I know someone who takes Christian faith so far to its logical conclusion that it’s genuinely scary.

And not even in the meddling, totalitarian way I’m used to being scared by Christianity– but in a way that’s more of a direct conclusion of the teachings, and yet somehow also much more chaotically horrifying.

Standard Christian fundamentalism splits from Christian teachings quite clearly, in that it lays out specific expectations of how people should restrict and punish other people for disobeying what it considers to be the laws of God. And, while these supposed laws do often have Biblical basis, it’s typically an Old-Testament basis that, according to most readings of the New Testament, was undone by Jesus.

Fundamentalism usually flies right in the face of the New Testament. The Christian Bible ends clearly on the note that humans shouldn’t worry themselves much with any thoughts of punishing each other– because no one except God has the right to judge us, and God’s going to end the world and rebuild heaven on earth very soon anyway. If you’ve got any faith, the end of the Bible seems to say, you shouldn’t bother with any concerns for humanity beyond the imminent salvation of your soul.

Which is horrifying, but in a whole different way from how the usual extreme Christian behaves.

Now, it’s not that Christians can’t live reasonable lives that involve caring about human laws and human futures apart from apocalyptic doomsday prophecy. It’s just that this isn’t the most direct conclusion from what the Christian Bible says. It requires some extra thought– extra non-obvious, non-direct interpretation– to steer the faith away from that conclusion.

Reasonable Christians steer it away from the focus on apocalyptic prophecy. Fundamentalists steer it toward constructing basically a dictatorship, aimed at ensuring that as many people as possible comply with the supposed rules of preparing one’s soul for the apocalyptic prophecy.

And my acquaintance seems to be doing neither of those things with her faith.

If you’ve ever heard people fearmonger about how terrible it’d be if no one believed in free will and responsibility for their own actions, you might have an idea of how it feels to watch her go through her life. But it’s not that she even seems to doubt free will. Even though a case for such doubt could reasonably be made from Christian theology, that’s not the road she takes.

She doesn’t set forth any arguments along the lines of “God knows everything, therefore God knows the future, therefore the future’s already determined, therefore I can’t decide my own actions.” She doesn’t, in fact, deny any responsibility for her own actions. She only denies that anyone else has any good reason to complain about how she acts.

No one but God, after all, has the right to judge her. Even– and this is crucial!– even if she’s directly affecting other people’s lives. Because even then, no human in the world can actually be harmed unless they deserve to be harmed. Someone who truly has faith and obedience for God will always be protected– if not in this life, then by means of so much reward in the eternal afterlife that whatever happened to them here is insignificant by comparison.

Which you can’t disprove, or even argue against! Not without questioning pretty central tenets of Christian faith, like… God being good and just, and the afterlife being eternal.

The closest you could get, maybe, is to suggest that God might want to punish her for the way she treats other people. But you still can’t prove it– Biblical teachings are up for interpretation, and she certainly interprets them her own way. In any case, her answer will just be that it’s none of your business. It’s between her and God, and what happens to other people is between them and God (even if caused by her, because true goodness and faith on their part would override any such cause).

And trying to get her to look at it from anyone else’s perspective is another dead end. Even though she should be able to imagine other people having similar reasoning to hers, and imagine them treating her the way she treats them, and imagine how maybe she wouldn’t actually like that… in practice, no such theorizing ever seems to happen in her head. Imagining that other people have minds at all often feels like a stretch, whenever I see her in situations where she may be attempting it.

Sometimes I get the feeling that she truly views all other people as NPCs in the big two-player game of her relationship with God. That she finds them relevant only to the extent that God might have expectations for how she should interact with them. And of course, since God won’t provide proof of any such expectations… and since no one else but God has the right to judge her… she’s pretty much free to assume she can treat others exactly however she feels like treating them. Rarely do I see any sign of her acting differently from how she’d act on the assumption that all other lifeforms on earth are just placed there by God as a sort of vague, unspecified test of her faith.

Watching her feels like a glimpse into the world where people’s morals are actually determined by their religious faith. Where people don’t have any innate, non-selfish, non-religious reason to be kind to each other, and actually need to believe in divine reward and punishment in order to follow any rules at all.

But where, just like in this world, the actual supposed rules they are supposed to follow are vague and debatable. And where it’s impossible to observe who actually gets rewarded and punished for what, because the vast bulk of the alleged reward and punishment takes place in an infinite afterlife, which none of us can actually see while we’re still alive and still making the choices that will supposedly be judged.

It’s fucking terrifying.