One of the greatest lies Christianity has inflicted on humanity is the idea that we are worthless without God’s benevolence and Jesus.
It claims we are born broken and incapable of anything good and that it’s only Jesus that gives us any worth. God can’t bear to look on our sinfulness and it’s Jesus righteousness that he sees.
Christianity invented the root cause of “sin” by declaring us all utterly unworthy and then supplying it’s own solution. This keeps us humble (although it’s not true humility, and that’s a whole other issue) and subservient, always reliant on God.
This can seem helpful when we have no self worth and live in frustration with our inability to be “perfect”. We live in deep cultural paradigms that demand our constant growth towards “Christ likeness”. This attitude is even in the “secular” world, shaped by our religious foundations and expectations.
But it never really makes us better people, although it does make us more “godly”, which is apparently what being “better” is all about. It hands control and responsibility over to a deity. And we are told that this is the only way to become not only better people, but to be accepted and loved by God and, more insidiously, make it into heaven!
The reality is, we are born beautiful innocent creatures, ready to be shaped by whatever our culture (family, political, social, peer etc) brings to us. Our humanity is more than enough to qualify us as loveable, accepted, worthy and capable of good.
When we drop the idea of being “saved” from ourselves and sin and instead, embracing all that we are as intrinsically good, we become far more empowered than any god could enable. Interestingly, I’ve found that generally, we are a little unnerved, or even afraid of people with high self esteem, who genuinely know their self worth and live from that place of confidence combined with compassion and empathy.
Sure, we can find relative comfort in religion, and for many, Christianity seems to provide the only life and peace they have known. But until that lie of our intrinsic “not worthiness” is exposed and destroyed we are missing out on the real depth of freedom, love and joy.
Change comes when we are at peace with ourselves, when we love ourselves, and we can only do that when we recognise the lie.
