Revelation 3:15-16

One of my favorite Bible passages is the combination of Revelation 3:15 and Revelation 3:16 (English Standard Version (©2001)):

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot!

So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.

In terms of theology and faith, I have significantly more respect for the hardcore faithful, those whose lives truely reflect their belief in whatever their faith is in. If your world contains a creator deity, how can you not let the deity and its existence permeate throughout your life? My respect is not contingent on whether their values or conclusions concur with mine, but on whether their lives are consistent with what they hold to be divine truth.

My reason for disrespecting and dismissing many fundamentalists and other "faithful" is that their faith is, to me, obviously hollow. Too often their extremes are informed by insecurity and personal doubt, leading their faith-inspired action to be predicated not on the assumption and assurance of divine existence, but on their need for self-validization (often at the expense of others, including their fellow faithful). Other times, it is informed by terrestial desires, with a religious justification slapped on to make the achievement of those desires respectable or to cover them up (staining both the desire and the religion). These terrestial desires include the desires for personal growth and angst-relief, where the faith is a base tool, a means rather than an end in and of itself.

The latter is also why I find many if not most of the semi-theosophist beliefs repellent. The faiths are not the same, they do not lead to a universal truth (though many broadly appeal to a common ground on occasion), and they seek and apply significantly different values. The wishy-washy "God is love and accepts all" message that is popular with semi-Christians nauseates me. This message turns something that is supposed to exist on its own (something that is supposed to be real, and often be more real than anything else) to only exist for us, our pleasure, our vanity; the Creator can or will no longer make demands on its Creation, but instead is an amorphus blog that we can appeal to whenever we feel like it.

Mind you, I specify "semi-theosophist beliefs," meaning those beliefs that claim a more specific identity (probably for the convenience of whoevers spouting off) but inject major elements that are not part of that specific faith. For example, the Abrahamic God(s) are staunchly monotheistic and express abhorrence to any other worship, so to claim that they're cool or down with Hindu deities is an outright lie and an absurd one at that.

I have few qualms about those who are and identify themselves as Theosophists, as it is a separate faith that establishes all other faiths as attempts at reaching it (and therefore that all other faiths are not equal to, but subordinate to the Theosophist universal truths). It is not wishy-washy; it asserts its universal truth and does not open for an equality of faiths.

This passage from Revelations reflects my sentiment on this, with the beautiful imagery of the Christian divinity spitting out those who are half-assed about their faith in it. I identify myself as cold, as I claim and hold to be true that the Christian divinity (like all other current human faiths) is a fairy tale. Its god and stories are myths, untrue stories that contain lessions on either true things or things we hold to be true (such as the desirability of the Golden Rule). Whatever reality, "real" truth, the Bible holds is limited to its non-supernatural stories (and even some of them may be untrue, due to either mistakes or intention). At most, it tells us of Jewish history and lessons about humans within an Abrahamic and later Christian value system. We should appreciate as such.