I'm going to be honest. I have a really hard time with organized religion and more specifically I have problems with Christians. I've been working really hard on understanding my own views and beginning to understand the theology behind Christianity so much so that I took a Christian Faith and Life class "for fun" in order to help myself figure these things out.

The hardest thing for me is that I don’t know if I want to believe or not. I have had so many negative interactions with Christians that I don’t know if I even want to be a part of that. There are times that I feel a strong need to have a belief in something and there are others that I find solace in not having a strong belief. I could be swayed fairly easily either way toward Christianity or away. I feel like there has to be something more to life but I don’t know how to figure out what that is or how that comes to be and I don’t know if Christianity is the right way or not. I know a handful of people who exemplify what I think that it means to be Christian and I admire and look up to those people greatly but there are so many others that turn me away because they seem to have blind faith and don’t know what they believe in, just that everyone else is wrong. I think Christians get a pretty bad rapport because we only hear about the ones who are members of the Westboro Baptist Church or those who share ignorant and disgusting posts online about how they are the only ones who know the truth and every other religion is false.

I see Christianity as having turned into more of a ritual system than a system of beliefs based on so many of the Christians that are around me. I strongly value openness and respect for all people and ideas or beliefs and although I know that Jesus preaches respect but I have a hard time seeing that when so many so-called Christians are some of the most disrespectful people that I know. I have difficulty finding myself able to believe in a system that has so many people who exploit it and turn the words so strongly into a hate system. Other religions do this as well, which makes this hard for me to jump into and call myself a believer in any of them. If we want to use the Bible as a way of life, we have to look at the context that it was written in to be able to apply what the themes and principles meant during that time period to today. There are so many that don't know the context in which a passage was meant or the reason behind one of the books of the bible that their interpretations are skewed. I want to be open to other views and appreciate the diversity in the world and so often I see Christianity as a barrier to that.

I think that there are so many negative interactions with Christians, Churches and Christian Organizations that they have really impacted my own personal development. I don’t see many Christians actually practicing the Bible and using the words the way that they were intended to be that it just really turns me away from the Christian word. Some Christians are the most judgmental and disgusting people that I have ever met. I see so many of them as feeling self-righteous because they feel like they are better than everyone else because of their belief, and I just really have a problem with that. Christianity wasn't meant as a way to exclude people, but rather to bring people together and include them in this good word. Christianity has devolved into something that isn’t about belief in it so much as alienating those who believe in something else and that is what troubles me right now. To be completely honest, my agnostic views are closer to what Jesus taught than so many Christians actions represent.

I have so many incredible people in my life who have shown me what it really means to be a Christian and I can't describe how highly I respect those people who really exemplify what I think Jesus stood for. I have conversations about these things on a regular basis with those people and those conversations have brought me closer to understanding why I have so many problems with Christianity and it's not the faith, but the people and the actions of those people that delve from the Bible that push me away.