Many religious people can  see only themselves as valuable to God and that perspective can only be destructive.  Think of all the separateness of Muslims, Christians,  Jews,  Hindus, and ask yourself how a God supervising the gathering of people from every family into one could possibly approve of the primary interests pursued by the communities where these religious views thrive.

Let me speak to Christians.   God does not approve of misogyny.   Nothing in the Bible stands up a policy of blocking the full participation of women in the faith.

Locked up in a box or on the street

People may have been fascinated by the tabernacle and the temple (many still are) but it did not take long  for the corruption and greed to open the people’s eyes to a family franchise gone wild. The levitical system has no spiritually liberating mechanism. It is stuck on annual cycles and rituals of food and drink.

The first arrangement, in Eden, had one prohibition and we cannot accept the notion that God today holds women responsible for the fallout and bars them from serving him.

Even with this knowledge there are many who want law to be God’s supreme gift, the idea that God is on the street where people who need him most can run into him.

Forgive, please, the madness of people who dress themselves up as the exclusive samples of enlightened humanity. The Jews most definitely had that privilege for the purpose of preserving the record of human failure and rebellion, as the keepers (literally) of divine instruction, and as the family out of which global salvation eventually came.

The prettiest are the ugliest

For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.

2 Corinthians 11:13

If there is anything God did that can create internal satisfaction and external integrity we cannot in any honest reckoning say we have found it outside the revelation of Messiah Yeshua. The tales of obedience and loyalty to law and servanthood are pure delusion and distraction.  It is an insult because God did not send Christ to recruit workers.   In fact those who we  can identify as dedicated workers are woefully distant from God’s heart and willingly ignorant of the tools the worker needs  and they take no pleasure in being God’s children. Salvation and adoption are on shaky ground and God can take back his gifts at any time.

Straining out flies and camel swallowing

It is no secret that North America is home to a host of religious movements we have not been able to place anywhere but on the fringes.

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

Matthew 23:24

They will never return to the apostolic foundations. They have no interest in separating the fables from the facts. They prefer to read broken translations, books of recent visions by people who admittedly are loyal to many heads. Everything in the Bible does not become Christian doctrine.

29) “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30) and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’

Matthew 23:29-30

Christ the loner

2 Timothy 2:15

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.

2 Timothy 2:15

We must recognize their commitment to the only Head and Foundation that the apostles confessed as a fat zero. Christ is of no benefit if there is a “plus” in the profession of confidence. If we are sure that Christ and something else or Christ and someone else is Head and Saviour then we have kissed the joy of salvation slightly. There are things to strain out and we should stop playing the “it’s all true” game when we work the text. The fable and fact even appear in side by side verses. The club they thought they had for indiscriminately assaulting their neighbours is really a sophisticated light sabre.