Like David and Goliath

This blog will be kind of a difficult one to write for me. I was raised...and still consider myself...Christian regardless of the path my life has taken. I will be discussing faith and religion...so if you are offended by those topics than perhaps this is not the post for you. I know that these are deeply personal topics, but I encourage anyone who reads on to be respectful and to remember that this is written from the point of view of one human being...me. It will be flawed, it may make you facepalm, but that's just the nature of discussing religion or politics, which is why people caution never to do it. Yeah...we never listen to those people. That said...

How did gay people end up being the single most important issue to religion? As I have lived my life as an out gay man, and been involved in advocating for marriage equality, I have seen this issue grow from being one of many issues the church frowned upon to somehow transforming into an apocalyptic battle for the survival of the world. It makes little sense to me. I mean, to be against it because of your interpretation of the Bible...sure, I'm used to that opinion...but to hear the way religious voices talk about the gay community is to have them paint the image of them as David facing down the us as the big mean Philistine, Goliath. There is no one else and no other issue as galvanizing to the religious community than stopping gay people....not poverty, not economical inequality, not hunger, not spiritual well being....just holding off the end times by holding back the tide of gay rights. Further more any other religious group or tradition that decides to support and affirm LGBT people gets branded as traitors and heretics.

For many this will seem like a no-brainer relationship between traditional attitudes to homosexuality being threatened by the advancements that have been made by LGBT people of late. However, rather than just accept that as a given fact...I'd like to take a minute to look deeper at why we have become the arch nemesis of organized religion and how I believe that is a mistaken view

Gays and Religion

We live in a multi-spectral world. Sometimes that fact can be a great source of wonder... as when you realize that it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around...or that life will always hold another mystery to be pondered no matter how much we know about the world. Yet sometimes, that same capacity for infinite diversity can also be a source of frustration and strife, as when you realize that with the endless possibilities that life manifests, a few of those possibilities fly in the face of your own reason and intelectuall comfort. How we use these circumstances can be a measure of who we are as human beings. Such is at the core of the debate over whether or not gays can...or should... believe in religion. Many on both sides of the aisle believe that you cannot be gay and spiritual with any integrity. Hogwash

todays discussion is brought to you via a recent Youtube video of our Yosemite camping trip in which Tom, aka Fruityteen09 appears onscreen wearing a cross around his neck. For which a commentor immediately picked that detail out...ignoring his shirtless dive into the icy stream behind our campground...and proceeded to berate him as ignorant for wearing it. My question is....Why? Video after the jump:

Near Death Experiences of Gays and Lesbians

This is the message many of us take away from from our churches...and sometimes our families. "YOU ARE GOING TO HELL." ....Being raised in a "Traditional Christian home" and being gay can cause sever emotional conflict that sends many of us on a personal journey away from religion to resolve our sexuality and our religion of birth. For many of us in the gay community...the condemnation can cease to be external and become an ever present voice in your mind. That same stance of condemnation causes a great many gay people to walk away from religion and spirituality entirely. That's not a judgement....it just is...and that was me for a time.

The voices I had heard all my life that said that being gay was an automatic ticket to hell had ceased to be the voice of sunday morning televangelists and had become my own. The emotional weight of which, would keep me up at night. I could not close my eyes to it...mostly becuase I knew that no matter how far away I pushed it from my mind, I would have to deal with it someday....especially that someday that all of us face...the end of our lives.So...as I was coming out, I also began dealing with the question "am I going to hell?" I began reaching out to other spiritual traditions and went in search of an answer that would put that question to rest, once and for all.

Thats when I discovered near death experiences. I had heard of near death accounts but had never previously given them much attention. Finally, the light clicked on..."well, most spiritual traditions are either written thousands of years ago and have been passed down such that their veracity can be compromised in the constant retelling, and many new age philosophies seem out to sell you something....what do the people that have been through death and seen it first hand have to say?"