Reflections on church and Christianity

A few days ago, a friend invited me to their church and I sat through the whole mass. These are some of the thoughts that passed my mind:

1. How much cruelty and tribalism resides underneath the bible. The sermon was about Moses and how he let the Israelites pass through the red sea "and then the sea came together and drowned hordes of Pharaohs soldiers". Didn't those soldiers have wives and children like Israelites? Shouldn't they be pities, left to their own resources after the death of their fathers and brothers? No, god does not care about that. God is a "tribal" god! He only cares for the Jewish tribe. For him, like any other tribal guy, people from other tribes are not considered human, they are subhuman, even less than their own sheep and cattle and can die in anyway.

2. I look around, see some disabled people there. Why are you, of all people, here??? To thank god who has created you like this, who has inflicted perpetual pain and suffering on you? What is there to thank him for? One of my friends used to wonder about gay people who try hard to be accepted into the church and wage lengthy campaigns for that. He used to say: For what? To go to church to thank god to have created them as homosexuals and denied them one of the greatest pleasures of life which is the love and touch of the opposite sex?

3. they line up to have the wine and bread. Isn't it a totally tribal custom? The tribe's witch giving all sorts of strange things to people to eat and telling them it is the blood of that deity and this god? Weren't the Romans, and actually all prmitive tribes also, practicing these ceremonial sacrifices and drinkings of blood and flesh? Christianity has just changed it by a thin veneer of a religious story. Funny thing that Mormons have changed the wine into water and have water in their churches.

4. Thank goodness I don't need to accompany everybody else in singing the silly songs and standing and sitting every few minutes. Why can I do this, because millions of people have sacrificed their lives in the past hundreds of years so that I can sit there without having to follow the crowd and pretend that I believe and not afraid for my life.

5. The building is large but deserted. It has definitely seen better times, when everybody used to attend the chruch or at least pretended to believe and attended. There are a miserable small number of people here. I think of the power and glory of the church before. Alpha males at that times, used to be attracted to the church because of it's power and money, and as usual, wherever alpha males are, you can expect cruelty and deceit and war and torture and churches did not leave anything to imagination in that department. But now that they can't attract people and money, they are devoid of alpha males, here I can just see some weak soles smiling perpetually. Boy, I can smell the minister's smelly breath from here in the first row.