Deserving Help

 

My husband and I have spent the last two years living in his mother's basement. His mother and her husband are Evangelical Christians and very, very conservative. They go to church every Sunday, do Bible study, and volunteer at Christian summer camps. Everything they do is related to their faith in some way.

Her husband (not my husband's father) is a very black and white person. For him, there are no shades of gray: it's either right or wrong and there's nothing in between. Like most conservatives, he has an idea of who is deserving of help and who is not. We fall into the undeserving category because 1: we aren't as religious as he is and 2: we are profilgates who have spent our way into our current mess and we need to learn to manage our money better. So, he has never really wanted to help us in any way.

To add to that, his mother offered us the basement without telling her husband that we were bringing our dog. Not really liking dogs, he wouldn't have allowed us to stay had he known about it – it would have been too much for him to accept. This was strike number two against us, even though we did not know she hadn't told him. Had I known that he wasn't ok with the dog, I would have never agreed to have come here.

In our time here, he has made it very clear we aren't welcome and that we're an imposition. From the very first, we offered to pay rent and we've been doing so ever since we've been able. The only time we weren't able to pay was during the first couple of months after our arrival since my husband didn't even have a job yet. He begrudges us this time. If he were able to, I'm sure he'd squeeze us for those first few weeks' rent as well. We should be grateful that he doesn't.

He's called us thieves and we get blamed if anything breaks. Right before Christmas this past year, he took away our parking spot because he bought a new car and he needed space for his old car. If our car got towed away because parking on the street is limited during certain hours, he couldn't see how it was his problem.

We are finally moving out at the end of the week. We found an affordable apartment that accepts dogs, something that is very difficult to do in a city with a vacancy rate of less than one percent. As I look back on the past two and half years, I don't know how to feel about the "help" we were given. I don't even know if I should consider it help. Does help that you have to pay for qualify as help? I'm not sure. It certainly would have been more helpful if we were only asked to pay for our share of the utilities.

Jesus Christ commanded his followers to treat others as they would like to be treated and to help those less fortunate. It's hard for me to understand someone who claims to be a good Christian and yet begrudges any assistance he may give to those in need. I am not even a Christian and yet I help others when I can. I don't care what they believe or how they came to need assistance. To me, everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect by virtue of the fact that they're human. I need no god or gods to tell me that this is the right thing to do.

The Bible: Literal Word of God Or Not?

So this morning I was driving my husband to work and he was talking to me about one of his religious co-workers who says she will not have sex until she is married. He told me he is going to ask her today where in the Bible it says that you are supposed to wait until marriage to have sex. He then said what many liberal Christians say: the Bible is only to be taken as a guideline and shouldn’t be taken as the literal truth.

I used to believe as my husband still does: the Bible is a guideline and there are parts of it that should be ignored as outdated. But the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, and as such, free from error and human bias. If the bible is not to be read in the literal sense and portions of it are outmoded or outright wrong, then why read it as anything other than a work of fiction?

The entire basis of Christianity is laid right in Genesis with the Fall of Man. It is because Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that God had to sacrifice himself on the cross for “our sins.” If that didn’t happen, then what was Jesus’ sacrifice for? 

We know that the Genesis creation story absolutely did not happen. Science has proven it wrong…yes, I know some Christians don’t “believe” in evolution and think that dinosaurs and humans walked on Earth at the same time, but really, most reasonable people can see that the creation story is just a myth.  What I can’t understand is why these normally reasonable people would continue to believe in a book that has been proven to be factually wrong…not only on the origins of Man but on basic historical facts as well.

So much misery and suffering in the world has resulted and still results from belief in the Abrahamic faiths. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a case in point. The Israelis are so unyielding on holding on to every piece of land in the Gaza Strip because they believe this land was given to them by their god…based on the  words written in an ancient book.

Conservative Christians, mostly Evangelical Protestants, in the United States have been on a crusade for the last thirty years to roll back the clock on civil liberties for minorities and women. They actively work to continue to deny homosexuals of their basic rights and the right to get married. They kill abortion doctors and fight to keep the death penalty legal. They dream of a day when the United States will be a theocracy: when Biblical law, as interpreted by them, of course, will be the law of the land.

Of course, the Bible has been used through-out history to oppress and enslave others. It has been used to justify torture, murder, and all manner of privations. Why continue to perpetuate this cycle by believing any portion of this book? Does it really make any sense? I don’t think so.