Claiming Not To Be Religious

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“Are you one of those religious folks?,” asked the man’s co-worker casually. “I see you carrying that Bible to work every day and praying over your meals…out loud.”

“No sir!,” said the fundamentalist stiffly, “What I’ve got is not religion. No indeed, what I’ve got is a belief in the Bible about the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, and a relationship with God through daily devotions and church attendance and times of remembrance during the Lord’s supper and last but not least the keeping a strict code of moral law as laid out in Scripture.”

“Oh.” said the co-worker. “Sounds like a religion to me…”

13 thoughts on “Claiming Not To Be Religious”

  1. Either that, or they abandon the denotative definition altogether and say something like “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship.” The only people worse with definitions than fundamentalists are postmodernists–strange bedfellows.

  2. I don’t want to be religious. But I desperately want to follow Christ. Almost defies categorization, don’t it?

  3. i love how, according to fundy dogma (or “fugma”) you can either be religious, or you can have a relationship with Jesus, but you can’t have both.

    it’s like a baker saying “i don’t believe in culinary arts, i just have a personal relationship with bread”.

    1. What’s amazing is that I don’t even need to look that up! “True religion and undefiled is this…”.

      It’s the ONE things Fundies avoid: Love.

  4. I remember wayyy back in the 80’s we were talked into selling Amway for a very brief period of time. When they instructed us how to get a roomful of people to listen to the presentation, we were told NOT to tell them it was Amway. It was “a business presentation” or some other generic thing. If they asked, “Is this Amway?” I think we were told how to dodge the question. This was done because the people selling Amway knew that anyone who had heard of Amway already didn’t want it. (Hmmm?) So they were trying to re-label themselves. I think the fundies feel the same way about their “religion” (And even though they deny it, it is a religion) Religion is mans attempt to reach up to God. Christianity is God reaching down to man. the problem is they don’t see that they ARE the “religious” ones with all their rules and focus on the outward appearance, etc.

  5. Nice! Darrell is 2 years ahead of the curve! I haven’t watched that video circulating currently, cause I’ve heard it since grade school. 🙂

  6. I bought into this bait and switch mentality for a stint. The problem is, as soon as you spend 1 minute observing Fundamentalism it screams religious-ritualism! And if a fundy continues to refuse that they are “religious” then at best they are superstitious.
    You can point it out to them when they are compelled to “pray” over anything they are about to insert into their mouth (I cant find a reasonable example of this any where in scripture and I am not sure the account of the “feeding of the 5000” or the passover meal / last supper constitutes as mandatory praying before every morsel of food).

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