Really? This is NOT helpful!

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I may be alone in this, as a Christian, but this is crap!

I understand why it is a popular response, however, that very same understanding is why I wonder if I can even consider myself a Christian at times.

Religion sucks! Religious responses like this in response to horrific tragedies are simplistic, lacking in compassion and empathy, and most of all faulty.

There are many spiritual belief systems, Christianity included, that state the omnipresence of God and believe that God’s spirit or essence can permeate and inhabit people and that essence is love.

If that is the case, then anyone who claims to be a God follower, regardless of the name we call God by, is the vessel through which the incarnate presence of God may be shared and shown to the world around us.

If the presence of God isn’t being shown or felt, it isn’t because God isn’t being allowed in our buildings and institutions. It is because we are not allowing God’s healing spirit of love to flow in us, through us, between us and around us.

When someone so removed from love that their only emotion is rage and action is destruction, that is not God’s doing or choice. When people rush headlong into danger to save, rescue, protect, and take down the source of destruction, that is God’s presence of love manifesting itself.

I believe with all my heart that God is weeping and grieving along with us all. Not just over the lives lost and families torn asunder today, but over all the tragedies that have ever happened that we have forgotten or never known.

I believe this because I see the uprising in the spirit of love, empathy, and compassion pouring out.

16 comments

  1. Reblogged this on Ran The Gauntlet and commented:
    I don’t plan to substitute Kina’s blog for mine, but this post also fires my heart. In my personal story the issue has been the careless, dogma and ego driven responses of fellow Christians whose advice I sought while struggling with domestic violence from my Christian husband. Thinking can become narrowed and re-parroted in closed groups until the original goals are lost in the drama of being fired up to be us vs. them.

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  4. Pingback: Asking for Help in the Aftermath of Death | Morning Meditations

  5. The whole ‘violence happens in schools because God isn’t allowed in’ argument REALLY irks me. It’s taken all my strength to not comment on FB posts that say this and start arguments.

    When I was in high school, the local Catholic school had a shooting. It, thankfully, wasn’t as bad as it could have been. One girl shot another girl. She thankfully survived. That was it. However, it happened at a religious school. That makes the whole ‘God is not allowed in’ argument invalid in my opinion.

    You did a great job of explaining the other reason the argument is crap. Maybe you’re not allowed to openly pray… but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it privately to yourself. In fact, students are allowed to pray in school all they want. The only law is that a teacher or administrator cannot lead the prayer.

    Ugh. I could rant about this subject forever. You did it much more eloquently than I every could, though.

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  6. I’m sorry that zealots like that give truly religious and spiritual people such a bad name. And they’re the same ones who say not to “politicize” the tragedy by talking about things like gun control. Because God forbid they shouldn’t have access to their weapons of mass destruction (they’ve got to protect themselves from all those commie liberal heathens–like me).

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    1. Mary,
      That is certainly true to some degree. However, I personally know many of the people who are sharing this and I know their hearts and their intent. Several of them fall into the mentally ill or deficient category and many others did not ever learn the difference between critical thinking and criticism and don’t understand they are being psychologically and emotionally manipulated to disseminate things that detract from that which they are trying to promote. I know too many people on all sides who fall into what the other sides label as sheeple. It’s all quite frustrating and sad to me.

      Be well,
      Kina

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  7. As someone who isn’t at all religious, yeah, I’m with you.
    In the end, it isn’t a higher power that decided to do this. And it is left for people to make sense of the tragedy as well.

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    1. El Guapo,
      You are so correct. If you don’t follow a religion or believe in God, then human agency is all there is. If you do have a spiritual belief system, then you are a human agent intended to aid, comfort, encourage, and love others. Either way, we need to stop politicizing, pushing agendas, and repeating rhetoric and reach out in love, empathy, and compassion.

      Be well,
      Kina

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  8. The Connecticut shooter wasn’t a student, so it’s not like there was “violence in the school.” His mother was a teacher and the shooter apparently had problems with her that extended into extreme violence. The t-shirt’s message is irrational, hurtful, and meant to communicate an agenda, not compassion.

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