I am sick of people who pretend to be good Christians.

Let me tell you a story about what happened to me today. I’m at work (where else would I be) and the phone rings. Normal daily activity for one who works at the front desk of a hotel. There is a man on the line who says he is with a local church and he needs to speak with a manager. I informed him that there was not a manager available, but that he could call back in the morning. He said it couldn’t wait until morning, he told me again he was from a local church and he needed a few rooms for tonight.

So far, no big deal.

He asked me what the best rate was that we could give him, reminded me again that he’s with a church and also told me that he would be tax exempt. I told him I could give him the state rate (which is the lowest rate we offer) on the rooms he needed. The state rate is $70; he said he was looking for something more around the budget of $30 a room because he is with the church. I told him $65 was really the lowest I could go, he starts to get a little peeved and explains to me that he is just a part of the church and their budget is very strict, he just wants these guests of the church to stay somewhere nice, blah, blah, blah. I told him again that $65 flat was the best I could do. He drops the rate haggling for a moment and says that he wants to pay for the rooms with a personal check, but because he’s a member of the church I can just act like it’s a church check.

Let me point out the problems with his last statement.

Number one, he’s told me about a million times that he’s from a church, yet he’s trying to engage in something dishonest. Trying to pass a personal check off as a check from your church doesn’t sound like the most “church-like” behavior to me.

Number two, we do not accept personal checks. I probably would have been able to take a check from the church, but I can’t accept a personal check. Especially not from someone who is already pissy because he has to pay $65 for a room he only wanted to pay $30 for.

So, I kindly tell him about our personal check policy, and he tells me again that WE could just SAY it was from the church.

Oh, can WE?

I think not.

I told him under no circumstances would I accept a personal check from him for payment for the rooms he needed.

Like a good Christian, he hung up on me.

This, in my opinion, is evidence of someone who is only pretending to believe in the Christian God because they are afraid of hell. This man has completely missed the entire lesson of Christianity.

Does this surprise me?

Sadly, no. Most of the Christians I have known have been this way. They will judge and condemn you for the slightest infraction in what they believe the laws of God are, but it’s okay for them to make a few little allowances, or completely discard everything about there faith when it’s convenient for them.

This behavior irritates me immensely.

As far as I’m concerned, if you don’t want to follow the rules to a certain religion, don’t belong to that faith. Instead, people try to mold Christianity to whatever they want it to be. All they end up doing, in my opinion, is pretending to believe, to have faith, to live by the laws they have accepted. It’s just a big, fat, sham.

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On the other hand, I have no problem whatsoever with people who honestly believe their faith and live it’s practice.

These people are honest and kind, they don’t ask me to participate in lies and then hang up on me when I refuse to do so.

The people I work for are believers of karma. They know that what you put out there comes back to you. But, unlike a lot of the Christians I have known, they aren’t nice to people for fear that in their next life they will come back as a sea slug. Their religion, through the tool of karma, teaches them the importance of treating people with decency and respect. That’s why they do it, because it’s the right thing to do.

And I’m sure earning a few extra karma points doesn’t hurt anything either.

But for me, that’s the whole point of religion, to take the stories and apply them to they way you should be behaving.

While I have never met Jesus personally, I think I have a pretty good understanding of him. After all, his message was a simple one. Simple as it may have been, that hasn’t stopped us from screwing it all up in the many years that have passed since his death.

I am pretty sure that Jesus would probably be quite pissed off (well, he’s Jesus, maybe he doesn’t get pissed, but I’m sure he would be disappointed at least) that people choose to judge and condemn each other instead of love and embrace each other, and that they do all of this in His name. Talk about the Gospel all you want and how much you love God, but it means nothing until you get out there and start actually treating your neighbor as if you love them as yourself. That’s all he wanted. He wanted us all to realize that we are from the same; we should love one another as the same.

Like I said, uncomplicated when Jesus says it, then you get all these other people putting there whole spin on it and next thing you know we’ll be burning people at the stake again.

I guess after all of this rambling, what pisses me off the most about religion is that we could all be using it (all of it, every different kind there is to include people who are not spiritual in any way) to bring people together, and instead all it seems to be is a dividing force in our world.

If this is God’s master plan, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I see some very serious design flaws here. Maybe someone should bring that to his attention before they get any worse.

Bless you, each and every one of you.

And I mean that.