I promised to write about this topic in the journal today, but I am pressed hard on a first draft deadline for a paper on Tennyson, so, here is a link for you to look at as a reminder that not every Christian has abandoned the intellect God gave him.  And here are my words of thanks to a friend on Facebook today:

Yes, I wonder… even when I was a teen, it seems that the church was losing the idea that it was about love and kindness. We seem to have come to believe it’s more important to be “right.” I know that many good people were concerned about me, still are. But why hasn’t one of them turned to me with the respect that I deserved and asked, “David, I don’t understand. Explain it to me?”

I take that back, one Christian did say that, and his name is Dave. Everyone else seemed so under the sway of the same things taught to me for years that they immediately assumed that I was wrong and fallen into horrendous sin. Gee, thanks for the vote of faith in me, folks. I am glad I didn’t let it kill me. And I’ll be damned if I’ll keep my mouth quite about this as long as their are kids and adults out there who are suffering because of the lack of understanding from the people whose chief job above all should be to love them, not to judge them.

I am guilty of many sins, just like they are, but loving a man? That’s no sin and never was. And until I see the church stoning men to death for adultery, or insisting that their women shut up in church and cover their heads when they pray, I will not be bothered with their misinterpretations and misapplications of cultural taboos. They can keep sailing the seas on their flat world and believe that they and the earth itself are the geographic center of the universe, but personally, I cannot believe in a god that small.