Answering Two Questions Asked by a Reader of My Book

I have read your book trying to look for answers to my own questions regarding the Christian faith. I had only recently became a Christian about a year ago and now I am experiencing serious doubts if the Christian God is real.

God rescued you out from your destructive teenage years and gave you a new life, and you were committed enough to become a pastor, did you ever feel like you are a bad person because you rejected this God who had rescued you from your destruction? Because this is what I feel right now, although I have my doubts, but He nonetheless was the source that pulled me out of my own destruction, yet now I am trying to logically prove he doesn't exist.

Secondly, in response to one of your claims that women are viewed as second class citizens and were look downed upon, here's an article that talks about the two passages and proves your claim contrary. If you can shed some light on this as to what you think, it would be great.

My response:

Thanks for reading my book and writing to me. I'm always curious if my readers get through it all since it's a big book.

Good questions.

It was my faith that rescued me in my younger years, not God, you see. Many youths are rebellious. As they grow up they learn to adjust or they spend their lives in prison. I was raised in a good family so I would have made the necessary adjustments to my life as I got older. It was a time when the Jesus Movement was flourishing, yes, but so also were a lot of other different religious movements. Did you ever get a good look at the faces of the Charles Manson killers as they were coming and going to trial? They were happy, blissful, deluded. That was me for Jesus. It could have been the Moonies, or Islam, but the deluded effect is the same. I no more feel bad for rejecting the Christian God as you do in never accepting Allah. Neither one of them exist.

When I was a conservative in every other respect I would have accepted what you sent me about women being able to teach. I was a biblical feminist and I read all of the literature I could get my hands on at the time because people around me didn't agree. Although, looking back this is surely not the overall thrust of the passages in question. Just like what Christians have done with the passages about eternal conscious suffering in hell, slavery in the Bible, the environment, the care of animals, anti-Semitism, and now homosexuality, they are gerrymandering the text to fit with modern notions. First our morality evolves and then Christians later find that morality in the Bible.

Cheers,
John W. Loftus

Share