Sunday, April 24th, 2011
Joy in Losing Your Religion
The popular English comedian, Ricky Gervais wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal at Christmas entitled “Why I’m an Atheist.”
A few days ago, he wrote another one for Easter entitled: “Why I’m a Good Christian.”
He says, “Even though I don’t believe in God, I
do believe I am a good Christian compared to a lot of Christians.”
He tells us why he dislikes so many of them. “I have seen such cruelty and prejudice performed in the name of Christianity…”
He then goes through the ten commandments, and with his own re-interpretation of each, claims he’s kept them.
His assessment: “Not bad for an atheist. I make that ten out of ten.”
The irony is that Mr. Gervais shows his propensity toward religion in trying to prove he keeps all ten of the commandments. He wants to think he’s more religious than most Christians.
And he may be. That’s his problem. He gets upset to think that Christians could be sinners and yet expect to go to heaven-while he’s working hard to be a good person, without the hope of heaven. He doesn’t think that’s fair because he’s too religious.
And so we’re going to see in this passage that Paul wants us to lose our religion-because religion won’t get us to heaven-only a relationship with Jesus will.
In fact we’ll see that in God’s eyes, man’s religion is revolting.
