Revisiting past beliefs

I’ve never really stopped believing in God but haven’t wanted to call myself a Christian for a long time. At least 90 percent (my very unscientific number) of what Christians do, supposedly in the name of Jesus, is so abhorrent to me that I want nothing to do with it.

I’ll be honest that a couple things are swaying me in the form of belief, none of them scientific in any way.

One is that I’m discovering the much smaller number of voices who advocate for what I think Jesus was really like, in light of his teachings. It’s a Christianity that’s focused on the less fortunate among us and groups that have been traditionally downtrodden.

Of course, my number one issue in embracing any definition of faith is that it has to be affirming of LGBTQ people. I fully believe that LGBTQ people were born that way, which means you either have to say God made a mistake or condemns you to be celibate forever by virtue of how you were born. I just can’t buy either argument.

The other factor, honestly, is my sister-in-law. She’s come a long way from the fundamentalist Baptist that she was when J and I first got married. When she was here recently, she treated Amy absolutely no differently than she would have in the past. She just accepted Amy at face value.

She also made some comments about Adam, as though she thought they were trans, too, but Adam’s still working toward being comfortable enough to officially come out.

I guess what those encounters showed me is that it actually is possible to just love people as they are, full stop. And if you do so because you think that’s what God has called you to do, it’s a lot more appealing.

J has been reading books about queer theology and trying to make sense of the Bible from a pro-trans perspective. I respect that but at the same time, I’m nowhere near ready to read the Bible again myself. It’s such a flawed book, considering its many interpretations and misinterpretations.

Maybe someday I’ll get past that or maybe I won’t; only time will tell. But as for treating everyone equally, whether you feel God calls you to do it or you just feel like it’s right, it seems like you can’t go wrong.

I’ve always been generous and mindful of the plight of the less fortunate, and feel so grateful that for now, I’m not one of them. I don’t see any reason to change that.