#most of my knowledge is from jewish sources though because I am a potential convert fun fact

[saffaggot]

With my intensive knowledge about angels and also my current hyperfixation on Jekyll and Hyde I could probably assign each character an archangel. Am I gonna do that though? I don't think so <3

[sharingshane-blog]

Why the Bloody Hell a Christian!?

I am religious, self-identifying Christian.  This part of me has had significant influence in whom I am today.  It is not something that I discuss often; yet, it is also not something I keep secret either.  It does usually take people by surprise to learn this fact about me.  I just finished writing a blog post about one of my idols, Emma Goldman, who was a staunch atheist.  I am transgender and bisexual, and I believe it is okay for me to live fully and authentically as myself.  I have date men, women, and non-binary folks happily and without remorse.  I am a steadfast leftist and a large critic of the church not just in the United States but around the world too.  I am also a critic of organized religion in general. I usually advice against looking for savior figures.  That is in part how dictators come to power.  I have extremely close atheist and agnostic friends.  I also have Muslim, Jewish, and even Satanist friends. I have also suffered abuse and ostracization from my church growing up which contributed to a lot of the psychological issues that I possess today.  I do also agree that the Bible does contain homophobic, ethnocentric, sexist, and genocidal content.  It also contains slave apology, human sacrifices, and rape defenses.  So, the question that may be running through your head at this point may be, “Why would you identify as a Christian?”

Well, let me start with why I do not talk about my Christian faith that often.  It is rooted solely in the way people perceive me when I talk about my faith than what I say about my faith.  Since Christianity is so mainstream in the United States, there is already widespread knowledge about the basics of the religion.  When Christians give out little booklets saying, “Did you know Jesus—?” it comes off like they are insulting the intelligence of anyone who is not perceived to be with the “in-group.”  I think sometimes many Christians lose sight of the fact that anyone outside their small group of other think-alike Christians are just as human and capable of cogitative reasoning as them.  Many people outside the realm of Christianity know the basic tenets of the Christian faith, and many even know and understand the Bible better than most self-identifying Christians.  Evangelism in the sense of educating people about the basics of the faith is essentially unnecessary in the United States, and I want to avoid coming off as an evangelist to other people.  When I speak about my faith, I do not want others to perceive me as that evangelist.  I want to communicate that I believe they are intelligent individuals with their own interpretations of spirituality that are completely based on valid perspectives of the world.  It is demeaning and degrading the way most Christians interact with others outside their little Christian in-group.  

Furthermore, there is a level of stigma growing against Christians on the left.  I am a leftist and potentially communist even.  Most of my friends are self-identified as atheist or agnostic.  Also, many of them have dealt with real abuse from the church in the past.  This is also true of my LGBTQ+ friends.  Unfortunately, in these groups, sometimes I must minimize my references to the Bible because it could potentially trigger traumatizing memories.  I can empathize since have also experienced trauma from the church, and I have a difficult time with Christianized language and contemporary worship music. I rather speak of Christianity in a deep philosophical way or in an extremely pragmatic way.  Enough with the bullshit abstract concepts with no explanation redundantly displayed in every single church!  I get that Jesus loves me, a basic tenet of Christianity.  But what does it mean for him to love me? What is love?  Does his love have limits?  But back to the trauma stuff.  Since the church has hurt these communities quite repeatedly in the past, it is absolutely understandable that individuals in these communities have built a stealthy resentment towards Christianity as a whole.  I have been an agnostic twice and sometimes I really do doubt whether I want to be associated with the label “Christian.”  I do possess strong convictions despite minimizing how much I discuss it.  It does still play an instrumental role in my life.

Back to the original question, “Why the bloody hell am I still a Christian?”  Before I move forward, I will not and cannot give objective evidence for the existence of God and specifically the Christian God.  I am aware that many of my views are dogmatic and originate from anecdotal observations rather than factual content.  Many intellectuals cannot agree on a solid argument for the existence of God, so do not expect such an unrealistic feat from me.  If you were to go down the route of a strictly logical path I would say that agnosticism is probably the most reasonable conclusion based on factual evidence.  The best arguments from the perspective of theism are abductive arguments, arguments that attempt to give the best possible explanation for a phenomenon.  Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation taking into account all the facts is the best explanation, is the method in which to find the best possible explanation for a phenomenon thereby strengthening an abductive argument.  For example, our ability to comprehend and discover science is one such phenomenon in which arguably the best explanation could be the existence of God or at least intelligent designer.  However, there are also many evolutionary explanations for the phenomenon as well.  Next is figuring which is the simplest explanation that also takes into consideration of all known facts.  Abductive arguments never prove that something is objectively true but merely most likely true.  The conclusion is subject to change based on new data that may arise every day.  Only deductive arguments if the premises are true and the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises can give objectively factual conclusions. (Example of a Deductive Argument: If A then B; if B then C, therefore, if A then C).  All of scientific reasoning exists outside of deductive argumentation even scientific discoveries that are blatantly true.

Sorry, I was once a philosophy student, and I hope to return to school again at some point soon (which, by the way. much of my philosophical curiosity stems from my religious background).  My reasons for being a Christian are not objective and not reasons for which you should become a Christian yourself if you are considering the possibility. They are merely justifications for why I consider myself a Christian.  For starters, I deal with intense abandonment issues and chronic feelings of loneliness due to my extensive history of trauma.  The belief in a loving and caring God who will never abandon me has helped fill those gaps.  Of course, that does not mean that I don’t question the reason I have experienced so much evil if such a God exists unless I potentially deny his omnipotence.  That is a valid question.  I remember though, years ago, I was dangerously suicidal and was taken to the hospital. While waiting for a bed to open in the psychiatric hospital, the doctors put me in a secluded room with no intellectual stimulation, just blank white walls, for about 22 hours.  About maybe 16 to 18 hours in and eventually someone gave me a magazine that I would normally not have expressed any sort of interest in except under dire circumstances such as that.  My friend who dropped me off at the hospital is Catholic (one of the good ones) and she gave me a rosary as a source of strength.  I hid it under my scrubs so as the cameras that were watching my 24/7 would not pick it up.  In the room next to me, there was an older man who was belligerent and violent against the nurses.  He made quite a ruckus all night, and it was frankly triggering and disturbing.  I thought I was losing a sense of myself. I clutched tightly to that rosary all night long.  After an ambulance transported me to the psychiatric hospital the next day, two nurses stripped searched me which of course meant that they took the rosary from my hands.  I cried profusely because I felt like that was the only part of myself that I had left. So, there is definitely a sense of identity and strength I get from being a Christian; it is at the very least useful or practical for me to identify as a Christian.  Christianity, particularly the scriptures involving Jesus, is also the reason why I am a leftist today.  It is also surprisingly the reason I became more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community after my extremely conservative upbringing.  Acts describes the early church, pre-Constantine’s conversion in 312 A.D., as being strongly communally based.  People shared food, shelter, and clothing with one another and no one went without.  This strikingly sounds like an anarcho-communist utopia.  The understanding of Jesus as the Son of God was of the upmost importance, and Jesus’ denouncing of the ethnocentric ideology of Jewish religious leaders telling his disciples to go out and tell the world about him brought the gentiles into the community with him.  One of the first recorded converts in the Bible was a eunuch from what is modern Ethiopia.  It was not only a gentile but also a sexual minority.  Jesus had a strong message about community and non-judgmental stance towards others.  He rebuked people who valued power and wealth over other people.  This particularly included the rich, religious leaders, and other people of power.  He told a rich man to give away all his possessions to enter the Kingdom of Heaven which the man left distraught.  He healed the servant of the Roman centurion and it is highly likely according to Biblical scholars that they were in a homosexual relationship given the historical precedent of that time.  Jesus is crucial and central to the Christian faith.  Christianity does not exist without him.  Why else would it be call CHRIST-ianity?  And of course, modern-day Jews and Muslims at the very least recognize Jesus as a great prophet (The Koran also states that Christians and Jews will also be rewarded in heaven alongside Muslims).  What sets Christianity apart is that one of the most basic tenets of Christianity is the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ.  When looking at Christianity, what is essential is looking through the lens of Jesus when interpreting the rest of scripture, what is human-informed and what objectively divine.  I believe that much of the Bible is divine to an extent but at times grossly misconstrued by human beings.  Christianity has been interpreted in ways in which have wielded immense good and immense harm today.  In other words, it is easy to imagine that this would be true for the history of the Judeo-Christian faith.  It has been used today to justify genocides, but it has also been used to build free clinics for people who do not have access to healthcare (the church I have been attending).  Religion can be extremely dangerous if interpreted in a grotesque way with self-interest plaguing one’s reasoning.  I do not think; however, it is something necessarily intrinsically wrong with religion.

I will probably do more blog posts on this topic, specifically on queerness and the Bible.  With how I interpret the Bible, I can easily justify living openly queer.  I will give a brief synopsis in how I justify the way I live in light of being a Christian.  Most of the verses which speak against homosexuality are in extremely specific sections with absurd rules such as never defend your husband in a fight by grabbing other man’s penis or washing yourself three times after a nocturnal ejaculation.  Maybe, the most substantive verse would be from Paul in Romans and Corinthians; however, Paul has also said that women should never speak in a place of worship which even by most conservative Evangelical Christian standards is too sexist.  We are talking about an extensive history of patriarchy and ethnocentrism, wanting desperately to separate their culture from other cultures by committing genital mutilation and refraining from homosexual acts plaguing the society for many centuries.  The Bible was exclusively written by men in this context trying to interpret something divine.  I do not believe the Bible is inerrant.  The Bible gives little insight in terms of varying gender identities.  It speaks against transvestitism a “crime” one cannot commit if they identify with the gender that they are attempting to express. Transvestitism does not equal transgenderism and equating the two would be an invalidation of a person’s gender identity since you are insinuation that a transgender man for example is really just a woman presenting as a man instead of a man in his own right.  But furthermore, with the increased greater understanding that sexual orientation and gender identity is rooted in one’s being and not a lifestyle which someone follows by their own volition, one must consider the idea of whether anyone could be excluded from Jesus’ community based on some uncontrollable trait.  The obvious answer to this is no, and most conservative Christians would agree with the premise.  However, they either deny queerness is an innate trait, or that it is a mental illness, or a trait that must be suppressed.  The third is absurd, because you would never tell someone to be a specific race in order to be accepted in the Christian community.  It a trans-woman is a woman, then there is no way to change the fact that she is a woman.  Even if she dresses masculine and never medically transitions, she is still a woman. She would actually be cross-dressing technically!  Since gender has to do with one’s internal identity and not necessarily one’s presentation, no matter how much she tries, even if she comes off as a man is not a man. Telling people to suppress their identity has only led to a mental health crisis in the queer community and high suicidal rates.  Is a God who tells people to suppress a portion of themselves that he presumably created for no other purpose but the prospect of getting to heaven one day truly loving?  I would argue not.  I would go as far to say that if you do believe that queer people should suppress themselves, there is the insinuation that God wants to make certain people suffer unnecessarily (unnecessarily is key here, not that we should never have challenges, but we should never have to suffer unnecessarily) and does not truly love certain people.  That last bit is a heretical statement.  

Phew!  That was a lot and thank you for bearing with me through all of it.  Thank you for your time and your patience when reading all of this.  Sorry if it mostly sounded like a bunch of thoughts loosely stringed together.  That is essentially what my life is at this point. I hope from this you may have been able to get a different perspective of what it might mean for someone to be a Christian or why I am still a self-identified Christian.  I also hope that you have been able gain a better understanding of me.  Maybe you have more respect for me or maybe you have lost all respect for me.  Either one is fine.  You may have whatever opinion you want of me.  I have heard it all: delusional, deceived, misled, crazy, etc. That is okay.  It is sad though in the midst of trying so desperately to fight for a completely egalitarian society.  I am comfortable for the most part with the label.  I have found a church that accepts my gender identity using correct name and pronouns.  I had the fortune of being in the church when I came out, so most of the parishioners knew my birthname but still switched out of respect for me at the very least. The official church directory has my preferred name there.  Not every individual is accepting, but the vast majority are including the priest who defended me when someone made some transphobic comments using scripture.  The church has been a source of slow healing for me from all the abuse and trauma I have experienced, and they have helped me during some dark times such as when I was homeless and hungry.  That is what the church is meant to be, a place of safety and love.  I have broken down in tears before during some of the services out of being so overwhelmed by the kindness and acceptance I got from them as opposed to people in my past. In fact, they were more accepting of me than my job who just cut my hours more and I eventually lost the job soon after coming out publicly.  After my abusive ex-boyfriend from back when I thought I was cisgender and straight became a full-blown fascist, I decided to dedicate my life to loving others. This is where it has brought me so far, a staunch Christian leftist.