I have a lot of friends who claim to be Christian but whose views are at direct odds with their stated religion. I am not for a minute saying that I am somehow perfect or something or that I don’t sometimes break the rules or whatever. What I’m talking about is people who hold views totally contrary to their belief system, yet they have absolutely no problem with this.
Christians all view abortion as wrong, for example. Yet many people I know are fine with IVF which almost always involves abortion. For Catholics, IVF, even if somehow abortion isn’t involved, is morally illicit and strictly forbidden. I find it shocking these people are fine with it. They don’t even attempt to reconcile their clear violation of morality with their so-called belief systems.
My contention is that these people should just stop calling themselves Christian. They can instead say something like “I tried to be Christian but it’s too hard and it conflicts with all of my viewpoints. Therefore for now I am not a Christian.”
Besides this, many so-called Christians and Catholics specifically will proclaim support for transgender operations, even for children, transvestitism, and homosexual activity. All of these are clear and obvious violations of Christian principles.
When pressed, they will ultimately make up some reasoning like “I don’t have to believe everything in Christiainty, plus different people have different opinions.” Ah yes, choose your own religion. So convenient. As St. Augustine said “If you accept things from the gospel that you like and reject what you don’t, it’s not the gospel you’re listening to but yourself.” These people are listening to themselves. It’s the religion of self. Self-worship. You are the ultimate God in this religion. Sounds attractive.
It’s also a result of Protestant theology which posits that there are no authorities within religion but that it’s up to each individual to decide what’s right. To be fair, they will claim the Holy Spirit has to make all the decisions. Sounds good right? God himself making your decisions. What could be better? Well, because of this belief we have 30,000 Protestant denominations. That’s why we need a structure. Otherwise people float around rudderless. As evidenced by many of my friends, their own faulty beliefs often take precedence over God’s laws. It’s all too easy to fall into this trap when it’s a “Me and God alone” proposition.
