Christian Choice Confusion - God or Nature?
(Top Posts - Distance From Belief
in christianity - 011701)

General references to christianity follow ... of course, each
type of christianity varies so the following is a concept as
imbued to varying extents by most christian faiths ...

Unfortunately, a predominant angle with christianity is
that God can do literally anything/everything and that all
of God's choices are God-worthy - loving - kind or, if
unkind in any way, that's to be blamed on humans.

To question that is to risk your immortal soul. To think,
and leave God out of it, is to risk your immortal soul.
To doubt God is to risk your immortal soul. The moral?
Don't think, follow God, thank God, be obedient to God,
worship God, believe in God, and (of course) carried to
the fullest extent ... well, we know where that can lead.

It's a powerful drug that poor defenseless children are
indoctrinated into from early childhood - it works for God,
for Allah, and for the remainder of the mystical ancient (or
modern spins) on religion that use a 'believe in ultimate
authority or else' modality in a never-ending cycle of brain-
washing from generation to generation.

Humans, and all creatures with a stimuli-response mech-
anism, have varying degrees of a 'choice' modality. We
choose constantly. We choose to get up. We choose to
walk. We choose to eat. We choose to dominate. We
choose to submit. We choose to rest. We choose to go.
We choose to stay. We choose to mate. We choose - we
choose - we choose, all the time (except when sleeping,
of course).

Onto that natural mechanism has been implanted the
God meme (for humans only, of course). Once instilled,
it's extremely difficult to separate the God meme that's
been placed on top of the natural choice mechanism
from the natural modality of life 'choices' made by all
stimuli-response creatures.

Christianity teaches that God is choice - that every
choice is watched over by, judged by, acted on if willed
by God ... therefore, once instilled, it's extremely difficult
for an individual to logic/reason his/her way out of the
confusion between natural choices, made constantly, and
the God attribution laid on top of the natural modality, for
to even attempt to reason out of it is to risk that which has
been instilled into you from childhood via parental/societal/
cultural factors ...

For them, choice is God, God is choice, choices that con-
form to their God teachings *are* God-inspired/approved,
things that counter their God teachings *are* anti-God/sin/
God displeasing.

For christians, then, it's a self-feeding self-validating con-
ceptual trap (fed by many other factors, including the
desire to live, the desire to avoid pain, the desire to please,
and many others) that feeds upon itself and can only be
escaped with logic, reason, doubt, and sanity.