Wow…that’s a lot of anger. Can we de-escalate and discuss this amicably?
But I have never for a lifetime been able to reconcile how any such code of conduct has anything to do with rituals and superstitions and appropriated histories and an extremely flexible cult of personality attached to a malleable mythology about how he supposedly died, was resurrected, took off skyward and promised to return.
The way I see it, people don’t just live by a “code of conduct”. People live and form communities by the stories they tell themselves. It matters a great deal whether we tell ourselves the story of a capricious, unfair universe or a universe guided by a force that is fundamentally good in spite of all the evil that exists. And this person we claim has died and resurrected is also a person who claimed to be that force, and whose life story is the basis for our larger story about the ultimate goodness of God. Everything else, including the hardest sections of the Old Testament, is interpreted through the cross. The God who takes death and suffering upon Himself in order to destroy death and suffering is a God who can sympathize with us and redeem all the pain that we go through. That belief has far-reaching effects in people’s minds and actions in the real world. I can’t remember if you’ve expressed an opinion on Jordan Peterson, but he has some fascinating ideas about how even a non-literal belief such as his can affect one’s life. For a more traditional believer’s perspective, I’d recommend Jonathan Pageau (a Canadian icon-carver with the Eastern Orthodox church).
And as a pastor’s son still trying to recover from what was at least meant for a while to be some kind of “Christian upbringing”, I doubt you can trot out any allegedly “biblical” rationales I am not already familiar with (but have become spectacularly unimpressed by one after another), to dissuade me from my ultimate conclusions about God versus ANY form of religion: that the latter is not and cannot be other than an arrogant, self-serving mockery of the former.
As a former fundamentalist, daughter of a campus minister, and homeschool graduate, I can get where you’re coming from. We were vehemently taught that our particular interpretations of the Bible were the only way to live, that the various abuses and extremes we practiced were a necessary part of the whole package of Christianity. (See my “Post-Baptist Therapy” series for more on that.) Many people who lived under that are now turning away from the faith entirely because they still believe that rejecting those particular aspects of their church has to entail rejecting the whole package. I don’t. Everything I am continuing to learn and experience has led me to believe more strongly in the goodness of God and the truth of the Bible, as against the twisted truths of my upbringing.
Frankly, I find contact with any of these artifices primarily to be repulsive and grotesque, more barriers from God than pathways to God.
I’m sorry your experience has been so bad. The way you put this makes me wonder; what do you experience as a pathway to God? What are your ultimate conclusions about God, and how did you come by them? Having rejected the forms of life and community that the church offers, what forms do you accept?