion.