God always gets left off the hook. Always, always, always.

The Slapdash Godliness of a Good Girl is an interesting blog, written by a young woman who says "I may be in the process of de-converting from my once-strong Christian faith."

I'm not sure where she is now in her journey, as she hasn't posted for some time, but I will never forget the post in which she compares God to an abusive husband/boyfriend, "The blindness of the abused."


An excerpt:

In other words, God always gets let off the hook. Always, always, always. It’s the assumed stance: God can simply do no wrong. So it is always the human’s fault, the human’s misunderstanding, the human’s limited pea-sized brain that can’t understand the perfect workings of an infinite, and infinitely good, God.

And let me be clear: I believed this myself, for decades. So I am not saying it lightly, and I am not saying it from an outsider’s perspective. I lived this for 20+ years.

At risk of offending the Christians that read this blog: isn’t this pretty much the same dynamic you see play out in abusive human relationships?A woman falls in love with a man. He treats her well, at least at the beginning. She feels loved, she gets attention…she’s getting something out of it. But over time, the abuse begins. Maybe it’s verbal abuse at first…but it eventually escalates to physical abuse.

Yet, when a woman is way deep in the relationship, she will defend her man no matter what he’s done: “He just had a bad day.” “I interrupted his ball game, so really, I don’t blame him for getting mad.” “You don’t know him the way I do – he is actually very tender and loving.” “He had told me twenty times not to hang out with this friend, but I did it anyway. I had it coming.” “He’s big and strong and understands the world better than I do…I need him!”

The comments are also interesting. Here's one excerpt:

The aspect I personally think it hits on the best is the fact that in much of Christian culture, honest, raw questioning of things is discouraged - people are guided away from really even expressing to "God" (and one another) how hurt they feel, which at the end of the day is a total diservice to the person, and, I think, to God.