Another 95 Theses

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Another 95 Theses

 9: The church is unwavering and quite biblical in its commitment to the sanctity of marriage, consistently teaching against extramarital sexual activity and divorce.

11: The church’s self-sustaining doctrinal bubble of belief without understanding makes it all just empty devotion, faith in other people who are likewise repeating the old slogans with no more actual knowledge.

29: The church claims that God gives everyone its particular “faith” at birth and that he offers everyone a “time of visitation” later, both of which are absurd in the highest degree given the microscopic number of people on the planet who have such faith, few having gone without childhood indoctrination and a lifetime of avoiding “worldly” ideas and friends.

65: It is just a case of Stockholm Syndrome, not genuine devotion, to praise God for the “gift” of faith when its value cannot be questioned and the consequences of rejecting it are social ostracism in this life and an eternity of torture in the next.

66: In an obvious and desperate effort at special pleading, the church claims that human reason doesn’t apply to its teachings or the Bible, despite Paul’s “reasoning” with the Jews and Felix, Luther’s voluminous writings, and its own written materials and instructional camps.

67: Reason is considered a gift from God that is useful for everything but objectively considering the most important question of your life, the answer for which you must accept without reservation from largely uninformed preachers of a single tiny sect that doesn’t even entirely follow the teachings of its predecessors.

69: The church tries to sanitize doubt by focusing it on uncertainty about one’s individual salvation and by blaming the “carnal mind,” making the attribute of critical thought about very real doctrinal problems into a source of additional guilt for which it can offer forgiveness, thus deflecting scrutiny of its doctrines while perpetuating a cycle of dependency.