Passive Beliefs

One day, I saw a mom and teenage daughter at Walmart, both riding around the store on separate, motorized, shopping scooters. Neither looked disabled—just obese. Now, I’ve seen plenty of non-disabled people riding around in these before, but this was the first time I had seen a mother/daughter pair doing so. They went around the same aisles, shopping—most of the groceries were in the mom’s cart. The teenager just followed a few feet behind. The generational passivity was saddening.

The next day, I heard a sermon about experiencing God. The gist of the sermon was this: ‘The Church’ has processed all the available wisdom about God and came up with the ‘objective truth.’ Since this was all processed, pureed, and diagrammed out for all the members of this One True Church, the members didn’t need to think too much. It has all been experienced/figured out by the experts. So just open wide and swallow. I just sat there and shook my head. I wished I could just stand up and walk out. However, I didn’t. I had my parents on one side and my son on the other. Every pew held multiple generations since it was Father’s Day. We all sat there passively accepting this pureed faith. 

Just like pureed food is necessary for the very old, the very sick, and the very young—I’m sure there are some people who require a pureed faith. Yet, when we ingest this processed, regurgitated dogma, simply because we are too lazy to think, seek, and experience God—we are not much different than the obese people who ride around in those motorized carts, because they find it too exertive to walk. What’s even more depressing is that we pass these bad habits from generation to generation.