This blog is what I expect to become a series of blogs as my theory and thoughts either become mode structured or as I realise what I’m talking is complete drivel!

Basically my thoughts at the moment are based on 2 things…

1. Annoying Christians

As regular readers will realise I am a Christian and secondly I get annoyed by Christians (oh the irony), and one thing which has been bugging me recently is Christians making rules up, in particular things like ‘a boy and a girl shouldnt be alone EVER whether they’re a couple or not’, alongside the reasons such as ‘people might think you’re being naughty’ etc. The best activity though that a boy and a girl shouldnt do advised by a Christian was PRAY.

What’s wrong with a boy and a girl being alone? what’s wrong with a boy and a girl being alone and praying?

So the first thing that’s been bugging me is all these random rules Christians make up

2. The Actions Of Jesus

I’ve also been thinking about the way Jesus acts in particular to what he says. One thing I’ve noticed is that his healing isn’t conditional on people becoming Christians and also that we’re not even told what happened to those healed after…so we don’t know if they became missionaries or if they just thought ‘ooh I’m healed, that’s nice, I might be able to pull now!’

Secondly I guess I’ve only caught on that Jesus and the Woman at the well were alone…yes and man and a women alone…not only that, no-one else was likely to go to the well at that time and not only that, she wasn’t a nice middle-class church girl who wouldn’t say boo to a goose (why would you say boo to a goose???) but she was a women who had five husbands and was having sex with another man…perhaps she was a bit of a risky character for Jesus to be alone with.

So My Point…

Perhaps I’m wrong but Jesus seemed to re-vamp every rule that existed and turned the religiousness of the people into a faith, a faith based purely on loving your God and loving your neighbour…a faith based on love.

Part of this is I believe down to the way which the Jewish people were at the time, they didn’t just have to stick to the laws of Leviticus but clever Rabbi’s made up more, these rules got to the extreme where they were dictating what sexual positions and husband and wife could use whilst having sex, I think Jesus came to clear the way of these ridiculous rules and make God accessible, he didn’t come so we could sin unendlessly but so that we could have a relationship with God in spite of.

There seems to however have been the additions of more rules as Paul writes his letters and others write in the new testament which makes me think this…

can you have religion without rules?

The reason I ask this is because I wonder if behaviour comes automatically when you have a loving relationship with God.

For example Joanna doesn’t have to tell me not to cheat on her, she doesn’t have to remind me I shouldn’t lie to her yet I don’t cheat on her and I never lie to her and that I believe is because we have a relationship based on love.

What if Christianity was like that? What if we didn’t hammer on about how what people are doing is wrong? what if we don’t condemn from a pulpit but echo the importance of a loving relationship with God constantly? What if we help people enter into a loving relationship with the creator and let God and the love they have for him stop the “sin”.

What if the church has the wrong emphasis on Christianity? What if we’ve been missing the key focus…that of love…people have a problem with Christianity because they claim it limits freedom but what if we didn’t focus on what you had to give up but if we instead focused on helping people enter into a loving relationship with God and let that love control them, let the love they have for God cause them to address their own issues?

A religion without rules doesn’t mean you can do anything but means the emphasis is shifted away from do’s and don’t and onto having a loving relationship with God…perhaps we don’t always need to be reminded what’s wrong to know it is…perhaps we should let love control us.