Whimsy

Yes, I've been super-bad about posting. I never was really good about going to church, either... and this isn't the only thing I've been neglecting. It's been some months of.... well, it's just been.

Anyhow, earlier today I was reminded of a scene from a Heinlein book, wherein a character goes to meet God and learns that He likes Coke. My sense of whimsy activated, and I wondered what else out there that humans have done with His creations that He is partial to.

Now, I'm pretty sure that He loves the art and music humans have created, being the ultimate Creator Himself, but what about food? Does He ever think, "Huh... I gave you strawberries and dairy and wheat and sugar, and you made this 'strawberry shortcake' out of it. I like it!" Or "So you just wrap all these things up in this flat bread thing? Portable and tasty!"

Anyhow, I just thought I'd share that, so I at least posted something on-topic lately. I do actually think about God (and religion, and etc.) more than I seem to post about Him; I should probably try to get more of it from my brain to the pixels.

And that's the difference

I have a right to worship who and how I want.

I do not have a right to insist others worship who and how I want.

I have a right to support or oppose proposed laws based on my morality, which is informed by my religion.

I do not have a right to insist others support or oppose those bills based on my morality, informed by my religion.

I have a right to choose to associate with, or refrain from associating with, people whose morals and life choices I approve or disapprove of.

I do not have a right to insist others associate with, or refrain from associating with, people whose morals and life choices I approve or disapprove of.

I have a right to religious freedom.

I do not have a right to dictate others' religious expression.

God has no religion

"God has no religion." -- Gandhi

Of all the things Gandhi said, this one may be the most interesting.

Gandhi was, by all accounts, rather universalist in his views. We share that, although his perspective and mine were shaped by different core religions. Another thing we seem to share is a belief that all religions are about love. In particular, I think they are (or should be) about love and respect for both God and all His creations.

Everything else is just window dressing. By which I no means intend to say that it's unimportant; the rules you adopt as a sign of devotion are definitely important. The commitment to those rules and rituals help you show that love and respect, and help you overcome your own flaws by doing so. It's a very human thing to adhere to a religion (or a non-religious moral and ethical code), to give oneself a guide to life.

But God isn't human, and he has no need for those things.

Which, again, isn't to say that He wouldn't consider them important for us to adopt. What I think it does mean is that (from His perspective) it matters very little which particular religion is used to acheive the goal of trying to live up to that ideal of respect.

And I think that is what Gandhi was getting at as well.

Epiphany

So, although I'm not a trinitarian and so have (minor, in this case) disagreements with the details in the post, overall, I'm very fond of this post by Fred Clark over at slacktivist, because it's a great explanation of what's so important about this holiday, which means once again it's time for me to wonder why it is that it isn't a bigger one. Like I said last year, it would seem like a holiday tailor-made for those people who feel secular Christmas and the generic "holiday season" in December are terrible things. Yet the people who scream loudest about how their holiday is being ruined by evil liberalcommienazisecularists don't even tend to notice the holiday exists. Go figure.

It seems to me that today is an excellent day to talk about something I bet most Christians don't think about today (or, in some cases, any day): what if it didn't happen? I mean, what if Jesus was just some really nice guy who didn't even have a pipeline to God? Or, you know, if that's because there is no God? Or what if there wasn't even some guy named Jesus or Yeshua or whatever and the Gospels were the result of a really drunken bet about starting a new religion? What if today was the celebration of fiction?

Well... what if it was? What if Christ didn't exist? Would that make the message any less meaningful? Is charity and brotherhood a bad message? Empathy a bad idea? Even if it were a total fabrication, the message in the Gospels is a good one. It's not a bad way to live your life, after all: caring about what happens to people, wanting no one to have to suffer, doing at least something to leave the world a better place in however small a fashion you can accomplish. If everyone did it, the world would be a better place, and it really wouldn't matter that much why they did it at that point. Even people who give to charity so they can Be Seen Giving to Charity are accomplishing something useful. One less person going to bed hungry, or living on the streets, or being stuck in poverty because they lack education, or dying young because they don't have access to clean water... any of those things is worth a celebration.

And that's an epiphany more people could stand to have.

An Open Letter About Christmas

Dear easily offended American Christians,

There is no anti-Christian conspiracy regarding the holiday greetings expressed to you publically by commercial organizations and/or their employees.

I could stop there, or just point to last year's rant on this topic, but I'm afraid you've shown me that you're very, very thick, so I feel a need to expand on this:

When someone wishes you "Happy Holidays", it's not an insult to you or to your religion. As a commenter on a blog I read recently pointed out, it's actually someone wishing you well for basically the entire month of December and a bit of January to boot, in fact, but even leaving that aside: it's not them prejudicially choosing to use a generic greeting from some secular humanist plot, or some liberal atheist snobbery about the word Christmas. It's them choosing to use a greeting that doesn't presume to tell people what they should be celebrating. That's the opposite of prejudice.

Get this through your heads: not everyone in this country is Christian. Not everyone in this country is even nominally Christian. And unless you're awfullly ostentatious, your Christianity is not visible to people, nor is someone else's lack of Christianity. The people who aren't Christian look and dress and talk and act just like you (barring any cross you might be wearing, and be honest: you probably aren't). So those store employees? They don't know which holiday you're planning to celebrate, if any, and therefore, it has nothing to do with your religion.

(As to the random wingnut who posted on their blog that "holiday" is somehow an insulting word: the word 'holiday' derives from "holy day", as in "what Christmas is". Seriously. That was pretty stupid even for this brand of stupidity.)

As I said last year: Get over it. No one is stopping you from religiously celebrating Christmas by not making sure they use the word regularly. Or, if they are, your faith is pretty fragile.

Which, come to think of it, it must be, if you think that other people not celebrating your holiday properly somehow damages your faith.

Maybe you should be thinking more about that.

Love,

Me

The Lord's Prayer (interpreted)

The Lord's Prayer, as intepreted by Right-Wing American Christians:

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by thy name,
(You know, unless we need to use your name to justify the things we do.)
your kingdom come,
(Preferably just soon enough that I can see the smiting.)
your will be done,
(As we interpret it, of course.)
on earth as it is in Heaven.
(Excepting that 'love thy neighbor' crap, amirite?)
Give us today our daily bread.
(Me first! Me! Me!)
And forgive us our debts
(And sins and stuff, too, okay?)
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
(Not their debts. We've just forgiven them... for being lazy.)
And lead us not into temptation,
(Or at least ignore us when we dive after it.)
but deliver us from the evil one.
(Obama, right?)

Some things you should read

First off, I wish I'd seen this interesting blog post quite a while ago. For those of you who don't like clicking links for whatever reason, let me sum up: some researchers found some evidence of church-sanctioned (and that means Catholic church, given the age) same-sex marriages. I don't know why I haven't seen this thing linked a hundred times by now, or why it isn't being taken up by liberal Christians everywhere and widely disseminated, but I can at least do my small part to help draw attention to it.

And now I want you to put aside your dislike of clicking links and read this sorta-recap of last night's Glee. Because the vast majority of what's written in it shows exactly why I think it's important to support same-sex marriage, and to oppose all bullying and discrimination against gays.

This is important. My religion is about love. Denying its expression to other people is wrong. Denying brotherly and neighborly love to people because of who they fall in love with is wrong. There's no argument you can make that will stop me believing this is something all Christians should think is important.

neighbors

So, I was thinking again about universalism (that's a small 'u' there), and you know what? I don't even care if it's Biblically justified. I mean, I should, and I guess I do a little, since my last post on it bothered to quote the Bible and talk about it in that context, but to be honest? I care more about the fact that I know a lot of people who are not Christian that I'm pretty darn sure Jesus would be happy to have as a neighbor.

Amongst my friends and acquaintances, both online and off, are Jews, Wiccans, pagans of various types, Buddhists, and a few people who don't fit so neatly into a category, plus of course a fair number of Christians, agnostics, and atheists. I don't run into Muslims as often, or at least not ones that mentioned they were (not so strange given the way people often react to that), but I've certainly known a few.

Of that list, every group has had people in it who were strongly for acceptance and tolerance and support for everyone who needed it... just the kind of beliefs and actions that Jesus would want to see from people. How could he not want them as his neighbors? As to what God Himself would want, well, if He sent Jesus down to us with that message about love, I'm pretty sure He'd be pretty happy to have them around as well.

Ultimately all the arguments about whether or not you said the magic words or followed the right rituals or voted on the right issues or love the right kind of person or whatever it is any give particular Christian church wants to argue is the "right" way to be a Christian really seem pretty small in comparison to that thought. (I suspect a lot of those people on my list from other religions would agree with the principle of the thought, even though their details would, of course, be different.)

Of course, it's not up to me. As one of my favorite bloggers once said, that decision's above my pay grade. But the nice thing about that is it's also above everyone else's, too. No one on this earth gets to decide who gets to go to Heaven, or who would be welcome to go should they wish.

Not Less of a Person

Here's what I've been trying to get at in my other posts on homosexuality, distilled: Someone doing something you feel is wrong or immoral does not make them less of a person.

It occurred to me today that that's what I've been really trying to say. Last night, on Project Runway, one of the designers came out as HIV+, a secret he's been hiding for 10 years because he was afraid of what the reaction would be. His mother knows he's gay, and told him to hide it from his father. She had not, at that point, known about the HIV status. (I'm gonna assume she and the rest of his family know now, because they've been watching the show.)

He's had to deal with the HIV+ status without any support from his family, because his family would not be able to deal with the fact that he's gay, because it's against their morals. Think about that for a bit.

What if you woke up one morning and realized that, yes, you have a problem with alcohol... but you can't tell anyone, because that would mean admitting you were drinking in the first place, and the people you love most in the world, who should love you unconditionally, think that drinking is wrong (and there are a lot of Christians who do), and have shown evidence that they may not love you unconditionally after all. You worry that if you admitted you were a drinker, they would cease to love and support you. That they would see you as inherently flawed, and that it would change how they see you as a person. You would no longer be "my child", but "my alcoholic child". You would be the label, not the person anymore.

Love should not work that way.

But for people who are gay, it all too often does. I will say it again: most Christians do not turn people out of their churches and their hearts for adultery or drinking or lying. They show willingness to accept those flaws, to accept that people are flawed, but that they're still people. "He's a great guy, this is just something we all have to deal with," they say, when their pastor admits to adultery. But that doesn't happen very often for gays. They're seen as something so inherently flawed that they don't deserve that consideration anymore. "Gays aren't welcome in our church. Murderers and thiefs and adulterers and drunkards, sure, but not gays."

And that's the tragedy. The tragedy is a man who for ten years, has known he has a medical condition that could easily shorten his lifespan, that we still don't know how to effectively treat and that in any event can get very expensive to treat, and who has been living in terror that he will no longer be able to count on the support of the people he loves if he admits this. That he will no longer be the person, just the label.

The tragedy is that people think that that's acceptable.

It's not.

ETA: This seems like a good post to link to the It Gets Better Project.

You're not HELPing....

[Note: I had not heard about the definitive canceling of the book-burning before writing this. I am glad it was canceled, but I think the sentiment in here is important anyhow (because someone else out there is surely contemplating something similar), so I'm leaving this up.]

Dear Pastor Book-burner,

I know that's not your name, and that you, strictly speaking, haven't burned books yet. (Or at least not the books you're getting known for wanting to burn. Who knows what you've done in your spare time before?) But that's what you're currently getting famous for. Whether or not you go through with it, right now what you're mainly known for is: "The guy who thinks burning a religion's holy book will accomplish anything meaningful."