Deconstructing My Own Bullshit

Editor’s Note: Hey, guess what? You can order my Father’s Day preview of Diamond in the Rough: The Gospel According to Baseball on Kindle for free! I could only make it free for 5 days, but I hope you’ll grab it before the price balloons to $0.99 on Father’s Day.

What good is deconstruction if I don’t apply it to myself as actively and diligently as I do to the religion I left?

Last month, I wrote about how a prefabricated faith can streamline our decision making and make our lives a whole lot easier (though it often makes people’s lives a lot worse when they don’t submit to the same set of rules).

But I want to call myself out on something I said and the potential wrong turn it can take regarding the way we look at people of faith. I was writing about the trend that sent me reeling the moment my eyes opened to it. I had realized that the conflicts and contradictions I had spent my whole life explaining and rationalizing formed more of a rule than an exception. Here’s what I wrote:

That’s not what I want to deconstruct. . . . I mean, I can, but I wouldn’t change anything about that. It’s what I wrote next that I want to re-examine:

I need to stop and look at this rhetorical sequence a bit more critically, because I wrote two consecutive sentences that contradict each other: People just made decisions about what to believe, and Accept it all without thinking? Do you see what I did there?

First, I assert that throughout the history of time, followers of Christianity have looked at the various contradicting statements and ideas recorded in the Bible and decided on a unified voice or moral code of their own making. Maybe the best way to describe this act—since they’re taking an existing text and forming their own judgments or focusing on evidence that supports and arguments that articulate their preferred narrative—is to say people have acted as their own executive editors of what they call God’s Word. They’re curating their own moral code.

I follow that description of a calculated, critical process by calling what I and my fellow believers had done accepting it all without thinking. That’s not what I just said happens! There’s a LOT of thinking involved, though a lot of it is done subconsciously or under less than genuine pretenses.

So I want to analyze and restate simply what I believe actually happens:

• People from ancient times until now have curated, interpreted, edited, preserved, recopied, translated, further interpreted/edited, ancient manuscripts into a diverse world of faith and theological interpretation with increasing popular accessibility and cultural influence.

• The people with an affinity for those writings and who practice that faith generally but not exhaustively trust the authorities and traditions in their faith and the editorial and interpretative decisions made by them.

• Everyone still runs their beliefs through their own critical filter. Whatever they dislike too strongly or whatever they can’t swallow, they figure out a way to rationalize its exclusion from their own personal moral code.

• Everyone decides for themselves what they believe and how they’ll live, even if it’s heavily influenced by an authority figure or figures.

• NO ONE IS 100% OBEDIENT.

The thing I should really criticize, the bullshit of my own I should have called out originally, was the accepted, universally adopted practice of ignoring the God branding with which we label our own beliefs. Ultimately, everyone thinks for themselves to the degree of their choosing, and people of many faiths attribute to God what they devised in their own heads.

We talk definitively on behalf of Jesus, God, Allah, and the Universe with ideas we’ve either fashioned out of whole cloth or repurposed with our own personal twist.

There is nothing wrong with believing what we read in a text we deem holy. There’s nothing wrong with using those texts to form our own conclusions about how to live and who to be. Nothing at all.

When we do this, though, it’s important to recognize that’s what we’re doing. Call it what it is. When we call our own editorial decisions the work of God, we license ourselves to authority we really haven’t earned and that no other being deserves to be subjected to.

Humility changes everything.