i feel like gen z need to be sat down and explicitly told it is ABSOLUTELY OK to say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing sometimes. growing up actually means fucking up, and if you spend your whole life paranoid of being ‘problematic’ then you are legitimately going to drive yourself into an anxiety induced meltdown. watching or reading ‘problematic’ media does not make you a bad person, and tbfh sometimes watching or reading said media (provided you keep your analytical brain switched on) is a good thing to do. because just as we learn by seeing what’s right to do, we also learn by seeing what’s not right to do. 

and without wishing to sound horrendously horrendously ‘i am in my mid twenties’, you don’t need to let the entire world know what you’re watching and reading. you actually don’t need to let the entire world know a damn thing about you, and i feel like a lot of the anxiety i see from gen-z online is this terror of being called problematic precisely because the boundaries for oversharing are next to non-existent. growing and changing and learning are a fundamental part of being a teenager, and you will say and do ‘problematic’ shit which will make you cringe in your twenties, and that’s absolutely ok because you will have learned from it. 

Remembering

Today marks 19 years since a heinous act of hate performed in the name of a religion that preaches peace. It forever changed this country. In the wake of those horrible events, some people in the country rose to the occasion and showed the best American can be. Others showed the worst we could be. Unfortunately, the worst seems to come out in some people again and again and they use the memory of that trauma as an excuse. So, on this day of remembrance, I like to remember not just the tragedy and those that it spawned. Not just the act of terrorism and those of use who allowed the terrorists to win by sewing hate and distrust amongst ourselves. I like to remember the story of how a single act of grief and compassion 19 years ago, grew into something lasting and beautiful.

After the events of 9/11, the Reverend of my church (I wasn’t a member back then, but for simplicity sake I’ll call it my church) reached out to the local Mosque and asked if they’d be willing to join her congregation for a memorial service. They were very pleased to do it. The two communities came together to sing, weep, and pray. Together, they started to heal. Since that day, our church and the Mosque have maintained close ties. We have women’s and a men’s book clubs that meet together, women’s and girl’s basketball teams that play against each other, and once a year each hosts the other for a joint service in honor of love, hospitality, community, and acceptance.

After the 2016 elections, a Jewish temple in our community was badly vandalized. Their windows smashed, signs broken, and words and symbols of hate painted all over. Our church volunteered to help clean up and asked their friends at the Mosque if they’d be willing to help too. Of course, they said yes. Members from a Christian church in the area came too. A group of Unitarian Universalists (including Christians, Jews, Pagans, Humanists, Agnostics, Atheists, and whatnot; I know we’re a weird religion; just call us interfaith and go with it) joined together with Muslims, Christians, and Jews to clean up the aftermath of hate, to comfort and reassure each other. The Rabbi and the Minister of the Christian church found out about our church and the Mosque’s interfaith activities and decided they wanted a piece of that action. The Rabbi said the women of their community had an annual women’s retreat and perhaps the women from the Mosque and our church would like to join forces for that? The Minister said an interfaith girls basketball league was a great idea. Could they play too? The Christian church was mostly immigrants and first gen people. So much so, that their services are entirely in Spanish. They said hey, if you help teach some of our folks English, we’ll teach some of your folks Spanish. A year or so later, the four religious communities decided that they could do a charity effort together and began a “warm nights” program. During the winter, they take turns hosting local homeless folks who need shelter and a hot meal.

Two years ago, during service while Rev. Liz was hiving her sermon, someone walked in with a cellphone is his hand. To everyone’s surprise he walked straight up to Rev. Liz and interrupted her service to hand her the phone. She listened quietly for a moment, her face grave, and then said, “Tell me what you need.” Then after another moment, she nodded and said, “You got it. Hold tight.” Handing the phone back she stepped back up to the podium. Looking at her congregation she said, “ICE has camped out in front of the [Insert name of Christian Church]. They aren’t going into the church, but they’re waiting for service to end so they can arrest people as they come out. I’m going to end service now and ask any of you who are willing, to go over there with me. Bring your cell phones. Let’s make sure ICE knows that God, and the world, is watching them.” Just about the entire congregation went. Every hippie, Wiccan, Pagan, Ex-Catholic, and crunchie-granola mom said “not on my watch.” On the way they called their friends at the Temple and Mosque. They said that Allah and HaShem would be watching too. They would not stand by while their friends were frightened and trapped in their own house of worship. The UUs, the Muslims, and Jews descended on those ICE agents with cell phone cameras, congregants who were lawyers and social workers, decorated veterans, stern grandmothers, hijabis, wide-eyed children, trans, gay, straight, non-binary,  and every color or type of human you can imagine.  

These were our friends. They were part of our community. They belonged here.

Inside the church, people were in tears. Terrified. Outside their was a wall of people around the ICE agents. Not trapping them, but blocking their view of the doors and standing in between them and the path that most of the people would need to walk to get to their cars.

I am please to say that no one in that church was even questioned by ICE that day. They seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth the scene they’d make. After all, even their most conservative supporters might take issue with interfering with a church service.

This is what America should be. This is what it looks like to live up to the ideals we claim are ours. This is the America I want us to build. On the bedrock of grief and pain and hatred that terrorists put down in this country, I want to build a better America with healing and peace and love. 

TLDR; After 9/11 a UU church, a Mosque, a Jewish Temple, and a Christian Church of primarily immigrants banded together to support eachother and their community. This is the opposite of what the terrorists wanted to have happen. So today, please don’t let the terrorists win again. Don’t let them make you spiteful and angry. Instead, remember that a tiny gesture of peace can help to build a bond that will change your community. It has in the past. It can again. 

When I was a kid I spent a lot of my summers at the Albert L. Shultz Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. I went to a number of summer camp programs, with various degrees of religious and political content, about which I still have very conflicted feelings. But this was also just the place where our family would come to go swimming or use the gym. The JCC itself was a set of low one story buildings connected by semi-open walkways with lots of open space in between - the same structure and layout you see in any Californian public school or community center.  It was next to a cemetery, a park, and a footpath and a small area of nature surrounding Adobe Creek. In general this was a very mellow place where I never really felt unsafe in a deep way.

This, maybe, in spite of the intentions of those who taught there. The summer camp programs were a constant reminder of the hatred that was out there; games that pitted kids against each other, re-enactments of exoduses ancient and modern, sessions with Holocaust survivors. All of this affected me deeply but a combination of the semi-idyllic setting and my instinctive resistance to the feeling of being indoctrinated in something made it seem somehow distant, or theoretical.

I was never particularly religious to begin with and as I grew up, while I remained personally spiritual on some level, I became skeptical, even suspicious of many aspects of the Jewish community. The more I looked around and read the more I saw a rising and ugly nationalism within the Jewish world. And when I looked back on the summers spent at the JCC as a kid, some of the memories remained warm but in many other cases I felt like some of my suspicions about indoctrination were confirmed. What I began to feel was that programs like those I attended, and much of the Jewish media I was exposed to, were in some ways exaggerating the threat against us in order to bolster support for Israel and a strong ethno-nationalist mentality in general. A mentality of being alone in the world, superior but surrounded by enemies - a position from which people can be easily manipulated, especially by nationalist forces. By the time I was just entering the adult world, which was right around the time of the Second Intifada, I had become almost completely detached and distrustful of institutional Judaism in general, especially anything that seemed to promote Israeli nationalism or the idea of a strong tribe or a religious state.

Many years later, well after having moved to NYC, I came back to the Bay Area to visit and noticed that the old JCC had been renamed and moved to a new location. A large and kind of strange looking, almost fortress like structure near 101. I was with a friend at the time, who had recently worked in Israel, and he told me that some of the features of the complex were defensive architecture adopted from Israeli practices. At the time, I remember this reinforcing my view of the paranoia coming from that community.

Two days ago, like dozens of other JCC’s and Jewish schools all over the United States, it was evacuated due to bomb threats. This following on the heels of massive vandalizations of Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia.

It is tempting to respond to these events with the thought that those paranoid voices within the Jewish community was, all this time, correct. We are and always will be alone in a world populated by our enemies, we must be a strong tribe and support our strong state. This was, after all, the dominant response when the Nazis were defeated the first time around. I think it is a mistake.

As I grew in political and historical awareness over the past two decades, I saw increasing alignment between the Jewish community and the forces of political conservatism in the United States. And disturbingly, I noticed that many Jewish people my own age who had liberal or even progressive stances on most issues were suddenly more conservative, even hawkish when it came to Israel. Israel’s defensive (and offensive) needs meshed well with the geopolitical agenda of conservative and pro-corporate American politicians of both parties, and because of this a strange sort of alliance was formed between elements of the American right - who had for most of their history been anti-Semitic - and elements of the Jewish community. “Judeo-Christian” began to be thrown around by certain kinds of politicians almost as a dog whistle sort of term, and the manipulators of the religious right began to re-emphasize the spiritual importance of Israel in their own context.  

This alignment has resulted in massive amounts of taxpayer money spent supporting and arming Israel as well as on our own related military misadventures, and it has been a massive contributor towards the xenophobic attitudes against Muslims in the United States. And this has caused a related shift in our paranoia, with much of the media - mainstream, conservative, liberal, Jewish, or otherwise - portraying modern anti-Semitism as almost exclusively as a threat coming from the Muslim world, and often framed with an anti-immigrant context.

This kind of thinking has misled us, and as frightening as these recent events are, I hope we are waking up to that.

There is a very common pattern in history: a group of people, long oppressed, rises from their oppression by oppressing someone else using the exact same techniques and mentalities once used against them. This is a pattern we must resist.

We should not be wall builders, and we should not align ourselves with wall builders, in this country or in any other.

Patterns are everything to us. We repeat things until they become true and these become the building blocks of the human part to the world: nations, borders, genders, races, ideologies - all of these basic elements of the world around us that often seem inflexible, sometimes even concrete but which are, in the end, purely a manifestation of our collective minds - a layer of thought that sits on top of the natural world. It’s not possible to just abandon these patterns collectively, we need to work, together and as individuals, to evolve them into new ones.

This chaotic time, scary as it is, is an opportunity to create new patterns. That means looking at ideas like the nation state or national borders, looking at how our identities intermesh with those ideas, and reassessing the patterns, maybe even forming them into something new, defining and organizing ourselves in new ways.  I don’t claim to have some vast new plan for human organization, but I do know that we need to start moving away from modes of thinking that are dependent on defining the self against an excluded “other” and towards those that are inclusive of all the forms of love and creativity that make being human worthwhile.

Atheists of Reddit: what is a story of an instance (or instances) where common knowledge of your atheism seriously fucked you via /r/atheism

Submitted June 10, 2019 at 10:25AM by phthalo-azure (Via reddit http://bit.ly/2MFMgfs) Atheists of Reddit: what is a story of an instance (or instances) where common knowledge of your atheism seriously fucked you

Mods: it's my first time posting on r/atheism, so if this post doesn't fit here, let me know and I'll kill it.

Edit to add: I was going to post this on r/askreddit, but was worried that it would be deleted as a "personal attack" on Christians.

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*** tl;dr at the bottom

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For my tale, I have to go back about 15 years to a time when I ran my own consulting firm (the details of this particular story began in 2005). I had about 10 employees, several hundred clients, and made a decent income every year. My work focused on the real estate industry, with many of my clients being real estate agents/brokers, mortgage brokers, home construction companies and contractors, repair businesses, home services, and other companies in the industry. I worked damn hard to build up my client base and many of my clients were earned through hard work, a good reputation, word of mouth, and referrals. My consultation work covered a broad range of services: technology, customer relations, bookkeeping, marketing, Human Resource management, recruitment, and almost anything related to business. I was indispensable to a lot of small businesses and individual operators who couldn't afford to pay full time employees to perform these functions.

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One of my clients (I'll call him Jim) who worked for a large real estate broker turned out to have a lot of the same interests as me, and we became good friends over the several years we knew each other. We spent a lot of time together golfing, bar hopping, barbecuing, camping, fishing, etc. We took our families camping together and all round just enjoyed each other's company. Jim attended one of the mega churches in the area, which didn't bother me - he didn't evangelize and only every really talked about the activities, family events, etc, and even that was pretty infrequent and not pushy at all.

​

For Easter one year, Jim's church was having a concert where some popular Christian rock groups would perform before and after the service. Jim invited me to the concert and service, which was the first time he'd ever done that. I politely declined with some excuse why I couldn't attend. I can't remember the excuse, but knowing myself pretty well, I probably told him I had family stuff to do. Jim seemed a bit weirded out that I'd declined; I live in an extremely conservative and ultra religious part of the country, and believers who live in a bubble tend to think everyone around them is a believer of one stripe or another, so it probably seemed odd to him that I'd refuse such a great opportunity to see these awesome bands and hear the uplifting message of Christ's resurrection.

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Note that Jim and I had never really discussed religion. Our relationship started out professional, and once we became more friendly the topic never came up other than Jim asking me where I attended church (which is a pretty normal question in these types of highly religious communities). I can't remember exactly what I told him, but my stock response to these types of questions is usually something along the lines of "I grew up Mormon and spent a considerable amount of time attending an Episcopal church, but I'm currently between churches." Since where I live it can be devastating to come out of the atheist closet, I try to keep it a closely guarded secret to maintain my professional life, friendships, family relationships, etc.

​

A few weeks after the Easter concert invite, Jim and I went camping and fishing with a couple other people and ended up getting pretty drunk around the campfire the first night we were there. After we were deep in our cups, Jim started asking about my rejection of the invitation to attend his church, how it upset him, how he thought that a good friend would have accepted, why it offended him, blah, blah, blah. Being drunk myself and making the mistake that as a good friend I could trust him, I made an oopsie and told him the story of my own religious upbringing, my time in the Mormon and Episcopal churches, and my exodus from believer to full blown atheist. I told him it was nothing personal, but I just didn't have an interest in religious stuff.

​

This is where the problems began. Jim was mostly quiet and standoffish for the rest of the camping trip, and I didn't hear from him for a couple weeks afterwards. My next contact with him was a phone call where he informed me that he was pulling his business from my company. He "couldn't work with someone who doesn't believe in anything", and accused me of having no morals, that I was going down a bad path, and that I "was lost". I was devastated. Losing a single client wasn't that bad, there were always new ones coming in and I was making plenty of money, but I knew I'd lost a friend. Particularly hurtful was when he told me he couldn't trust me around his kids. "Atheism often leads to theft, murder and pedophilia".

​

But that's where things got really bad. Soon, other clients started cancelling their contracts with me. At first it was just a trickle, but it got worse and worse over the coming months. I live in a fairly tight-knit community, and the clients I serviced all knew each other because of the work they did, and apparently, knowledge of my atheism had seeped out to the entire industry group, and many were cutting ties with me. In the space of a year, I went from ~350 clients to less than 100. My income was seriously affected, and I had to lay off some good employees because I didn't have work for them to do and couldn't afford to pay them. They even asked me not to coach youth football anymore as "they had more coaches than they needed." I knew that was bullshit but what could I do about it?

​

It wasn't long after that the Great Recession hit, and my client base was hit especially hard. In 2007, I had to close up shop because I was losing a lot of money. If I'd had more clients, I might have been able to hang on for a couple years until the worst had passed, but because my client base had been decimated, and it had become almost impossible to sign up new clients with my new reputation as the atheist guy, Jim ratting me out as an atheist essentially destroyed my business. It also destroyed all my trust in believers, even the ones I perceived as "good people". And it's made me wary to discuss my atheism with anyone outside of my wife/children and some trusted friends that I've known since high school who were already aware I was somewhat of a free thinker. The loss of my business and income almost cost me my marriage, and it took until ~2015 to pay off the debt I'd accrued in an attempt to keep paying my employees in the hopes that things would get better. The counseling to deal with it has cost me thousands of dollars, and I'm not sure I'll ever fully heal from the trauma.

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*** tl;dr: came out as an atheist to a client who I considered a close friend and he leaked the info and destroyed my business.

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PS: fuck all the Jim's out there that would put their stone age beliefs over basic human decency and destroy great friendships in the furtherance of their Christian agenda.

On the itinerary, it said that we were going to visit a school that was specifically designed with the intention of teaching both Jewish and Arab Muslim children side by side. It said that lunch would be provided and we would tour the school.  I looked up the school on the internet and was really excited to see this school in action. Up until this point (all 1.5 days of the trip) a lot had been said about how separate the different religions, and even different sects of Judaism are.  When your child enters 1st grade (Kindergarten is included with preschool), you have to decide if you want your child to go to a “light” Orthodox school (the strict Orthodox are private), Conservative, Arab Muslim, Arab Christian and probably some more I’m not remembering. You decide when your child is 6 which school they will go to and they stay in that type of school for the entire education. Parents take into consideration what religion they want their child to be immersed in, but also what language they want them to be educated in. The Jewish school are in Hebrew, the Arab schools in Arabic and I guess it depends what kind of Christian school it is.  The school that we visited today was a private school that was started by a couple.  From the very beginning, this part of the tour wasn’t anything that we were expecting.

We drove into the city of Jaffa, the oldest city in Israel; the original port city that was the gateway to Israel.  They old us that Jaffa was more integrated, so you would see Arabs and mosques as well as synagogues and Jews. Tel Aviv isn’t very integrated at all, so it’s a different atmosphere. The bus stopped and the driver got out to try to figure out how to get to the school.  We never got an explanation of why he needed to do this, but eventually found out there is no way to drive close to the school and you can only drive near the street if you’re in a small car.  We walked up a handful of stairs and into a very tight neighborhood brick street. The apartment houses winded down a hill with courtyards full of palm trees and stained glass in their windows (when the windows still had glass in them). 

All 40 of us traipsed down the hill until we saw one of our guides speaking with a man and a woman.  We soon found out that they were the founders of the school and who would be taking us on the tour.  The man introduced himself with a joke about how happy he was to be with 50 women with a mischievous smile on his face. He had long, tightly curled, wirey gray hair that he pulled back in a clamp-clip. He wore a long white thwab with a fur vest over it. He spoke to us in Hebrew while one of our guides translated.  I don’t know why he spoke in Hebrew because he was so fluent in English that he would correct the translator if she didn’t translate his jokes just right.  His jokes were off color enough to be charming but not so much that they were offensive and everyone was immediately taken in by him. We stood in the alleyway for the introduction, then went inside a gated “garden” of a house that we found out belonged to his father.  As we walked in to the walled off area, one of the women in the group asked, “Are we sure it’s safe to go in there with him?”

Walking into the garden, everything got very quiet. Palm trees lined the fence and long strips of fabric made a canopy to walk under. The dirt was fine-grained sand and you couldn’t hear a sound when your foot touched it.  Persian rugs dotted the walkway and little wooden structures for playing were on either side. The garden opened up to an area with more trees, rugs, and a set up of chairs in a circle.  Everyone sat down and we began. 

The man and woman met each other, fell in love and knew that they needed to find a better school option for their 2 year old son.  Being from two different religions, it didn’t feel right to have to choose one or the other and they wanted to make a nice, accepting place for their son to have school.  They started the school with just their son and one other child and within months it grew to over 100 children at 3 different campuses.  The teachers in the school speak their native language, so teachers speak both Hebrew and Arabic and don’t translate for each other or switch to a common language when speaking to certain kids.  They said that they wanted the place to not be about being multi cultural or bilingual, they just wanted it to be everyone being themselves.  The school celebrates all of the holidays, Christian, Jewish and Muslim.  After some resistance at first from parents, they’ve now discovered that parents are learning to be kinder to the different kinds of people in Jaffa because of their children making friends with them.  

When they began talking, they told us that we were free to ask any question, even if it was personal.  One of the women asked about how the two met. To this point, we were sitting in the backyard garden area where the children come to play in the morning, and they told us that we were going to go to their house for lunch and they could continue the story there.  We weren’t allowed to go into any of the classrooms (we don’t even know where the classrooms were). I don’t know why, but imagine it has a lot to do with security.  The lunch at their house was a total surprise and no one knew what we were getting into.

Their house was on a road that looked over the Medeterranian Sea, from high up.  You walked into a small courtyard and up a few stairs to get into their house. Their house was part of a larger house, probably with people above and below.  After taking our shoes off, we walked a few steps into a living room with red velvet couch and chairs with gold trimming and brocade pillows on the floor to sit on on top of 4 differently sized Persian rugs on the floor. Everyone sat down while lunch was being finished up.

They asked a catering company to provide food for us. The company is run by women who, for whatever reason, are in financial trouble. The couple said that it’s very important to them that they support the community they live in, in every way possible.  The meal had humus, tahini, babaganush, yogurt soup, pastries filled with spinach and goat cheese, upside down rice with vegetables. and stuffed squash leaves. Everyone filled up their plates and sat down again. The couple put two chairs in the circle that we all made sitting and told their story.

The man spoke in Hebrew for a long time while the wife translated, but he eventually switched to Arabic. He told the story starting from the beginning of his story.  His father was 15 when the War of Independence started in 1948. His family members all fled in different directions and his father was sent to a refugee camp.  The man grew up hating Jews and thought that they were the scum of the earth.  He grew up protesting them and fighting and eventually got thrown into jail for a demonstration.  When they started their story, the woman joked that you only ever see Arabs fixing your car or serving you humus and that she had never seen an Arab until she was 28 and that Arab was her now husband. (He joked that he was the first and last Arab she ever saw). After he got out of jail, he got a job serving humus at a restaurant. One day, a Jewish boy came in and started yelling at him because he said that he hated Arabs and that they were terrible.  The man was angry and he yelled back at him and they kept up this fighting once a month for a long time.  The man realized that he started looking forward to these arguments.  They kept it up for awhile and then something happened where they didn’t want to fight and argue in the store anymore and the Jewish man invited the Arab man to his home.  The man said that this conflicted him because in the Muslim culture, if you are invited to someone’s house, you must show them respect and be kind, so it didn’t feel right to go to go to someone’s house to fight, but he went anyway.  When he got there, he found the Jewish man depressed on his couch.  They started talking and he found out that his girlfriend of 3 years just broke up with him and he was feeling badly about that.  After going there to fight with him, the man started to talk to him and comfort him and it was the first time that he opened his heart up to a Jewish person and he realized that it was wrong for them to want to fight each other. They started hanging out and became friends with each other and with each other’s friends and created a group of Jewish and Muslim friends.

 He started organizing conversations with rabbis, priests and imams and invited his friends to come to try to open the dialogue between the groups. He said that the priests and rabbis and imams would fight and argue with each other, but people really responded to it and eventually thousands of people wanted to come. He started speaking at places and had a private meeting with the Dali Lama. As this progressed, his parents decided that it was time for him to stop this ‘nonsense.” They said that the way of peace was not their way and that it was time for him to join the family and get married, get a job, have kids and settle down.  He couldn’t do that and it caused a lot of trouble with his family.

When he was 35, he went on a vacation to Sinai down in Egypt. It was a place where people go to hang out on the beach and lots of different people come there. He walked over to an area where there were lots of people and he saw a beautiful woman dancing with a white scarf and he knew immediately that he was going to marry her and that he was in love with her. He went to talk to her and figured out that she was Jewish and he knew that he had to be with her, but at the same time had a vision of his father chasing him with a knife when he told her.  They talked a little bit, and the woman said that she had an appointment to talk with a storyteller the next day at 10.  The man said that he did also (even though he had never heard of the person she was talking about) and they made an arrangement to meet up the next day.

The man was so excited and so in love, that he couldn’t sleep. He said he spent all night hugging camels and eventually fell asleep at 9:00 and woke up at 5:00, missing their meeting. He was so upset he jumped on a camel and rode as fast as a horse (that was his phrase) to get back to the cabin where she had been staying. She was no longer there, but someone directed him to her and he found her in a large group of people.  He went to sit next to her and they talked more, eventually telling each other that they loved each other.  She said that he couldn’t touch her until they got married (and he said as a devout Muslim man, he was supposed to be the one who was so conservative) and then the next day they drove back to Jaffa and got married.

They took the Torah and Koran to the beach, made a tent and had God be their witness as they made a covenant with each other.  The woman explained her side of the story after the man was done and said that when she was dancing on the beach, she turned and saw this man dressed in white come out of the dark dessert and said, “That’s the man I’m going to marry, that’s the father of my children.” 

As they were telling their story, everyone was completely silent and the story took almost an hour to finish. There’s so much more to it than I put here, but that’s the main part of it.  It was like something orchestrated by Hollywood. Not just their story, but the way that they shared it and the meal that they gave us. It was like something too magical to be real. As they were finishing their story, their youngest son was brought home from kindergarten. He sat on their lap for a little bit, then ran into the other room where his older brother was.  He wasn’t phased at all by 40 women sitting in his house, and he only stopped when he passed the donuts that were for dessert and popped one in his mouth.

After we left, the organizers of the trip said that that wasn’t what they had expected at all from this tour, but everyone was so glad that they got to experience it.  

I felt like it was Story Church, Israeli addition.  I thought about the woman at the beginning of our tour who wasn’t sure if it was even safe to go into a walled off back yard with this Muslim man, and then we ended the visit in his house, hearing his life story and he and his wife calling us all family.

A Few Ground Rules

If you’re reading this, you may have peeked around some of my writings and wondered where I stand on certain issues. Specifically, because I don’t deny that I have conflicting desires, my faith and commitments are often incongruous with my feelings (hello, every male who is married whose eyesight also works). So I’m upfront about that because I think we all have belief systems or committments that don’t allow our desires to have their day in the sun—at least the way we’d want to. Why do we feel the need to pretend that our feelings always align with our belief systems or truth? Or maybe by the time you’re reading this, I have published a NYT bestseller and you want to find out more about the brilliantly humble author behind the book that made you weep, laugh, love God a little bit more, and punch a homophobic Christian man in his fat fucking face. Welcome, you belong here.

Below I’ve explained—sometimes beautifully, sometimes with reason full of holes—what I believe about God, faith, homosexuality, worldview and faithfulness to my family. 

What I believe about God I believe in God. I believe in Jesus and that he was the son of God. I have a relationship with God through Jesus and I believe that my relationship with him is what brings me joy, purpose and, ultimately, eternal life. I’m not big on theology (I got kicked out of Bible college in my junior year and it’s been downhill since—but it’s a great story that involves weed, shoplifting, and four meals in jail so stay tuned), so people who start saying things like “postmillennialism” or “the right theology” I usually tune out. I love Jesus, he’s saved and transformed my life. Boom. I like to keep it simple. That doesn’t mean that I don’t find different ways to look at spiritual living and learn from it. But from my experience, people who get really jazzed about theology and biblical interpretation are also dicks who judge people a lot.

What I believe about the bible and homosexuality To many people, this is really simple. “God says it’s wrong” [cites the dozen or so verses in the bible referencing this] and drops mic. Easy peasy. Other people I’ve met say that, while they believe what the bible says, the context in which the bible refers homosexuality is somewhat vague when you look at the original text and they have peace about interpreting it differently than what mainstream Christians do. Where I stand is somewhere in the middle. Most of my life I believed that if I acted on same-sex feelings or embraced a gay relationship (prior to marriage) that it would have been wrong for me. That has since been challenged as I have met gay and lesbian people who are in a relationship with Christ and genuinely exhibit evidence of the spirit in their relationships and marriage. I’ve struggled to admit that out loud (and have changed this portion of the post since its launch) because in my mind, it didn’t matter *what* I thought was permissible before, because I now have a wife and two kids and that is no longer an option for me. But I’m in the middle of accepting what it means to be fully committed to marriage with my wife, to parenting my two kids, and still fully accepting and living as a loved child of God without shame. 

No matter how you interpret scripture, I see no reason to hold anyone outside of the faith to the standard of the bible since it’s not something they’re trying to do themselves. 

What I believe about imprinting and sexuality Since I’m sharing my experiential thoughts and musings on life here in this blog, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. You’re a guest in my home, sitting on my couch and you’re going to drink the tea I serve you. However, as you’re reading you may say to yourself, I wonder what he believes about.... So I’ll lay that out. There are basically three camps of belief when it comes to sexual identity origin that I can see. They are:

Nature: This camp essentially believes that sexual orientation is purely genetic—that there is a yet undiscovered gene that says you are gay, lesbian, straight, bixual, transgender. In believing this, sexual and gender identity is not innately right or wrong—it just is. There’s no need to go to conversion therapy for having blue eyes because it’s just who you are. It can’t change. Often people raised in Judeo-Christian traditions don’t believe in this theory because “God would never MAKE someone gay”, because, you know, he hates them.

Nurture: The nurture camp believes that life experiences (usually in childhood) largely shape sexual and gender identity. People who might believe this will cite their or others’ sexual abuse as a child as a reason they became sexually attracted to the same sex when they hit puberty (or before). Another person might believe that their emotionally absent father and overbearing/emotionally attached mother shaped their identity. Paging Dr. Freud! This camp typically believes that sexual desire emerges from and seeks to meet unmet emotional or psychological needs from childhood. I have met openly gay people who believe this. I have met others who are offended by this idea and have said it’s an insult to insinuate that their sexual or gender identity has anything to do fulfilling an unmet need from their youth. It really depends on how you look at it (and who’s doing the looking). I have also, unfortunately, heard the stories of men and women who who experienced sexual abuse in their childhood and subsequent same-sex feelings. While I think it’s offensive to assume this is the cause of same-sex preference for most people (it’s not true for my personal experience and many people I know), it’s also something that falls in the ‘nurture’ category of sexual orientation and should be acknowledged. 

Choice: People who believe sexual identity is a voluntary choice often think that gay people wake up one day and say “you know what? I’m bored. I think I’m going to try sleeping with a dude and see how it all shakes out”. Am I showing my bias against this theory? I do think it’s a ridiculous notion, and it’s often touted by unsympathetic preachy types of people who say things like “love the sinner, hate the sin!” Their interpretation of human sexuality is astonishingly simple and very binary. You’re born 100% heterosexual and one day wake up and start playing Tetris with your bathing suit areas out of sheer curiosity. I have asked people who believe it’s a choice if they themselves could foreseeably experiment with someone of the same sex. Shockingly, they could not. I have a lot of judgment for this way of thinking because, again, it is so simple and uncomplicated. I have never met someone who simply wanted to try same-sex sex and just plain ‘ole did and liked it. I have met people who lived and enjoyed heterosexuality and then had a same sex experience. Some of those people go back to heterosexual relationships happily while others discover that that experience uncovered a latent desire that was deeply met in their experience.

What I believe is quite simple My personal experience suggests that there’s some environmental component in the development of my sexuality. I grew up with overwhelming (and sometimes overbearing) female role models; my mom, two sisters, grandmother, aunts, female cousins, all of their girlfriends (and the Golden Girls). I played dress up with my sisters when I was a kid. My grandmother taught me a lot about antique costume jewelry because that’s what she was interested in. My mother relied on me emotionally to be The Man Of The House because my father was drunk, abusive, and then absent. Women were plentiful in my family and men were mysterious and brooding and left no breadcrumb trail to follow in their footsteps (which, in hindsight, was a beautiful intervention from God).

As I got older, my comfort level with women grew. When I was 15 years old, I went to my neighbor’s house to hang out. But my neighbor wasn’t some cool kid named Cody with a skateboard and a Bieber cut. She was a French Canadian in her 60’s named Doris Demers. She had Crones Disease, a wig and a swimming pool. Sometimes we’d watch the Golden Girls together, sometimes we’d play cards. I baked her an angel-shaped birthday cake for her birthday one year (we had the same birthday fifty years apart). I finally got let into her mahjongg circle when one of the ladies stopped coming (it’s possible the lady died but we never talked about it). So Doris, I, and two other old ladies in their 60s and 70s would play mahjongg and smoke Virginia Slims 100s. I’d go home smelling like smoke and I’d blame it on Doris’s friends if my mother asked. I felt like I belonged with these women. On our 16th/66th birthday, Doris and I went to go see Mother in the theater together. It was my first date with a woman. I’m shocked myself.

Motivations for belief I can’t talk about belief and imprinting and nature vs. nurture without also talking about the motivations for belief. We would all like to think that we’re open-minded and our belief systems are based on objective facts or observations that then informed our thinking—that we just so happened to stumble on the one worldview that is perfectly objective and truth-based. What’s more likely, however, is that our worldview informs our beliefs, not the other way around. If you’re a fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christian, you’re not likely going to believe that homosexuality is genetic. Because you can’t believe that. To you, homosexuality is wrong and God wouldn’t make someone imperfectly. You need to believe what you believe because anything else might threaten the foundation of your worldview.

Conversely, if you’re more liberal and/or if you are openly gay, then you’re less likely to believe that this comes from a flippant choice or a relational imbalance from childhood. I have met people who don’t fit this mold, but by and large, people who accept and believe living openly gay is acceptable believe that it is also purely or largely genetic. To do so would be a threat to the foundational belief of what is true.

Motivation is important, is all I’m saying.

This initial post is woefully incomplete and full of philosophical and logical holes, I’m sure. But hopefully, you’ve understood where I’m coming from and why I believe what I believe. If you seriously disagree with me or want to comment on this subject, please write. I by no means believe I have the corner on truth and am always growing and adapting my way of looking at the world.