A while back, I joined the Gay-Straight Aliance over at the school I am currently attending. I figured that I could not only lend a hand (And given the relatively conservative nature of this area, groups like this can always use another member.) but meet some new people in the process.
So now it's National Coming-Out Week, and the group has a table set up in the Student Services building with rainbow pins, flyers, information and whatnot. Once class got out at 11:00 am, I headed down there to see if they needed any help manning the table. (I was schedualed to watch over things for an hour or two later in the day, but I had nothing else to do, and I figured that whoever was there might appreciate some company.) Things were fairly slow, and I'm still trying to decide if that was more good or bad.
As it turned out, the one person there was grateful for the company. Neither of us were sure how well the whole thing would go over. We both had fearful senarios in mind of insults and thrown objects, although none of that ended up occuring. A lot of people walked by and glanced at the stuff, but very few actually stopped. The majourity who did seemed to be genuinely interested, which was rather heartwarming.
Reading this blog, I may come off as sounding as a fairly in-your-face type of person who is simply spoiling for a chance to start up a protest. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, this journal ends up as more of a venting board in which I release the frustrations that I am normally too afraid to say. (I also don't want to give the impression that I'm all talk and no action when it comes to my beliefs. I simply prefer a rather low-key, pacifistic stance.) Knowing this, it should come as no surprise that I was downright terrified at first of being seen at this booth.
Besides the negative scenes playing out in my head, I could already hear a lot of the common stabs that people take when the issue of gay-rights comes up. I had a hundred responses running through my head should any of these actually come up, although I knew that I would immediately forget every witty retort in my arsenal and end up stuttering some lame reply should the scene actually play itself out.
However, I wasn't really expecting anything when one guy came up to the table and started looking over a packet of info on what the Bible really says about homosexuality. (For those curious, the information in that packet came directly from this site. Credit and a URL was added at the top so that people could find the site and read the info at their leisure.) He asked a basic question or two at first, to which I wasn't really paying attention. (As my companion was answering him, and I was busy flipping through one of the pamphlets that I hadn't gotten a chance to look at earlier.) Then I saw him gesture to the Biblical information and state, "Well, I disagree with this..." He went on to say something about how the Bible does say that homosexuality was wrong.
Heart pounding, hands sweating, I piped up and quietly mentioned that the concept of sexual orientation is, at the most, 150 years old. Thus, it is impossible for the Bible to say anything about it, because neither the concept nor the word existed at the time that any of those documents were written. I also pointed out that no Bible printed before the late 1940s ever used the word 'homosexual' for those same reasons. I think my response startled him, and he said something about the guy who wrote the info didn't seem to really know what he was talking about. Confidence gaining somewhat, I informed him that the man in question was not only a Doctor of Theology, but had been a Baptist pastor for some years.
He then made some lame excuse about how the info didn't deal with anything from the New Testament (It did, he simply hadn't looked that far into the packet.) which certainly condemned homosexuality.
(Fear receeding, frustration rising... did he miss the whole idea that both the word and the concept were nonexistant when this was all written?)
"Just read the Bible..." he started.
At this point my voice got somewhat cold as I mentioned, "I have. Several times." He sort of wandered off after that without saying much more. It certainly didn't go as good as I had hoped it would, and I probably didn't win the GLBT community another supporter. However, I hope that what I told him stuck, even if only on an unconscious level. Perhaps he'll stop and actually think when he's had a bit of time to mull it over.
Still, I have to wonder about people who seem to think that all they need to do is read the Bible to understand everything. That just isn't enough. The Bible was not written in modern-day English or with our current culture in mind. You cannot fully understand what these people were trying to say unless you trace back the words to their original languages and examine the times, places and cultures that they were written it. Besides, if you acknowledge that some "facts" within that book are false, (Like the Earth being flat.) then how can you accept all the other aspects as the absolute truth? What makes one paragraph right and another wrong?
I guess I just don't understand people who have no desire to learn about their own religion. If you're going to devote your life (And possibly afterlife and eternal soul.) to a particular faith, wouldn't you want to know as much about it as is possible? At first I simply thought that all of these people were simply afraid, via science or other methods, of dicovering that their God didn't exist.
(This is understandable, in my mind. After all, the concept that a higher being is watching out for us, and that all this shit happens for a reason helps make Life a bit easier to deal with. I sometimes worry that this is the only reason I believe in diety; that I'm simply in denial about reality. Pascal's wager is better than none, I suppose...)
Still, I know several people whose belief has only been strengthened by the research that they did. It's not like God would make us wonder about something if S/He didn't have an answer. Dealing with this kid, though, made me wonder if there's something more than fear of the unknown going on here.
Perhaps this knowledge is a threat to him because it proves to him that his (possible) dislike of homosexuals is not sanctioned by his God. Rather than using religion to enhance their lives, people like this use it (And their ignorance.) as a shield. By not knowing what the Bible really says, they can go on believing that their bigotry is justified. They don't have to stop and think and realize that these are thinking, feeling human beings just like them.
The more I ponder this idea, the more it makes sense, and the more instances I can see fitting into this scenario. It strikes me as a rather sad way to go about one's spiritual journey, but it's their lives, not mine. They can go on thinking, feeling and believing whatever they want.
(Yes, that means that I don't care if they think gays are all out to molest children and destroy society. What a person thinks is their own business. Hell, they can even blab about it to anyone who is willing to listen. I only have a problem with people who try to interfere with other people's lives, whether by outright opressing their rights or simply forcing them to live by their beliefs. You don't have to think that another person is "right" to leave them alone. That's what tolerance is all about.)
All in all, the situation and resulting thoughts have simply reaffirmed to me that it was the followers, not the religion itself, that caused me to leave Christianity. That, and so many people just follow it because that's what they were raised as. They do it all by route, not by any true belief or passion for the whole concept.
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piasharn
