nice guy jesus

was with a friend trying to find some to talk to about jesus at sydney uni, and ended up chatting to this girl who had founded her own religion (membership = 1). what frustrated me most in the conversation was her inability to see the complete arbitrariness of a system that takes a foundation of pop-buddhism, part new-age-spirituality, and the nice-guy jesus who said some things that the gospels are just trying to distort.

it's not at all an uncommon thing, but i really don't know how to get through to this kind of person. C.S. Lewis' famous quote came back into my head as i've been reflecting on the conversation:

... you must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

quote originally from Mere Christianity, this one in From Narnia to a Space Odyssey, a conversation between Arthur C. Clarke (who could be classed as believing in 'scientism') and C.S. Lewis (who rejected the claim that science answered all of life's problems). book edited by Ryder W. Miller, iBooks, N.Y., 2004.

religious? moi?

i listen to the radio a bit. mostly to 702 ABC Sydney. they often have interviews with various people, and they often get asked the 'so are you religious?' question.

and i can't remember yet hearing anyone say 'no'. and this frustrates me. partly because making up your own religion doesn't make you religious; if anything it says you're deluded. secondly because being superstitious about which sock you donn first does not equate with trusting that your eternal salvation is in the hands of something or someone greater than yourself.

but i think the final reason i find such a response so frustrating is that i spend so much of my time trying to explain that i'm NOT religious, that Christianity is a-religious, that Jesus didn't spend much time going around exonerating the religious leaders of his day, rather hammered them for being false shepherds, hired men, duplicitous wolves. i therefore go to great lengths explaining the difference between following Jesus and religion.

am i right to do this? or in this culture of postmodernity does everyone have the right to determine for themselves what religion entails?