The Bastard Doctrine of the Personal Relationship

Even among Protestants the bastard doctrine of the personal relationship with Christ is not mainstream and had late origins. It's the illegitimate and delinquent child of a wayward father, predestination. Evangelicals are like long haul truckers on the CB radio with Jesus, their good-buddy. Breaker, breaker! Life is a necessary nuisance between destinations. 

For non-believers the existence and triumph of evil is a fatal insult to the idea of God. Evangelicals, in attributing to God person-to-person involvement in saving grace, thereby implicate God in the particularities of evil. But grace is impersonal and freely available to anyone and so the presence of evil and injustice within the system is no reflection on God.

The refusal to take advantage of grace is an individual's choice. There's nothing irresistible about it. I'm probably resisting it right now because of that idiot, Trump, and the Palinites and the Fox News crowd who screw with my equanimity and equilibrium, they themselves being evidence of God's neglect of particularities. It's our domain. God gave it to us.

God's perfection is at a cosmic scale. Evangelicals are guilty of moral cowardice and self-importance and idolatry. Evangelicals can't handle freedom so they invented a belief in the certainty and inevitability of their salvation. They think they know they are going to heaven. Jesus told them so on the born-again radio-band so they spend their time judging others.

This insulting doctrine coincides well with the racism of evangelicals.

Individuals are prejudicially born in the same way as the white race. Predestination plays out interestingly among the sons of the fathers, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Richard Roberts and the rest. They just happen to have been chosen, (pre)destined for salvation, and also intended for adulation and higher incomes than in used car sales and other jobs.

There must be a genetic component to salvation. Silly me. I always thought it was God's prerogative. I thought that everything was God's prerogative. In next week's lesson we will debunk literalism, a hateful doctrine limiting the vast wisdom of the Bible and another example of the misunderstanding and fearful outlook of the fundamentalists.