Christianity is stranger than I would have ever believed. Here's the picture I'm getting so far:

1. God is a god of infinite love and goodness. He is good to the point that he cannot abide any wrongoing at all; he is so hypersentive that he is essentially incapable of distinguishing a rapist from a person who experiences sexual desire for another person to whom they are not married. And so he condemns everyone everywhere to endless and eternal suffering for horror of their tainted character.

2. God is willing to relent and forgive those who become good as he is good. As such goodness is wholly beyond human capacity, there is only one way to acquire it: by despising one's own character and turning oneself into an empty vessel for the holy spirit which is capable of such inhuman moral perfection. Ideally one should become an automaton motivated only by the holy spirit's drives. This is difficult as the automaton in question, one's own human body, has its own drives all of which are intrinsically evil.

3. It doesn't matter why one submits so long as one submits. Degrees of evil among unbelievers are like degrees of uncleanliness among maggots in a turd. If one becomes christian out of cowardice or fear of damnation or loneliness or cynicism, then one nevertheless attains to a plateau of spiritual perfection that is simply denied to an unbeliever. God forgives all, once a person has submitted to God. The exact reasons why one submits are, on the long view, utterly insignificant. This is why it is legitimate for one to convert to Christianity out of fear of damnation.

This is the picture I'm getting after two days of concentrated examination of pentecostal christianity. The pentecostal god seems to be not so much a god of love as he is a god of certitude. And it's striking how consistent this is. The pentecostal teachings I hear resonate over and over and over with certitude, certitude, certitude. When you read what Jesus did and said, his teachings also resonate, but they resonate with humility, compassion, justice - so the uninitiated tends to imagine that Christianity is at its core about these three things. As I said, it's very disconcerting to find that in practice it's about something else entirely.

And it's kind of sad, too. Well. I know my own mind a little better now though. The christians this evening asked me what could be so important that I'd be willing to go to hell for it. In my heart I cleave to the idea that humility, compassion and justice should be things one would rather go to hell than surrender. And the same goes for one's intellectual integrity.

They're probably going to pray for me tonight. I suggested that their faith would not be in jeopardy if they were to familiarise themselves with the bedrock of buddhist principles. One of the three of them was pretty cool, an I have a faint, cautious hope that he might actually take me up on it. He leavened his faith with the capacity to entertain doubt, and I found that I couldn't help but respect him for it, whereas the uninterrupted fervor of the other two was dully, monotonously offensive. It also didn't help that every theological argument they gave me was straight out of my first year Philosophy of Religion course notes.