The sin of being imperfect

Something has been nagging at me lately and only last night did I finally figure it out.  It has to do with an abusive relationship with a god that holds us to an impossible standard and what finally shined the light on it was a post that someone made on Facebook that my wife read to me last night.  The quote is, “I can't brag about my love for God because I fail Him daily, but I can brag about His love for me because it never fails.”

It was that first part that made it click.  We fail him daily.  Obviously, this was posted by someone who is very religious.  If you are very religious you obviously want to please your god.  It very well may be your greatest desire in life.  And STILL you fail him daily?  This really brings up two terrible problems with religion.  First, as I mentioned above, is the abusive relationship.  We are imperfect, but not JUST imperfect, fundamentally flawed, bad people who have no right existing, but he loves us anyway.  We are so bad, in fact, that even when we want to be good we still do bad things every single day because we are just such bad, bad people.  Fortunately for us there is someone who accepts and understands just how terrible we are, loves us anyway and is willing to forgive us our faults if we just do everything we’re ever told without complaint.  While we, ourselves, can never actually become decent enough people to ever have any kind of value as individuals because we are so utterly useless we can gain value as individuals by being with him because he gives us value by his very existence.  In psychology this is generally referred to as “Battered spouse syndrome”.  The person in the relationship who “gives value” is the lowest piece of shit scumbag on the planet; a manipulative, self-serving, sadistic, arrogant and completely self-centered individual who sees the other more as a property than a cherished loved one.  In religion, however, the person in the relationship who has no value on their own is the lowest piece of shit scumbag on the planet, at least until they are given value by their god.

That is bad enough.  To ever have a thought that you are a worthless scumbag of an individual, no matter how good a person you try to be, that you are a lowlife, vile, putrid piece of shit until you are given value by another out of the kindness of his heart, though you don’t deserve it and never could, that is a pretty bad place to be.  I don’t care if the one “giving you value” is your husband or your deity, to make you feel that is true takes a real piece of shit (in the case of the latter, the piece of shit in question is your pastor, not your imaginary friend).

Of course religious people don’t see it like that.  They don’t look at it like that.  But just look up any religious nutbag pastor who ever gave a speech about secularism and the dangers of our society becoming more secular and you will see that they very much see it like that.  Not only do they not trust atheists, not only are they leery of all things secular, they are terrified that if they are not allowed to preach in our public schools their own children may become secular, thus evil.  In fact, they’re not even afraid that their children are going to be taught to be secular in the public schools, they’re terrified that their children won’t be taught anything; that their religious beliefs won’t be constantly reinforced throughout the day.  They are so insecure that the simple idea that their children may spend part of their day not having their religious beliefs actively reinforced is a source of major stress, prompting them to lie, cheat and attempt to subvert the law in a pretty much continuous effort to reintroduce religion into the public school system.  All of this because, without their religious beliefs, they’re afraid their children will become evil, vile people, the default position all people hold until given value by their god.

But that’s not even the worst of it, which brings me to the second point.  God holds us to such an impossible standard that we cannot help but to “fail him every day”.  That’s how utterly useless we are.  We are such worthless pieces of shit that no matter how hard we try it is simply impossible for us to ever be good enough.  Which begs the question, if it’s impossible for me to do something, why do I need to be forgiven for not doing the impossible?  If I, as God made me, am simply incapable of living up to the standard he set forth, no matter how hard I try or how badly I want to, then why do I require forgiveness for not doing the impossible?  This becomes particularly troubling when you think about this quote from a Wikipedia article about codependency:  “In a codependent relationship, the codependent's sense of purpose is based on making extreme sacrifices to satisfy their partner's needs. Codependent relationships signify a degree of unhealthy clinginess, where one person doesn't have self-sufficiency or autonomy. One or both parties depend on their loved one for fulfillment. There is almost always an unconscious reason for continuing to put another person’s life ahead of your own, and often it is because of the mistaken notion that self-worth comes from other people.”

That quote EXACTLY describes a relationship with God, especially among fundamentalists.  They are called “worshipers” for a reason.  The worshiper is expected to make extreme sacrifices to satisfy God’s needs.  The worshiper and God depend on each other, the worshiper for a sense of worth, God for the worship he so desperately desires.  And the worshiper’s entire life, even to the point of sacrificing that life, are spent at the whim of their god because it is the only way they have any self-worth.  All because we were apparently created to be such weak, vile creatures that we would have an absolute need for God to forgive and fix us on a continuous basis.

So why do I need forgiveness for being exactly the thing I was born to be?  Why do I need forgiveness today, tomorrow, the next day, next week, next month, next year because I have not yet attained the unattainable?  Many Christians believe it is impossible to live without sinning.  They say it is because we are “imperfect”.  So what kind of prick demands that we beg forgiveness for not doing the impossible?  All Christians agree that only one man in history lived his entire life without sinning once, which means that all Christians believe that, with the exception of the savior, it is impossible for a person to go through their entire lives without ever committing a single sin.  If you accept that as truth and you accept that we are created by God then you must admit that we were created to be sinners.

Of course that isn’t true.  There is a whole lot sideways thinking to wriggle your way out of admitting that this is what you believe.  The one that comes to mind is that we were not sinners until the original sin and it was our own choices that made us this way, blah, blah, blah.  Except that isn’t true, is it.  I didn’t eat any fruit from any forbidden tree.  I am as I was born.  It was God’s choice to visit original sin on all the generations to come.  If I were to accept creation myth then I am exactly as God intended me to be.  If I were to accept that it is impossible for me to live without sin then I would have to except that this is exactly as God intended as it has been impossible since my birth, not since I, personally, did something to change it.  And even if I accepted that it was the sins of Adam and Eve that brought this upon me, making in the fault of “man”, I would still have to admit that there is nothing in my entire life that I, personally, did to make this true, there is nothing in my entire life that I could have done to prevent it from being true and whether or not it is true is, always has been and always will be completely and utterly out of my control.  Further pressed I would have to admit, though I’m sure begrudgingly, that this is by design.  As mankind had no hand in design and is incapable of changing this “fact” in any way then only the creator himself could hold any kind of responsibility for it being impossible for me to live without sin.  The fact that it is “impossible” pretty much relieves me of any responsibility in the matter.

So, God created us, allowed the first of us to be tempted almost immediately and, when they failed the test, cursed all the generations which followed with constant temptation which is impossible to resist entirely for one’s entire life and, by some estimations, “daily”, but demands that every time we “fail him” we must beg forgiveness.  You’ll have to forgive me if I think that’s stupid; the kind of thing only a sadistic prick would do to someone.  So, really, you can't brag about God's love for you either, because he made you such a pathetic wimp that you couldn't not fail him daily, then demanded that you beg his forgiveness every time you did.