"What if Satan has tricked you into thinking you've been saved?"

(A pastor said that in a sermon I heard once.)

I've been thinking about this hell thing some more. Back in the day when I believed the God I didn't believe in wouldn't send me to hell, one of my justifications for it was that if God really loved me, He'd want me in heaven with Him. But if God is all powerful and reigns over everything, including Satan, then He must rule over hell too. What that means then is while a person is in hell, they are separated from God, but God isn't losing anything. It's just a one-sided transaction. God gets whatever mediocre benefit from knowing your soul, while you get no benefit of God's unfathomable infinite love whatsoever.

When you consider how selfish humans are, it would kind of seem backwards that any human would accept a relationship so one-sided from which they would receive no benefit, but that along with the selfishness comes a strong drive towards instant gratification, which often outweighs the desire to make provisions, even if for eternity.

I've been listening to sermons and lectures for a while now, and sometimes, I'll come across a really awesome one and I'll feel a need to share it with my atheist friends because I feel the logic and reasoning spoken by whichever minister or authority would either clear up some cloudy areas (about religion or life in general) or allow them to relate to Christians in a more respectful way... Generally, they'll react one of three ways- either they'll tell me to stop pushing religion on them, or they'll feel the need to appease me, take the link and never listen to it, or they'll just ignore it (and me) completely. So far, not once have any of my atheist friends actually listened to or watched anything I've sent, as far as I know. Maybe they're too shy to tell me. *shrug* But what bothers me about their reaction is that this is a life decision they've made, and they won't even give it a few minutes of thought outside themselves to either confirm their decision or perhaps challenge it.

And I know I was there once too. I know I was closed to the idea of learning about religion or even learning anything at all from religious sources, all while thinking I was open-minded, self-aware and forward-thinking.

After finally opening my mind a little and learning a ton, I finally realized that being a liberal thinker doesn't necessarily mean you're an open-minded person, nor does it mean you're either progressive or self-aware. Being liberal in this day and age basically means accepting that with which societies of the past tend to disagree. But the limitations are in the word "past". Religion was the norm in the past. Now, it isn't. Now religion has become something that our liberal society as a whole seems to disagree with, and it also seems to have become the scapegoat for all that is wrong in the world today.

I used to think liberalism was synonymous with tolerance, but it really isn't. Liberalism has become more of a lack of boundaries concept than anything of actual tolerance. In a liberal society, a woman can be promiscuous without judgment, but a woman who saves herself for marriage is judged as oppressed, uninformed, and old fashioned. Everything is a choice until the person chooses the path that is most conservative at which point they are seen as not having made a choice, rather as on a path based on their environment. However, choosing to be promiscuous in this current environment is by far more of a conformity to societal pressures than is choosing to stay a virgin until marriage.

The media seems to paint North America as overwhelmed and increasingly threatened by religion and the religious, even though churches are dying as Christians in particular leave the church in droves. The media constantly glorifies the worst, most bigoted, closed-minded and intolerant religious people and occurrences and project them to the continent as the "norm" of religious circles, and atheists, agnostics, believers of other faiths and even some believers of the Christian faith adopt this horrible perspective as a general view both of Christianity and often of religion in general.

Maybe they are the norm. Maybe the majority of Christians are hateful, bigoted, intolerant misusers and misquoters of the Bible. But even if that is the case, that's not what Christianity is about. That's not what Jesus' goal was. Jesus' goal was not religion. Jesus pissed off the religious and hung out with those the religious would have considered the bottom-feeders of society.

Humans get a lot wrong. We try to help the environment and sometimes end up damaging it even more. We protect ourselves by judging and generalizing to the point where it hurts those around us. We believe we're conscious, thinking individuals, but often discover what we've been led to believe about one thing or another with total confidence is so false that we end up terribly embarrassed. We screw up. It's what we do. Our grandparents messed up the world for our parents and our parents messed up the world for us and we'll do it to our own children, too. In our daily lives and on a global, historical scale, we get everything wrong.

So why then do people base so much of such a personal decision on the actions of so many broken people? Why would you let a bunch of potentially ungodly, broken people decide what your own personal relationship with God should be?

There is no doubt that people have done horrible things both in the name of religion and by taking advantage of the trust within the religious platform. No doubt. But that's not God. And that's not Jesus either.

People go to church to find God. I don't have any stats, but I'm guessing that a lot of people who get the urge to seek God start with the local church. And it makes me wonder how many of these seekers actually find God through people in church versus how many find God through other less interactive means, such as studying the Bible independently, reading criticisms, and listening to sermons on the web.

I wonder because I started independently. I started by reading the Bible, and eventually got a study Bible with notes in it to help me understand passages, and from there, I moved onto reading multiple versions of the texts to get a clearer understanding of it, and gradually, I moved to listening to sermons online. I did talk to people when I had questions, but my discussions were very limited. And in the process, I thought my faith was very shaky and fragile, but when push came to shove, and everybody around me thought I had fallen hard enough to give up my new passion, it only grew. I believe it grew stronger because of its foundation being independent of the broken people who were around me (i.e. the Christians who had introduced me to the Bible to begin with), and therefore, I could dissociate the pain they were causing me from the personal relationship I had built with God. Without having stepped foot inside a church over the past year, I avoided the politics and the brokenness that turn off so many seekers.

But now, I am finding it so hard to integrate into any sort of religious community because I get rejected from both sides. On the one hand, I get rejected because I don't know the rituals, the songs and the procedures that seem innate to those who've grown up in the church. And on the other hand, I get rejected because I see the exclusiveness of the church community and from everything I've learned so far, Jesus is not about exclusiveness.

Last week, I got into a mild debate about exclusiveness within a Good Friday sermon with one of the few religious friends I have. I've been listening to sermons from my now favorite church in North Carolina for some time now, and leading up to Easter, the pastors would explain to the regular church goers that with Easter comes crowds. People attend church that one time of year (maybe Christmas too) and the fact that they enter the church at all provides the church an opportunity to reach them. And so they planned for weeks, from what I heard in the sermons, to make Easter so passionately inclusive in hopes that they'd touch as many hearts as God would allow.

While they were doing that down there in NC, I went to a choir performance of Saint-John's Passion the evening of Good Friday here in Montréal, and in the middle of the performance, the pastor gave a sermon. As he walked up to the microphone before the packed church (probably between one and two thousand people attended, which is an insanely abnormally high number for a Quebec church, as far as I've been exposed to it anyway), I got my hopes up to be moved and touched by the words he had so diligently prepared for this giant audience. Instead, he gave a sermon that Quebecers have come to expect at any church devoid of humanity. It was full of Bibley references, old religious words and references that nobody understood, and was entirely lacking in passion. He did mention love a couple of times, but considering this was the day Jesus suffered terribly and ultimately died on the cross, the day this entire church was being birthed, I would have thought that the power of the significance would have moved him to express the meaning of Good Friday in such a way that everybody listening would feel the intensity and importance of Jesus' death on the cross.

So my friend, who was in the choir, asked me what I thought of the evening, and I was honest. His reaction to my perspective of the sermon was (paraphrased), "The sermon was for the congregation. Does it really matter if the 'holiday Christians' aren't touched? It's not like they're coming back anyway."

Can you see it? That's not Jesus. That's not the Jesus I've come to know. That's not the message that I've learned and cherished. If one sheep strays from the flock, that sheep is most important. But that's not the message I've been getting from the churches I've attempted to reach out to and frankly, it's made me terrified to commit to any church. What if the strings attached to membership overwhelm me? What if I clash too much with the church community simply because I feel Jesus is loving, forgiving and inclusive? What if those fundamental things that have kept my faith strong- Jesus' love, forgiveness, inclusiveness- aren't in the church at all and my exposure to a Christianity that is so impure takes it all away from me? What if the broken people of the church are so broken they replace my idealistic faith with a bitter cynicism?

I am new to faith, and as such, my perspective on it is naive and childlike. But from what I've read, that's a good kind of faith. It's not tainted by legalism, pride and certainty. I pray from my heart because I haven't been taught the rituals of prayer yet. I worship with my soul because I haven't learned to mumble hymns incoherently. I feel broken and completely imperfect because I haven't yet begun to take God's grace, mercy and forgiveness for granted. I feel I am the worst possible Christian there is because I hide my faith, I don't go to church, I don't partake in the Christian community, and I know God loves me anyway, even if fellow Christians judge me and look down on me for my seeming lack of devotion and commitment. I am also humbled by my own arrogance in judging the church, the Christian community and lifelong Christians so harshly.

I'm an in-betweeny. I know there's more to life than atheism, but at this point, I feel I'll never get to a place where my salvation is secure. I think it's very possible (more than likely) that there is a God, but if the way to heaven is through church and the rituals that follow, I'll end up down in hell wishing I could feel the God I loved while I was alive.

So then tell me again, after all this work over the past year, all the effort, the passion and the devotion towards learning about God, along with becoming a social outcast in this respect, why an atheist who rejects a relationship with God would be so confident that if there's a God, they are going to heaven, while my eternity is suddenly so uncertain?

I believe if you know God at all, you know you can't ever grasp even a tiny fraction of God's greatness. God is everything. In the Bible, God says, "I am." He just is. While I'm this tiny person who, from even a kilometer away, is already nearly insignificant, He is all things and everything. How can I be so sure of Him? How can I know Him? I can't. None of us can, whether we believe or not.

All I can do is live, learn and love in His name with all my heart and soul. I believe that's the extent to which I may know God in my tiny human capacity.