Choosing Your Own God

I would rather have titled this entry "The Fallacy of Choosing Your Own God," but that title didn't fit adequately in the allotted space, so please forgive if this one is misleading.

The idea for this blog came from an article I read last week in Slate. For those unfamiliar, Slate is an online magazine whose articles are often printed on MSN. It's very liberal and I normally don't read it, but occasionally I see something that catches my eye.

Such was the case last week when I saw an article by an atheist, touting the worth of reading the Bible. Giving the good before the bad, I was pleased and a little proud when he said his research showed the only religious group which routinely read the entire Bible was Evangelical Christians.

If he had stopped there everything would have been great, but of course he didn't. He went on to declare two things that, while I've heard them both before, always leave me shaking my head. The first was that he could not worship a God who would treat people as God had in the Old Testament. The second was that, essentially, God had changed between the Old and New Testaments.

The second of these assertions will be my next blog subject, but for today I wanted to deal with the idea that it's okay to pick and choose what God you serve.

The fallacy of that idea is so broad and so deep that, as I said above, it leaves me shaking my head in wonder. That people who think themselves intelligent could believe such a thing produces even more wonder.

First, every religion preaches exclusivity to some degree. Some, such as Buddhism, accomplish this by simply drawing everyone under their net, including Christianity and Islam, though both religions shudder at the thought. Others, such as many of the ancient or Native American religions, recognized other gods but not for their own people. In any case, no religion can afford to say "worship who you please, we're nothing special" for the obvious reason they would soon die out.

That, alone, seems to me to kill the idea of choosing a religion of convenience. It also makes it vitally important to find and worship the "right" god. Choosing wrong leaves you no better off than following no god at all. That being the case, it behooves every person to search the scriptures and make sure they are secure in the knowledge that God is really God. In the case of Christians, there is ample reason, though beyond the scope of this blog subject, to be satisfied on that score.

Beyond that, however, I want to address the idea of saying that you can't worship God unless He does things your way. I have even heard evangelical Christians say they couldn't worship a God who was not a loving God.

HELLO! PEOPLE!

You will worship God the way He says to worship Him, or not at all. If God demanded child sacrifice and pagan sex rituals, that's exactly what you would, and should, do. You don't get to pick and choose. God made you and, in the end, you have to answer to Him.

Thankfully, God is a God of love and does care for us. But if he didn't it would not matter, we still have to worship Him because He is God and He not only knows what is best, He decided what would be best. The only choice you have is to follow Him, as he commands, or not to follow him at all.

Exodus 20:3, Job 38-41, Acts 17:22-31