Actually, I do–I just couldn’t resist paraphrasing John Lennon.
A post on this Comics Journal messboard thread praising Craig Thompson’s book Blankets for exposing the “pap” and “hypocrisy” of modern-day American Christianity led me to post the following:
I think the book is far less judgemental than Juliette’s making it sound. I myself am a thoroughly lapsed Catholic who has a hard time believing in a personafied God with an active will at all, yet I always find the vitriol heaped on Christians by artsy-fartsy types–“Those goddamn Christians are so judgemental! Fucking assholes, I hope they burn in hell!”–to be extremely off-putting. I thought Craig did a tremendous job of showing exactly what he found unpleasant and stultifying about his fundamentalist upbringing and the Christians he came in contact with while growing up without leaping to broad generalizations about “pap” or “hypocrisy.” After speaking about it with Craig personally, I came away with the feeling that his big problem with Christianity as an organized religion was the judgement passed on non-Christians and the overemphasis on heaven as opposed to the divine within everyone, not that he thought Jesus was bullshit or that he felt that everyone was molesting children the second they got home from Bible camp. (I’m pretty sure that not once does he show a Christian preaching against something, then doing it himself–so so much for exposing hypocrisy or whatever.)
Anyone could write a book full of ad hominems and stereotypes about the big bad Christians, but Craig took the time to throughly explore the doctrine that caused him to reexamine his faith and come to a new belief on his own. Good for him for not taking the easy way out.