it's so hard to reclaim the name of christianity. when i'm out in the world interacting with people, interacting and reaching out and saying fuck you to social norms and ideas of appropriateness rooted in discrimination just to validate everyone's humanity. just like my religion taught me to. it's hard when i go out there and realise just how many people have been hurt and i pray for justice and repentance from those in power, just like my religion taught me to. because so many people have been hurt by it. hurt by fear that was instilled and abuse of power by people who are real fucking insecure and think Knowing God And Being Right will mean they can feel better and just not. realising they're hurting people. because their hearts are too hard, and that's something my religion taught me too. that there are people like that. but the people like that. they have impact extending far, far beyond what they could have ever dreamed. impact making people think oh no this god could never want me and i can't live the kind of half life that you do. it always crushed me as a child when i saw people felt like this and--those were the days where it happened to older people around me, and i thought i wasn't grown up enough to ask about it. i grew up. couldn't hold myself back from that empathy anymore, because you learn how to love by doing it. it's quite basic actually, core of what's being human is to love your neighbour as yourself. that's what my religion taught me. and i get out there and i fucking listen and it's everywhere and the people in my religion, they just don't see it unless they've felt it themselves too. most aren't intentionally or even themselves doing the things that are hurting people, but they're so naive to hang around those who do sometimes and in a way, they're just as bad. and yet when you hear their stories, they believe in a god of love. they just think everyone does. no, i say, how are people to see that this is the god we believe in if the only ones making noise are the ones using fear? they go on with their little lives and they care for me, but i am nothing like them. i never could be. so i share my story, just like my religion taught me to. i share how i don't fear punishment (in fact i've been known to chase after it only to realise what i've forgotten again and again, that there's a god who gave everything because of not wanting me to be punished) but i do care about justice. i do want an impact that turns social structures upside down, and why my god became a man this was what was talked about. i do care about almightly all powerful all everything comfort for those who need it just like how my religion taught me and captured me because otherwise i would try and do it all on my own and god knows that would kill me faster than any kind of threat to my existence from outside. and yet, there are all these people who claim to have the same god. i don't understand them, oh wait i do, i see their shame and how uncolourful their lives and hearts are and how they just don't know how to love. themselves. others. think this is what's best for them (something to do with eternity that i won't talk about because. they're got it so simplified it may as well be outright lies) and so. just providing 'facts' is a substitute for warmth.

when did you lose your happiness? when did you lose your heart, your soul, the very thing you sacrificed pleasure to save? i don't relate because my pleasure comes from connection, and before i knew about my neurobiology or my sexuality it was my religion that showed me examples of that. that showed me i wasn't wrong to exist as i do. the same religion, supposedly, that people are all over being hurt by. it makes no sense. it doesn't check out. but wait, it does perfectly. what a better way to harm people than to gatekeep their greatest source of love by dressing it up like hate? telling them by your actions that they would never want it, portraying it as hurtful through your existence, even despite inviting people in. washing out all the richness, because richness makes you uncomfortable: richness makes you not be able to control people. it makes you have to feel, how dare we feel anything, how dare we when we follow a man who cried when his friend died even though he knew bloody well he was about to resurrect the guy 5 seconds later? inviting people in as if you have the authority to do so, but making it so fucking ugly why would anyone in the first place? and genuinely not understanding that and getting discouraged as to why, not realising it was you, you who butchered the entire thing. what is a greater kind of evil? especially as it's one done by accident and through hurt and shame and insecurity and the things all humans carry, warning us by your existence, that you and the evil you've become could happen to any of us. could become of any of us, and no wonder there are people who want to be as little like you as possible, associating you with the religion that is mine. well, not mine, it belongs to the one who created it. but i experience it. do you? because yours is nothing like mine. and yet. it's like darwin's finches, for i could find an evolutionary cousin in the people around me in this building who embodies each step of the transition between my experience and yours. am i any better? do i need to be? all i know is you've hurt me too. you hurt me by telling me to love others and twisting that to say i should serve you. you hurt me by saying emotional intimacy is just as important as physical, and then withholding the emotional intimacy until i find someone to have sex with and sign a piece of paper saying i will with only them. you hurt me by hurting people, other people, who i am one with and connected with just like my religion taught me, long before i heard of the concept of boundaries (the kind that mean you don't feel others' pain as your own). don't you ever think there's a deity who might feel the way you do? you claim to fear him yet you don't realise, do you, that you're breaking the heart of a god. you fear punishment, i don't, so why aren't you scared there might be consequences even if you believe this god doesn't want you to take this path and did everything so you might not have to? or are consequences something you only associate with people who make you uncomfortable?

and that is why i have to reclaim the label of christianity. i have to exist in a way that makes you uncomfortable, armed with quotations from the god you claim to follow driving me to do everything i said, everything that makes you uncomfortable. pass on the truth of those millions that you've hurt, pass it on like it's my truth (because it is now) to the next finch in the line, normalise talking about it until they too, see that there is more to life than the perspective you thought you could make us believe, the one that stunts love. you have your power through control, we have ours through connection and truth, just like our religion told us to. so we don't shut up, keep it going along the chain of finches, every experience widening its own horizons only by a step, hoping that maybe, maybe those who have been excluded might be free to exist with us, should they choose to. so that the power you have over us is gone and you are just a broken human once again, maybe then it might thaw you as the light comes in and you'll be harmless once again. you'll open up to love received when you have no ability to give and nothing to hide behind. really, i'm reclaiming this label for your own good, just as you say you are hurting me for mine. but i shouldn't fight fire with fire. or ice with ice. not when i know how to capture hearts with a truth that is bigger than me, i learned that from my religion. not when there are people, hurting people, whose experience of you i can't undo but i can share it with them, be someone who maybe, just maybe, might offer some semblance of a corrective experience. showing the world how insignificant you really are, by simply being too stubborn to let you and your twisted interpretations of love become a category, a label of a faction of personhood that i happen to relate with too. people like me exist, and our existence doesn't require stolen power that could be gone, it is going, at the drop of a hat. our label isn't something convenient--you took that away from us--but rather something we're ashamed of, because it has been used for great hurt. but if it really is infused with the power of a god, a god who loves justice for the oppressed, then it is something i don't feel worthy of. but i know that never for one second will i let anyone get away with portraying it so absolutely, destructively wrong without fighting to destabilise this worldview. and take back the label of christianity.

inspired by a couple of (admittedly distressing, but validating and true) posts i've seen floating around and the lovely @tleeaves' curiosity.