Christianity: Worshipping Perpetual Childhood

Peter Pan is a story about a child that never wants to grow up. In J. D. Salinger’s book, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is suffering from a similar problem. And both are simply exhibiting what it is to be a Christian – stuck in a permanent state of childhood. The Catholic Church denies this is true, of course, because it could never sell its snake oil if ever it told those it was selling such snake oil that it was pure snake oil. But we can see the contradiction plainly enough if we are willing to “put the ways of childhood behind” us and think like men. In one of his more well-known passages of Scripture about spiritual maturity, St Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” The problem is that Christianity, by requiring a dependence upon a Church and a Bible and a belief in a “God” father, thus requires its faithful flock to talk, think, and reason, not like a man or an adult, but like a child or a slave. As children, we rely on our parents to guide us and teach us how to determine what things might be bad for us (like taking drugs) and what things might be good for us (like learning to think for yourself). But religion flips this script. Christianity offers its followers the spiritual drugs of its sacraments. And even if those sacraments are placebos, they nevertheless convince the “believer” that they are cured of their fallible nature, and are therefore spiritually improved, by such sacramental vaccines. Thinking for yourself, on the other hand, is a strict no-no. That is the greatest sin of all, in fact. As a “believer” in God, one must always make sure that the Father “who art in Heaven” do all of their thinking for them. The job of the “believer” is to ONLY ever “believe,” and not to question. The “believer” must only think about why they should, and indeed why they must, “believe” that God (i.e., the Catholic Church) should be trusted to do their thinking for them. This is like a bird that never trusts it has learned how to fly straight, so that it feels the need to have a priestly class of birds that correct its errors of flight its while life. it is the difference between learning how to swim in the ocean and thinking that we must learn instead how to only hold onto a buoy for dear life lest we drown or be consumed by sharks. To be a champion swimmer in the seas of thought one must know how to think, which is impossible to do when one is clinging to the buoy of one brand of belief or another. And who speaks for this God who we are to rely on like a father figure to do all of our thinking for us, a god who seems to have stopped speaking for himself 2000 years ago? The Catholic priests who claim they alone have the ability to know God’s will. In this way, the Christian is taught not to learn how to swim and think for themselves, which is a privilege limited to the priestly class that alone has been give the power and the right to do that, but to cling to the buoy of the beliefs they were taught as children, and thus remain like a child, waiting for various “fathers” in the form of priests, and “mothers” in the form of nuns, to tell them what to do and how to think so as to please God enough so that said God will NOT throw them into a lake of fire for all eternity for the sin of being man enough to think for yourself.