Christians Vs Gays. FIGHT!
Nov. 20th, 2009 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaPulled these links out of someone else's journal.
http://www.whosoever.org/v8i4/seal.shtml
http://blog.mattalgren.com/2009/09/hospital-forces-lesbian-to-die-alone/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216910/page/1
The first one I found a bit tedious to read. It's someone's personal treatise on being a lesbian and a christian and how they view God. Not really an article for me, but if you've got someone in your life that's religious, there's probably a few points you can take from her story to try to gently coax them into the light.
The second article will just make you sick to your stomach. The idea that anyone could treat another person so low, especially children is just stunning and then for the court to support such vile behavior is disgusting beyond words. If had even the slightest pretense that 'separate but equal' was in any way equal, go ahead and read that one and when you're done, if you haven't changed your view, I recommend you read the third article.
Actually, I recommend everyone read the third article. I was moved to tears with compassion for the guy, or maybe co-miserate. In my earlier life, people like his earlier life had given me such contempt for anyone labeling themselves as a Christian that I would sooner spit on them than even attempt to be friendly to them. I'm not a mean person. I didn't like having that sort of reaction to people, but I'd bee so badly hurt by so-called christians so many times that there wasn't any room for trust there. It's still my knee-jerk reaction to have that response to anyone libeling themselves a 'conservative christian'.
Funny thing though. Jesus didn't really sound like such a bad guy. Sure he had asshole moments but on the whole, he was sort of a hippie guy who talked a lot about love and kindness... A lot like my ideal self really. I have no desire to carry around anger with anyone.
So I think, though I'm on the other side of the fence, I really understand how he feels. Being asked if he thought he was acting like Jesus is much the same question as asking me if I am on the path to my ideal self. Being awakened to that and suddenly becoming aware of all the harm that one has done is a very painful experience. Truth be told, making a post like this is part of my atonement for painting people like his current self with such a broad brush. I am aware that my attitudes were very hurtful to many people I know and I've had to make several adjustments to my framing of things.
I still don't believe in God but there's not a lot of profit in trying to prove to others that my reality is the dominant paradigm and theirs is flawed. I don't know all the answers and regardless of how improbable something may seem to me, it's arrogance to assert that I do know all the answers. I'll never be christian but I no longer so damaged by the bad variety of christians that I really feel threatened by them. I guess.. The worst they can do to me is torture me and kill me. Compared to poisoning my own self identity and self worth by living a life of hate, that's pretty trivial. It's more important to me to be uncompromisingly me than to constantly feel I need to change them.
Still. Stories like this one give me hope and they give me gentle words I can use which, one can hope, will get the bad ones to wake up and change themselves.
My ideal solution to the world isn't for everyone who disagrees with me to perish but instead that we all just relax a bit and accept that we're all different.
http://www.whosoever.org/v8i4/seal.shtml
http://blog.mattalgren.com/2009/09/hospital-forces-lesbian-to-die-alone/
http://www.newsweek.com/id/216910/page/1
The first one I found a bit tedious to read. It's someone's personal treatise on being a lesbian and a christian and how they view God. Not really an article for me, but if you've got someone in your life that's religious, there's probably a few points you can take from her story to try to gently coax them into the light.
The second article will just make you sick to your stomach. The idea that anyone could treat another person so low, especially children is just stunning and then for the court to support such vile behavior is disgusting beyond words. If had even the slightest pretense that 'separate but equal' was in any way equal, go ahead and read that one and when you're done, if you haven't changed your view, I recommend you read the third article.
Actually, I recommend everyone read the third article. I was moved to tears with compassion for the guy, or maybe co-miserate. In my earlier life, people like his earlier life had given me such contempt for anyone labeling themselves as a Christian that I would sooner spit on them than even attempt to be friendly to them. I'm not a mean person. I didn't like having that sort of reaction to people, but I'd bee so badly hurt by so-called christians so many times that there wasn't any room for trust there. It's still my knee-jerk reaction to have that response to anyone libeling themselves a 'conservative christian'.
Funny thing though. Jesus didn't really sound like such a bad guy. Sure he had asshole moments but on the whole, he was sort of a hippie guy who talked a lot about love and kindness... A lot like my ideal self really. I have no desire to carry around anger with anyone.
So I think, though I'm on the other side of the fence, I really understand how he feels. Being asked if he thought he was acting like Jesus is much the same question as asking me if I am on the path to my ideal self. Being awakened to that and suddenly becoming aware of all the harm that one has done is a very painful experience. Truth be told, making a post like this is part of my atonement for painting people like his current self with such a broad brush. I am aware that my attitudes were very hurtful to many people I know and I've had to make several adjustments to my framing of things.
I still don't believe in God but there's not a lot of profit in trying to prove to others that my reality is the dominant paradigm and theirs is flawed. I don't know all the answers and regardless of how improbable something may seem to me, it's arrogance to assert that I do know all the answers. I'll never be christian but I no longer so damaged by the bad variety of christians that I really feel threatened by them. I guess.. The worst they can do to me is torture me and kill me. Compared to poisoning my own self identity and self worth by living a life of hate, that's pretty trivial. It's more important to me to be uncompromisingly me than to constantly feel I need to change them.
Still. Stories like this one give me hope and they give me gentle words I can use which, one can hope, will get the bad ones to wake up and change themselves.
My ideal solution to the world isn't for everyone who disagrees with me to perish but instead that we all just relax a bit and accept that we're all different.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-21 02:54 am (UTC)The thing I think is that there are two different versions of the J man here. If you look at the Old Testament, there are a lot of places where, I think there's a literary convention that God can be close even to the most flawed of us (sounds like something Jesus would say, right?). You see a similar thing in Tibetan Buddhism where the same lineage that Pema Chödrön belongs to is definitely flawed. In the OT case, Moses has a foul temper, Elijah has a short fuse, and so on. So Jesus' outbursts, I feel, are in line with this literary convention. That part only seems out of line when he's remade from Jewish prophet to Greek god.
I think early Christianity had a lot of ecstatic elements - that's part of some of the more mystical stuff Jesus came out with. So I think to us, especially, he's a very accessible figure. If you can get past the late Roman interpretation of him as a literal deity, distanced from the ecstatic and universal experience of myth, and hammered into a hideous weapon by people whose power or whose emotional strength derives from being on the "right" side of dogma.
I don't think any religion starts with the intention of hurting people. Even the LDS just started with Joseph Smith wanting to have a good old time, and even Scientology just started with wanting money. But people are only human, and too many mistakes happen. MLK used to say that most evil is actually just ignorance, and Gandhi said (in Satyagraha in South Africa) that untruth is also unreal so it cannot persist. What I am hoping is that discussion - and with communication technologies expanding all the time - is the thing which will really help in the end.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-21 02:40 pm (UTC)