History Beyond Christianity
Christians who believe in peace need to learn to take “no” for an answer.
Not just “no” to your savior, but certainly that, too.
“No” to your history, to your story of the world in which your campaign makes any sense from any perspective other than yours.
The rest of us don’t live in a world where Christian history is the default. Where civilization’s history happens to be Christian history. We live in various worlds with histories interrupted by a forcible attempt to end history, which has dragged on for 2,000 years.
This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?
Why don’t we end this drain-circling death spiral and try to fix history before it really ends?
Believe us, it’s okay to have a perspective other people don’t understand. You learn to communicate across differences.
Your spiritual forebears were misunderstood once, before they joined the ongoing imperial history-ending project. I know that’s ancient history by now, and your own perspective seems like it was inevitable, but the rest of us preserved the stories of what happened.
It seems like forgiveness is pretty important in the teachings you carry around. I wonder how much of this universal historical inevitability stuff is a way of trying to ambiently, culturally forgive yourselves for what your forebears did when history did not end.
What if it was just okay to be whoever and whatever you are as long as you do the right thing next? Letting the world’s many worlds not be Christian could be the beginning of the chance to show us, after all this time, what Christianness is.
This isn’t it, is it?
I say “Christianness” for a very important reason. We know what Christianity is. That’s not the issue. Religion is not a culture. It’s a facet of one. And we’ve told you for millennia we are not interested. Keep your religion to yourself. We want to see cultural results.
Show us who you are in relation to us. Show us who we are in relation to you. Not as marks or leads or potential or future Christians, as others. Try to live in a world where you represent only your own perspective, as we have had to when yours was imposed from all directions.
