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I don't apologize for my answers. I speak to the audience, and in doing so I sometimes tell the audience things they don't want to hear or cant handle.
I believe in stands on principle. I believe that doing right for the sake of doing right is a good way to live. I believe in self awareness and encourage it in others. I offer the most unbiased viewpoint I have. And yes, I am only human.
Im going to tell you what I think you need to hear. You are not supposed to take what I say and follow it. You are supposed to take what I say and _think_about_it_
Oh, and feel free to ask me questions, but netspeak, ebonics, terrible grammar, and your teen angst about a crush will be ignored.
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I am a Christian and I'm working on being a better one, but I'll be the first person to admit that I'm far from perfect. I have debilitating guilt and shame about my past and even the way I came to Christ, even though that sounds strange now that I'm writing it.
I feel like everyone else has really great, inspiring stories and I have kind of a cowardice one. Long story short, I wanted to come to God for years, but thought that I was too bad to do so. Like God wouldn't want someone like me. I didn't have the courage to find out if that was true or not until I was sick and thought I might be dying soon. When I found out that you can be forgiven for anything, I asked Jesus into my heart. (I'm fine now BTW).
Getting to my problem, my dad will not stop judging me, or my family for that matter. He judges us for missing church and any sins we commit. He'll imply or flat out say that we won't go to Heaven because of certain things that he himself does.
I hope this doesn't sound like I'm being hypocritical and judging him, but he's got problems as well. He talks hatefully to my mom, he does rotten thing to people, he uses filthy language, he lies, he takes our things that don't belong to him and these are the kinds of things he judges us for. He'll come home from church and act this way. I've never habitually done all of these things and I've repented, but when I drop the ball, he's all over me. I'm not saying that my dad's a terrible man or that he's not going to Heaven, but I don't feel that he's in a position to look down his nose at me.
The worst is when he judges me for missing church. I admit that I've been bad about that, but church isn't the only place where I worship God with other Christians. I've heard that you don't have to go to church as long as you worship somewhere. It's not in the Bible. It's not that I don't like church, it's just a long story of why I don't go every single Sunday.
He's confident about his own salvation and that of certain people close to him. He just judges his household. It bothers me that he thinks I might not go to Heaven when he and some of the people close to him are no better than I am. It just plain bothers me that he judges me at all.
One reason I think it bothers me is because it makes me feel like such a loser. It brings back the guilt and shame I mentioned earlier. It also makes me wonder if I'll ever be the Christian I need to be. If my own dad doesn't have confidence in me, how strong of a Christian can I be?
What do you think of this situation? (link)
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I'll be honest, this may not be a question for me. I'm not Christian, I am agnostic. I was raised Catholic, but I no longer believe in any God. But there are parts of your question that have nothing to do with religion that I can definitely speak to, and I'll do my best on the rest. I just wanted to state my biases outright.
First, everyone judges everyone. Judging, without the positive or negative connotations, is just looking at those around us and trying to figure out who they are and what they're like. I think that you do not have to be perfect to judge others for their faults, but at the same time I think that no one has the right to be hypocritical.
When it comes to Church, gathering to worship is as old as religion itself. You don't keep a religious community running without gathering it's adherents together to agree with each other on their religion. My problem is that there are a ton of people in the world, especially in America, who think that going to church makes them a good person. In Catholicism we called them "Sunday Catholics." People who go to church and sing hymms and give money to the church and then go spend the rest of their week being as un-christian as possible.
Believing in God itself does not make anyone a good person, but there are alot of people who think the exact opposite. They think that believing in God and believing God forgives them for their wrongs gives them license to be a shitty, horrible human being. They are not actually good people, but they will self righteously lord their beliefs and their involvement with their religion over others as if it makes them a better person than other people who are not as devout, even when those not as devout people or people who are devout in ways they refuse to recognize are just plain better people in their day to day lives.
Now, when it comes to your father, you have to realize something that every child eventually realizes.
Your parents are just the same as everyone else in that they are fallible people who believe and think things that are wrong. I'm not talking about religion at all with this. I'm talking about things like believing that they know things they do not, that they are better than others when they are not, that they make mistakes and are fallible and can easily be wrong.
Your father is a selfish asshole. Sorry if that sounds harsh, I have my own parent problems and so I pull no punches with parents and especially fathers. I think most fathers these days do not measure up.
I won't speak to Christianity, but you can indeed be the person you want to be even if your father thinks you're scum. What you have to realize is that not only is it entirely reasonable that he's wrong about you, but that from what you've said the actual things he judges and measures to see whether you or anyone else is a good person are also wrong. Which at the same time frees you. You do not have to be a person who is good by the way your father defines good. You can look at your own life, at the people you care about who care about you, and define for yourself what a good person is.
All that takes is working to surround yourself with people who have qualities you admire, whether it's Christian qualities of belief and devoutness or just human qualities like being intelligent, being fair, being humorous, or being kind. Define for yourself what a good person is, and hold yourself to that standard, and ask people who you actually respect, who respect you, to tell you when you fall short.
That's how you find peace with this, because your father isn't judging you because he is right he is judging you because making you feel shitty about yourself makes him feel better about himself.
So the answer to that last question is that your father's confidence in you has no bearing on how strong a christian or good a person you can be unless you allow it to.
Does he deserve that? That's the question you have to live with the most right now. The realization that your father does not deserve to judge you and have you feel bad about it. That he is not that good of a man or a christian, that he should be treated like someone who's opinion is irrelevant.
Now, you want to be a good person yourself? Learn how to recognize that your father is an asshole who's judgements are wrong and hurtful on purpose and learn to love him anyway. Learn to not resent him for his faults, and hope he someday learns from his problems while accepting that he probably never will.
That is true strength of character, Christian or not. If you can figure out how to care about your dad while caring about his opinion of you, you've reached a point that he will never even see, and you can look in the mirror and know that you're both stronger and kinder than your father.
Once you get there, he can't take it away from you after that.
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Rating: 5
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Thank you. I'm very sorry it took so long to get back to you. I really appreciate your advice and thank you again for it. You sound like a great person. God bless you.
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