Jesus: " . . . I will in no wise cast out." Really?

[Not Heidi]

You might find this to be TL;DR.

I wanted to answer someone who posted a Christian salvation message, altar-call style, on Facebook. He wrapped it up with this:

John 6:37:
"All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out." (KJV)

My life's experience proves that this is out and out bullshit.

When you've been saved as a child, and as a young adult you've become agnostic but still want to believe, and you want to sing, you sing in a church choir.

I made a friend in that choir. I felt close to her - not super close, but I trusted her. She seemed true. One day we were having coffee and in one of the most regrettable whims of my life, I came out to her. I felt no fear.

After our next rehearsal, the director caught my eye and waved me over. He told me that it had come to his attention that I was a homosexual. As such, he said, he knew that my claim to worship, as a member of this choir, was false. He dismissed me from the choir.

Having been rejected by a representative of Christ (as I saw the director), I left that church flat. I never went back.

So what's this bullshit about "him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out"? If this god knew my heart, he knew I was a true believer - questioning but studying, listening in church, contributing my thoughts in bible study - he would've known that singing in the church choir was an act of sincerity.

So why did he in fact cast me out via his representative?

This has been bugging me for months. I usually manage not to go off like this when I read altar call sermons on FB. This one is different - probably because my experience contradicts Christ's words. I will always hold my life's experience over words written eons ago, based on tales told over and over and coming through to future generations as clearly as a game of telephone.

[RockRaven]

1. The religionists always have a trite answer for stuff like this, such as

"God didn't cast you out, you cast yourself out by doing X/choosing Y/not having faith in Z."

They've got nothing original; it is all tired, stale, re-used nonsense. And most of it isn't even from what was written way back when, most of it is some dickhead from in between times (who had some particular situation/agenda prompting his BS) who gets repeated ad nauseam by other dickheads for their own immediate agendas with a plea to prior authority, rinse and repeat.

[Think. Again.]

2. It's probably best to only consider the opinions of mentally healthy people.

[Not Heidi]

3. It's hard to recognize who those people are. n/t

[Think. Again.]

5. yes, but people prone to delusions are best to stay away from.

An insistance that supernatural gods exist and are running the petty details of everything in the universe, without any real indications that would lead a person to believe that, are pretty delusional.

Talk about a conspiracy theory!

[GiqueCee]

4. More evil has been committed...

... in the name of religion than any other motivation in the history of humanity. I washed my hands of it 60 years ago, and have never regretted it. Some of the vilest people I have ever encountered were holier-than-thou sociopaths who wrapped their malice in the blood-soaked cloak of über-religiosity. They are utterly ruthless in their exploitation of those who are desperate to seek some sort of salvation through their misguided belief in an imaginary sky daddy.

Matter and energy is, was, and always will be.

[anciano]

6. "Matter and energy is, was, and always will be"....

Agreed.
"For all things are formed by Nature to change and be turned and to perish, in order that other things in continuous succession may exist." Marcus Aurelius

[anciano]

7. As an ex-religious person I can understand

and identify with what you have experienced. But I was finally able to break free from the illusion (or should I say delusion) of this thing called religion. I believe that the complexity and precision of the creation we can observe by necessity requires the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient eternal essence, and that essence has revealed itself to us mortals as the phenomenon we call Nature. Creation itself reveals to us all that we need to know as mortals.
Good luck and best wishes!