Empty Faith: Saving Faith By Rejecting its Tenets

I must admit, I find it curious that Christians often reject certain claims of scripture but not others. Fundamental Christians who do this strike me as being hypocritical, since they make the bold claim that the Bible is God’s inerrant and holy inspire word. How could any of it be wrong? More liberal Christians who reject the Bible confuse me even more. Many Unitarian Christians, for example, fully reject the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This perplexes me, because even the pious Paul made it known that, 14 And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. (1 Corinthians 15:14)

As an ex-Evangelical Christian of nearly 3 decades I must say it sounds vaguely heretical by Christian standards. But I get it… I really do. The Bible is inadequate when it comes to answering most of our modern moral dilemmas, and so Christians move away from a rigid legalistic reading of their holy scriptures and try to find balance in their editorial decisions to leave certain bits out. In other words, they let their human conscience guide them to make the right ethical discernment, but then they often attribute this little voice in their head to the Holy Spirit or the ever living Christ. Wrongly so, I might add.

As a liberated atheist though, I won't hold them to such barbaric teachings as those found in the Bible, since I believe our innately evolved moral humanism causes us to be repulsed by such putrid nonsense and reject inadequate teachings such as burning witches or beating your slaves. I feel this selectivity for Christians to choose the moral high ground, so to speak, depicts this higher moral sense in how we as humans have come to act, think, and relate to one another as well as the world around us.

Even so, what intrigues me is how Christians can seem to cherry-pick some bits of scripture, separate the good from the bad, and say they're filled with the Holy Spirit and have been saved by Christ, and this makes you Christian enough, but ignore the consequences of such actions.

If you reject any bits at all this puts the reliability of the whole into question, Christ dwelling or not. You put your entire faith into doubt since it is predicated on what your sacred holy book contains in its tenets of faith.

Since you would have no concept of Christ but for the Gospels and Bible, it doesn't make sense to just reject it when you don't like it, but rely upon it to inform you about your relationship with Christ when it suits you.

It seems a little double-faced to me. You can either take it or leave it for what it is. But you can't just make it into whatever you desire it to be while blatantly ignoring what it is. That's not being objective.

So I'm curious as to what the justification is (other than the little Jesus inside you says... because as mentioned... that doesn't solve the problem) when Christians give themselves the right to abandon scriptural verses which they find unsatisfactory while holding to others they might reject the next time around. It’s just not a good practice for those who swear they live or die by what their faith entails. To disregard elements of that faith arbitrarily merely in order to rationalize and reconcile the contradictions or discrepancies and thereby justify a continued adherence to said faith doesn’t seem to do it any justice. In fact, I feel it not only detracts from faith, making it obsolete, but ultimately, seeks to make it meaningless. After all, if faith can be anything you want it to be, and mean anything you want it to mean, then as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, your faith is empty.

Although it seems to me that most Christians today are doing just this. They're trying to maintain this  sense of evolved morality, claiming it stems from their faith, and at the same time are denying that their faith is predicated and founded largely on immoral tenets--where the capricious nature of the tenets of faith negates the morality they seek--basically they're trying to have it both ways. When it comes to genuine morality, ethical behavior, and doing what's right, this just won't do. Salvaging one's faith by selectively rejecting some of its less impressive tenets meanwhile upholding others, coincidentally to suit whatever purpose you want it to (arbitrarily), is hypocritical practice which leads to a meaningless and empty faith.


Even so, in the end I find myself agreeing with the poet Robert Burns when he writes: 

But twenty times I rather would be 

An atheist clean, 

Than under gospel colours hid be 

Just for a screen. 

(Epistle to the Rev. John M'math, 1785)

In a related article see: Why I Am Not a Christian: Part 2 Biblical Errancy.