I like to keep in mind what Oscar Wilde said in his Magnum Opus (and one of my top four books), The Picture of Dorian Gray: "To question is the beginning of faith."
Returning to my hometown for the summer tends to be a love/hate affair. On one hand, I certainly do enjoy the company of my family and friends, the ones who have stayed true to me for years. I always look forward to swimming, trips down to the river, and just having some mostly stress-free free time. On the other hand, when your hometown is a speck of dust on the radar of rural Missouri, as a Christian, this means coming home also involves having to be subjected to a lot, a lot, of terrible theology. I do not claim to know what it is about small towns that makes people small-minded. It could be the lack of culture clash, or the general lack of culture. I'm not much concerned with that. What I am very concerned with, however, is the fact that small towns also produce small, weak, anemic, and altogether terrible theology.
For the sake of argument, my name is Ox Younger, and this blog is dedicated to unearthing and looking deeper at the God-awful theologies that are accepted as fact in many ultraconservative and fundamentalists regions in the church. I intend to pull no punches with my criticisms, so I hope you treat mine with the same dignity. Please understand that I am by no means a true authority on Scripture: but that my aim is to tear down those that have wrongly asserted their own perverted doctrines as "Gospel Truth."
Now, a little bit of my recent background on the subject:
My girlfriend and I are in town for the week, and this marks the first time my girlfriend has had any interaction with any of my family. So far, she has been taking to my family rather well, and likewise in that regard. However, my girlfriend has identified herself somewhere in between an agnostic and an atheist, so I knew that first impressions would be the hardest when it came to the church my family has attended for entirely too long. Our church has never been the type to be heavy handed on actual scripture study, which is a shame, because so many of the young people who attend start off with a burning desire to unearth truth, but most end up succumbing to the doctrine of their parents. The lack of intensive scriptural study has led me to become the church's Devil's Unwelcome Advocate on a number of issues: gender roles, The End Times, homosexuality, the significance or lack thereof of The Devil, Hermeneutics in general, the place of art in the Christian's life, charity, "once saved, always saved" and other questions of salvation, music and film, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera; all of which I intend to address throughout the blog.
And I will most certainly address these topics. With fervor. I should have the first actual post done by today. Hope to hear from you soon.
