Empowerment Conundrum

The thing I like about faith is the same thing I hate about it: empowerment.

Christianity can help people build a foundation for their lives, develop new goals and pathways for living, and pretty much cheer up a blah existence. It works, seen it happen.

On the flip side, it also destroys with the same empowerment. It empowers an institution, and leaders, to have control of your life and pry into it’s many details…somewhat trapping the person in a constant cycle of obedience via fear & paranoia.

Fear & paranoia = guilt; must obey those leaders or you let God down as well (since the leaders represent Christ’s bride – the church)

But is it healthy to have that fear, paranoia, and guilt? Is this what good faith should look like? Is this the foundation you started with? Why do church people choose to build on these inferior emotions?

It’s really a tad strange when you think about it. Something with such promising beginnings (faith and hope and love) becomes something worth forgetting (guilt and fear and superstition). What happened and where did it happen?

Church blames the people, they doubted, they lacked faith, they fell into satan’s trap, etc. But when you examine it, the institution is the one that don’t change and demands you to. The institution don’t grow, yet you do (emotionally, mentally, and spiritually). Is it possible we can outgrow the church?

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Irony of the Wages of Sin

“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23)

This passage is strange. I mean, strange in a kind of big picture way many Christian theologians interpret it. Something doesn’t make sense here.

I know Christians try interpret this ‘figuratively’ based on this “Now if we have died with Christ we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead…” (Romans 6:8-9) (figurative since we don’t really die – we just stop sinning).

The wages of sin is death. Jesus dies to pay for that penalty (wages). Jesus then resurrects – proving he shall live forever. You come along. You accept Jesus and are promised eternal life (because Jesus paid the price for sin – death). You stop sinning, as best you can, and you still die. Shouldn’t you not die? Didn’t Jesus eliminate the price for the curse of sin by dying? 

If it is figurative (as in not a literal death in which we identify with Jesus by) then why did Jesus have to die a literal death…and are we not paying the price for our sin by dying the same literal death?

The logic is strange to me. All things being equal – Sin – prior to and after meeting Jesus still results in the same thing – death. So what was removed exactly?