I once actually thought that when movies and shows were developing, I thought that they were being made within the year of their release date. I didn’t know that these projects were sometimes done in advance or took years to make.
That when ‘Commercial Breaks’ happened during shows, I thought they meant that the actors needed a break before resuming. Not realizing that episodes are already made and commercials just interrupt things to just sell you shit.
When I learned food and drinks were energy for your body, I actually thought that when I got sleepy or tired, I just needed to drink or eat something. Not realizing that it wouldn’t have mattered.
In my experience, and maybe some churches are different, you’re just supposed to pretend to take it seriously, if you actually take it seriously you’ll find yourself very unwelcome.
If I went around saying, “I’m a Christian, so obviously that means I oppose the Iraq War,” or, “Christian teachings clearly call for opposing the war and anyone supporting it is living in sin,” I would get a lot of strange looks. Swap out the war for abortion or gay marriage and it would be perfectly normal. Between those subjects, Jesus was constantly talking about nonviolence and said nothing at all about abortion or homosexuality.
If you base you beliefs around a good faith attempt to understand Jesus’ teachings, you won’t be accepted in those circles. Heck, even if I based my beliefs around the Catholic Church’s teachings, for example, going around insisting that being “pro-life” requires you to oppose the death penalty, I would be out of place in most Catholic circles, considered annoying at best.
I still don’t really understand what I would’ve had to have done to fit in there. Somehow, a lot of people seem to see morality as something that is almost exclusively related to sex, and the idea of applying morality to things like war or executions is a completely foreign concept. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to arrive at that point but it clearly wasn’t from a good faith reading of the gospels.
I think you have to have the same emotional impulses somehow, like, to really fit in you need to have a drive to tear down people with more exciting sex lives than your own, and that was something I had no interest in. So it was either keep calling myself a Christian and try to reclaim that label, which would just confuse everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, or find a better label. So, now I just tell people I’m a communist.