Michael Jackson’s Death Has Hijacked the News! (But No One Was Paying Attention to the News to Begin With)

Usually, I hate putting down the media. They seem to get a lot of unnecessary criticism from all sides, and quite a bit of it usually seems too harsh. Overall, I support the various types of news media–television news networks, newspapers, and internet sites, because I believe that it is important that Americans, well, people all over the world, really, keep themselves informed about what’s going on. Our world is shrinking. Once, people never traveled more than fifteen miles away from their hometown, if that. Now, just by logging onto the internet, people can connect with others from all around the globe. A webcam can allow people to speak to other people hundreds of miles away without even leaving their own office. And that’s not to mention all of the overseas travel that is now available. One can go across the world in a matter of hours. We are more connected now than we ever have been, and that has given us the responsibility to know what is happening around the world.

However, the news media also has a responsibility, which is to provide relevant and informative news to its audiences. Most of the time, it does. I was actually quite enthralled by the news last week and earlier this week, as most of the major coverage had to do with the protests in Iran, which is definitely something that Americans need to be informed about. There were also some local stories that weren’t having a major global impact, but they were certainly relevant.

And then Michael Jackson died. Now, I’m not saying that his death was completely unworthy of any news coverage. A famous and controversial pop star dies and people are going to want to know about it. I’m sure that his family and fans are grieving. His contributions to popular culture, music, and dance are certainly worth remembering. (Yes, just like everyone else, I think that the Thriller album was amazing!) But does his death really deserve so much coverage? Tonight, I just watched news anchors spend fifteen minutes (of a half-hour news program) discussing the fact that his autopsy results will not be completed for several weeks. Does that information need fifteen minutes worth of coverage? All they have to tell us is that we won’t know for sure what caused his heart failure for a while and that it might have something to do with some prescription painkillers he was taking. Then they should get back to giving us some real news that actually has some substance. For instance, the House passed a bill that will attempt to cut down America’s use of fossil fuels. I’d think that a story like that would get precedence over a celebrity’s death.

Now, I mean no disrespect to Michael Jackson and his grieving family and fans. I was never a huge fan of his and I thought he was a little strange, but he grew on me a little after a professor in one of my English classes had us analyze his “Thriller” music video. We ended up having a pretty insightful discussion about the portrayal of race in American media. Plus, the song was really catchy. I’m not trying to downplay the impact that he had on popular culture or the right that his fans have to mourn his death and celebrate the positive contributions of his life.

But does every news network have to spend their entire program time doing that? There are people dying all over the world. Many of them are dying because of intolerance or injustice! Shouldn’t the news be enlightening us about their situations instead of talking–and essentially saying nothing because there is nothing definite that can be said at this point–about the fact that they will not know for several weeks what caused Michael Jackson’s heart failure?

I sometimes wonder if this doesn’t have something to do with the internet becoming Americans’ main news source. Because you know Americans: we want what we want, and we want it now, and we want it to be the newest, shiniest, freshest whatever-it-is that’s out there. We feel this way about our news too. We want it now, and because the internet is becoming available nearly everywhere, it’s the most immediate way to find out what’s going on. It can also be updated more quickly than, say, a newspaper.

We Americans are also very specific about what we want. We usually don’t want to hear opinions that differ from ours. We want our own opinions presented as truth. We also don’t want to be bothered with news that doesn’t interest us. (I’m proving my own point by complaining about how much Michael Jackson’s death has been covered.) We only want to hear about what we’re interested in. With television news, we really can’t do that, unless we flip the channel. (I tried that, and I only found that every news station out there was discussing nothing but Michael Jackson’s death.) With newspapers, we can flip to another page. But newspapers’ coverage tends to be kind of bland. Aside from the editorials, journalists present the facts with as little opinion and explanation as possible. This is actually a great way to be unbiased, but Americans tend to prefer reading biased news, provided that bias is in accord with their own.

So Americans are turning to blogs for their news! (That is, if Americans are even paying attention to the news. Only 11% of Americans watch television news. Only 12% of Americans read the newspapers. And the people who are getting their news from the television and the newspapers, and the internet are all the same people! Only about 12% of Americans actually know what’s going on in the world. My statistics are a little out of date, I admit, but, still, that is a scary thought. We are the most powerful country in the world, and none of us know what’s happening in the world. Does anyone else see a problem here?) And we all know what a great source for news blogs are! I sincerely hope that no one is reading this blog and expecting to get accurate, cold, hard data about what is happening across the globe. I’m writing my opinions. That’s all I’ve got to offer. Now, for my own personal integrity, I try to make sure that I have some basis in fact to back up my opinions. I try to research issues as thoroughly as I can before I make up my mind regarding them, but I can make mistakes too. (Typos abound, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.) And in a blog, there is no editor to call me out when I make mistakes. Television news networks and newspapers have such editors. Blogs really don’t have this kind of checking system.

But even if they did, would they still be the best source for news? I’m not sure. When the internet first became available to the public, a lot of people thought that it would bring all sorts of different kinds of people together–that it would encourage dialogue between peoples of different backgrounds and worldviews. And the internet still has an amazing potential to do just that! The problem is, the internet also has the potential to let people filter out whatever ideas they don’t want to hear and surround themselves only with the ideas that they already agree with. And that’s the potential that the internet is living up to. When we get our news from the internet, it’s much easier for us to only read blogs that pander to our tastes. I know this because I do it. There are no blogs that I read regularly that present current events from the conservative Republican point of view. I might stumble across them once in a while, but I don’t read them regularly. The blogs that I read regularly for news present their information from the perspective of liberal Democrats. I shut out the voices that don’t agree with mine. And I’m not alone. In general, most other Americans do the same thing that I do–they ignore what’s out there that they disagree with and they only concern themselves with the information that supports their beliefs.

The problem with living this way is that it breeds intolerance and it does not promote understanding. If you never come into contact with people who are different from you, it becomes easier to marginalize them as the “other.” It becomes easier to see them as stupid or not human or ridiculous. It also doesn’t help you learn how to talk to these people. If you don’t know how and what they think, you certainly won’t know how to start a conversation with them. Even worse, you probably won’t even bother trying to have a conversation with them in the first place.

Like I said, the world is getting smaller. That means that our minds need to be getting bigger. We need to start realizing that the way that we think is not the only way to think and that it is not necessarily the way that other people think. We also need to realize that just because other people do not think exactly the way that we do, that does not make them stupid or ridiculous or less human than we are. This also doesn’t mean that we have to accept every idea that we happen to come into contact with, but we should be willing to consider other viewpoints, even if we don’t adopt them as our own. Instead of avoiding diversity, we should be embracing it.

That being said, I feel like looking up that old “Thriller” music video on YouTube. And I should also probably go read some conservative blogs, so that I can say that I practice what I advocate.

Coming Out as Agnostic to Some Christian Friends

One of my closest friends is having her high school graduation party this week. I really want to go (and probably will), but lately I’ve been feeling nervous whenever I spend time with her, her sister, and some of our mutual close friends. 

In some ways, my worry is probably for nothing. I have been friends with these people since elementary school. Despite attending different middle and high schools, as well as colleges, we’ve all managed to remain close. These friends are the closest I’ve ever come to having siblings. We have a tight bond that has proven that it can’t be easily broken.

And yet, I wonder if my agnosticism might just be what breaks that bond, because as well as being some of my closest friends, these young women are also some of my most devoutly conservative Christian friends. These are girls that I attended retreats and youth group meetings with. We helped out at each other’s churches’ Vacation Bible School programs. We went to youth gatherings together. We’d spend hours talking about the Bible and God and our faith journeys.

I know that even if we do remain friends, things will be different. These friends once affirmed all of my worldviews, but now that my worldviews have changed, I know that if I state my opinions, they will no longer back me up. I once supported their beliefs and encouraged them. Now I will be a voice of dissent. I know that this will be an uncomfortable adjustment for all of us, even as I hope that our relationship is built on more than just shared religious beliefs and that my friends will be willing to make this awkward adjustment because they value our friendship.

I’m still not sure how to tell them, though. I never shared much from my period of doubt and questioning with them, so the news that I’m not a Christian will probably surprise them. I’m not quite sure how they’ll react, and I don’t know exactly what to tell them or how much to tell them. The only thing that I know I will try my hardest to make clear is that, though I no longer feel the need to have a relationship with Jesus, I still want a relationship with them.

However, I tell them, I know that it will not be on Saturday. That day is meant to be one of celebration for my friend, and I don’t want to add my coming out to her stress of hosting a party. I can live with the nagging refrain of, “I should tell you, I should tell you…” buzzing in my head for a little while longer. But I don’t know how much longer I can wait. I feel pretty confident in my worldviews at this point. I’ve come to a place where I’m not questioning as much as I was a year ago (I hope that I never stop questioning entirely). I’m at a point where I’m identifying as agnostic, and I want to be honest with people about who I am and what I think. I want people to accept me for who I am and understand what I believe. Sometimes I just want to send off a Facebook message to all of my close Christian friends and explain that I am no longer a Christian and why I made that decision. I never have though, because I feel like the news would probably be best delivered in person.

I’m also curious as to whether or not my friendships can withstand this change. I sincerely hope that they do, and if they don’t I’ll probably grieve for a while. Ultimately, I know that if my friends can’t tolerate my being honest with them, then they really aren’t good friends to begin with and I’ll be better off without them.

Knowing that still doesn’t change the fact that I’d rather be better off with them.

We All Want to be the Underdog

We all want to be the underdog, the Lone Ranger, the sole voice of truth and right in a world gone mad. And we want to do this alone.

At first, this claim sounds crazy. Nobody really wants to be the underdog. We’d rather win. We’d rather have all of the advantages, and we’d rather have them with a large group of people who agree with us and support us. We’re certainly more comfortable that way. However, I would argue that Western culture loves the underdog more than the top dog. As a culture, we value our independence and individuality more than anything else. They’re two of the few values that we have that we won’t question. We might question our religious assumptions, our standards of beauty, our ethics, our treatment of minorities, or our previously held assumptions about institutions like government, but we never question our worth as individuals and our right to independence. In fact, when we question all of our other values, we often do so on the grounds that they are threatening our individuality and independence. We take them for granted.

So, it might surprise us when we learn that these values are not universal. Traditionally, Eastern culture has valued the collective over the individual. In America, school children are encouraged to express their own opinions and told, “think for yourself” or “just be yourself.”. In Japan, school children are told, “the tallest nail gets pounded down,” meaning that instead of asserting their own ideas, children should conform to the consensus of the group. In the West, we gain a sense of worth based on who we are as individuals and what we as individuals can accomplish. In the East, a person’s sense of worth is based on his or her place in a larger group of people and what the group accomplishes by working together.

Each way of thinking has its pros and cons, which I won’t get into right now. My point is that Western culture often takes for granted the worth of the individual and the individual’s right to be independent. But once we realize just how powerful these values are in our culture, we can explain a lot. Why do Americans drive their cars, even when public transportation is available? We want to be independent. We don’t want to depend on the bus or the subway. Why is Welfare so stigmatized in our country? Because people who are on Welfare depend on government money. Of course, we are all dependent on someone for something. (The middle-class conservative with his or her own car might sneer at a Welfare recipient for being dependent on the government while not realizing that s/he is also dependent upon the government to keep the roads paved and in good condition or that car would be useless.)

Our values of individuality and independence can also explain a lot of the rhetoric that goes on between conservative Christians and atheists/agnostics/deists/de-converts, because even though we might not be consciously aware of these values, we know how to use them to manipulate other people to feel sympathy for our cause.

Conservative Christians do this by setting themselves up against the world or the devil. They claim that they are the force of right and truth in this world, but they are beset from all sides by enemies who want to stop them from spreading this truth. These enemies might be secularists, who want to keep church and state separate. They might be pro-choice advocates or feminists. They might be homosexuals or heterosexuals who believe that homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. These are the people of the world, and Christians try to differentiate themselves from the world. They have to set themselves up against an oppressive norm so that they can prove that they are independent. They do not get their ideas by thinking like everybody else. No, they think differently!

They also have to portray themselves as losing. After all, the best way to prove that you really are an individual is to stand out from the crowd, especially when doing so involves risks, and the greatest risk is losing. (Our culture loves stories about heroes who fight for what they believe is right, even when they know that they’re set up to lose right from the beginning.? And the more risks you’re willing to take, the stronger individual you are. At the Christian middle school that I attended, we were constantly told that life would be different when we went to secular high schools. We would be ridiculed for our faith. Some people might not want to be our friends because we were Christians. Our teachers would teach us about evolution, and we had to be brave and tell the teacher what a lie that was! We had to stand out from the crowd. We had to be different from the secular majority around us, even when that meant taking risks.

By trying to show how they adhere to the values of individuality and independence, Christians, whether they know it or not, try to manipulate people. They want people to think that they are good, and if they can show that they are in line with these values, then the public will perceive them as good.

Secular groups try to use the same tactics. Nearly all the de-conversion stories I’ve read rely heavily on gaining the reader’s sympathy by appealing to the values of independence and individuality. De-converts like to stress how they are in the minority, not only in the country (which, according to the last census, is 76% Christian and 14% atheist/agnostic), but also in their groups of family and friends. They are setting themselves apart as individuals–they are unique in their lack of faith in God. They also often stress how they are independent thinkers. Instead of following the religious crowd around them, they emphasize how they question what everyone around them assumed was given to be true. They try to demonstrate how they put the popular phrase, “Think for yourself” into action.

And, unfortunately, they also sometimes have to set themselves up against an enemy to which they are losing. And often that enemy is Christianity or other religious institutions. Sometimes they do point out things that Christians or other religious groups are doing that are wrong, but sometimes they can sound just as pig-headed as Christians, as though they just need somebody to fight with.

Now, I’m not point this out to place blame on either group. I also think that when both groups try to manipulate their audiences by appealing to the values of independence and individuality, they’re not doing it consciously. These values are so ingrained into us that we often take them for granted without questioning them. They’re givens that we don’t bother questioning. And if we want to feel like we’re doing the right thing, we’re going to look to these values to judge our actions and attitudes.

I am pointing this out, because these values seem to be the reason that these two sides so often set themselves up against each other is to prove how much more independent and individual they are, especially in comparison to the other group. Sometimes, Christians accuse de-converts of giving in to the world’s values–they accuse de-converts of being like everyone else, of not being individuals. Sometimes, de-converts accuse Christians of letting the church think for them–they accuse Christians of not thinking independently.

In reality, both groups are probably each a little bit right and a little bit wrong. Christians certainly do hold beliefs and practices that different from the larger culture, and it takes some individuality to be able to do that. And I know that, as independent as we de-converts often feel, even we need communities of like-minded people. At the same time, though, Christians also need that sense of community, and as much as they try to make themselves seem like a minority, in America, they are the minority. They have their own lobbyists and special interest groups, not to mention their sheer numbers, so they have a lot more sway than they make themselves out to. We’re all dependent on somebody, as much as we hate to admit it. And none of us are quite as individualistic as we’d like to think we are.

So, my question is, if we’re all dependent and we’re all conformists, even though we like to think of ourselves and independent individuals, why do we have to set ourselves up against another group? Why can’t we realize that by creating this opposition between our groups, we’re really just playing into a deeply held cultural myth? What I’m really wondering is, Instead of setting ourselves up as opposition against each other, why can’t we make more efforts towards getting along with each other?

The Importance of Gay Characters in Fiction

I just realized that June, which is Gay Pride month, is almost over, and I haven’t written any posts related to homosexuality for a while. So, here goes…

I applaud writers of all sexual orientations, who write about gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals and strive to accurately and fairly depict them  in their works. I think that what they do is often unrecognized and underappreciated, but they deserve to be thanked for it. I think this because if it weren’t for gay characters in fiction, I never would have come to see people of sexual orientations other than straight as human, and I would have missed out on a lot of good friendships.

You have to understand that I was raised in a Christian home, in Christian schools, where homosexuality was never discussed. If the topic came up at all, everyone agreed that homosexuals were all sinners and it was time to change the subject as quickly as possible. I barely even knew what homosexuality was, except for what a classmate had told me in third grade: “Boys who love boys are called gay. Girls who love girls are called lesbians.” As I grew a little older, I found out that this included men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women. Bisexuality and transsexuality were not discussed, and I didn’t find out what those were until I was in my mid-teens. I was a very sheltered child.

Though my community was sheltered, my reading was not. Almost all of what I learned about sex, I learned through young adult novels that I checked out of the public library. However, even when I read these books, I censored myself. I skipped passages that contained descriptions of heavy making out or sex. I skipped conversations that included swears. I even skipped portions of the books that included descriptions of religious rituals that were not Christian or Jewish. My reason for doing so was because I had been taught that these things displeased God, so I shouldn’t be reading them. In fact, I often felt guilty for not reading more Christian books, but they were so often dull. Most of them were tedious romances that I found in my Christian middle school’s library. The heroines of these novels worried constantly about whether or not their latest male infatuation was the man that God meant them to be with. When a crisis came, characters did not do anything proactive. Instead, they prayed, and a few chapters later, God would undoubtedly answer their prayers. The love between the hero and heroine was completely chaste. There was almost no hint of any sexual desire between them. Strict gender roles were enforced, and the heroines never thought for themselves. The heroes did all the difficult thinking. The novels were also heavily didactic, and I always felt just a little bit insulted that the author didn’t think I could figure out the main theme of the book (it was almost always, “Trust God and do what He wants you to do”) by myself.

With little interesting Christian fiction available, I read secular books, but, as I said, I skipped over any parts that I felt were in conflict with Christian values. (Well, okay, I didn’t always skip those parts. Sometimes I was weak and I read them anyway, but I always felt guilty afterwards.) Sometimes, I would even stop reading a book entirely, and one topic that was sure to make me stop reading was homosexuality. I barely even knew what it was, but I knew that it was bad and gross and God wouldn’t want me reading about it. (On a few rare occasions, I did read things that contained homosexuality, but because I knew so little about it, the references went completely over my head. This happened when I read the short story “Charm” in Francesca Lia Block’s collection, The Rose and the Beast. At the end of the story, I thought, “Wait? The two girls are kissing…? That’s odd. Oh well, I wonder what the next story is about.”)

Then, in ninth grade, I read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It started out innocently enough. The narrator, Charlie, was a pretty sweet guy, and I could relate to him. He was just starting high school, and so was I. He was often confused and sad. I was too. He didn’t always get along with his family. I didn’t always get along with mine either. He was taking an Honors English class, and I was too. He was a main character that I could relate to, so I cared about him. I could also relate to another main character, Patrick. I liked Patrick just as much as I liked Charlie. He was funny and added some much-needed humor to many serious sections of the book. He was outgoing, whereas Charlie was more reserved. They were good foils to each other, and their contrast made the book even better. I continued to read.

And then, I found out something shocking! Something mind-blowing! Something horrible! Patrick was gay! I was devastated. There was a gay character in a book that I was so thoroughly enjoying! But God didn’t want me to read about gay people, so I’d have to stop reading the book. But I really, really didn’t want to stop reading… I thought about it for a while and decided that I liked all the characters so much that I’d read the book anyway. And as I kept reading, I found that I still liked Patrick. He was still funny and goofy. He was still relatable. I felt really bad for him when he couldn’t see his boyfriend, Brad, anymore, even though I thought that what he and Brad had been doing was a sin. I was a little weirded out by the sections of the book where Patrick took Charlie to the golf course so that he could pick up guys, but I read them anyway. By the end of the book, aside from Charlie, Patrick was my favorite character.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but The Perks of Being a Wallflower had changed me. Stephen Chbosky had created a gay character and made him human. His book had shown me that gays were human. They were people. They liked books and music and all of the same things that I did. They had feelings. They cared about other people. The book didn’t change my perceptions of homosexuality immediately, but it had made me empathize with a person who was gay. Albeit, this person was fictional, but I was beginning to see gays in a way that had never occurred to me before, which was a good start. I also stopped self-censoring books with homosexual characters or discussions of homosexuality in them. In fact, I gradually stopped censoring what I read all together and stopped skipping sections of books just because they contained things that went against strict Christian morals.

It still took me about a year, though, before I really began to question a lot of my assumptions about homosexuality. I really can’t remember what specifically made me begin to question what I believed. Even though I was now open to reading books about homosexual characters, I don’t recall reading that many books that touched on the topic of homosexuality and I can’t remember any gay characters making as much of an impact on me as Patrick did. I think that maybe I just became more aware of gays and lesbians and their presence in the larger culture than I had before. Now that I was beginning to learn what homosexuality actually was and what it involved, I was realizing that gays were not some sort of nebulous “other.” There were famous actors and singers who were gay or lesbian or bisexual. There were poets who were gay. Homosexuality was alluded to on shows that I watched, like Seinfeld. Maybe I was just becoming more aware of gays in general.

It was also around this time that I actually met, in person, someone who was gay. I didn’t know him very well. He was one of those people that I only knew because he happened to be a friend of a friend. Still, I’d hung out with him a little bit, and he was an okay guy. He was an excellent singer and had various solos in the high school choir. He had a good sense of humor and was friendly. He was also brave enough to come out, despite the conservative majority of the high school who made ugly comments about him behind his back (and probably to his face as well). I didn’t know him very well, but he was a nice guy and not a bad person, and that contradicted the “fact” that I had been taught that all gays were bad people.

I also think that I became more curious about homosexuality because, in an odd way, I could relate to it. Gays were told by the Christian culture that their sexual desires were bad and that they were sinning by having them. I might have been straight, but in a conservative Christian community that talked about heterosexual sex about as often as it discussed homosexuality, I felt like my own heterosexual desires were bad. Even thinking about someone in a way that even remotely related to sex was a sin. Having sex before marriage was a sin. Expressing one’s sexuality in any way before marriage was a sin.

But what was I supposed to do about my sexual desires until then? I was told to surrender my burdens, such as my sex drive, to God and that He would help me be strong and save myself for my husband. The trouble was that I’d always slip up. I’d fantasize about a good-looking actor or singer whom I’d have a crush on or I’d get turned on by looking at a hot guy who sat near me in a class. I wondered if, before I got married, I would have to confess to my future husband all the lustful things that I had thought and done and if he would be able to love me in spite of them. (It never occured to me that my future husband would have probably also experienced lust and the desire for sex. I thought that I was the only Christian in the world struggling with these problems.) I always felt incredibly guilty and would beg God’s forgiveness when this happened. I knew that God would forgive me because of Jesus’ death on the cross, but I didn’t understand how God could keep forgiving me again and again and again. I certainly never seemed to learn my lesson, and I was sure that eventually God, in His love, would punish me somehow. I also assumed that I would never be able to have a good relationship with a boyfriend or with my future husband, because I had always been taught that keeping one’s self chaste and pure was the only way to have a happy marriage. Even though I’d never had sex, I certainly didn’t feel pure or chaste.

So, perhaps, in my desire to justify my own frustrated sex drive, I decided to investigate homosexuality further. I had been taught by my dad that everything in the Bible had to be understood in context, so what if Christians were reading the Bible incorrectly by thinking that homosexuality is a sin? What if they were taking the Biblical passages about homosexuality out of context? And if homosexuality wasn’t a sin, then surely heterosexual desires couldn’t be evil either! Also, as I began to feel comfortable with the idea that gays were just regular people, I became more uncomfortable with the idea that God was going to send them all to hell. So I decided that I’d learn about homosexuality, and I did so in the manner that I investigated everything at the time, which was strictly through the Christian viewpoint.

There is actually more pro-gay Christian stuff out there than you might think, and Christians’ views about homosexuality run from the stereotypical fundamentalist view of “All gays are going to hell!” to very accepting views of, “Homosexuality is a gift from God that gays should celebrate!” I also picked up a lot of practical information, such as the distinction between homosexual behavior and homosexual orientation. I also got my first lesson in queer theory when I learned that human sexuality is not something definite, but seems to exist on a continuum, in which no one is totally straight and no one is totally gay. As I learned that homosexuality was not a choice but something that had a biological basis, I wanted to accept the idea that homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, was a gift from God that should be celebrated.

Unfortunately, all of the Biblical evidence that I investigated seemed to say otherwise. I did learn some interesting little facts about Biblical translation, though. For instance, anytime you read the word “homosexuality” in an English translation of the Bible, you’re not actually reading the world “homosexuality.” Translators have no idea what the original Greek word really means because, outside of the Bible, it’s present in only a few other texts. So, translators just guess that the word translates into “homosexuality.” To me, this seems like irresponsibility on the translators’ part, especially because most people don’t even think of the Bible as being a book that is translated or understand just how tricky the process of translation can be. There are words in one language that have no equivalent in another language or express concepts that are not present in another language. But lots of Christians don’t seem to realize this. They assume that the Bible in English is the same as the Bible in Greek. This is not the case.

I was confident that there was nothing in the New Testament that directly condemned homosexuality, but there were still some tricky passages in Leviticus that I couldn’t get around. I read Daniel Helminiak’s book What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality, and thought that I had finally found the solution. Helminiak argues that the homosexual act is not actually a sin but just part of the Jewish purity code, which included the Jewish dietary laws. Christians, however, believe that Jesus abolished these old laws. Well, I thought, if homosexuality is just part of the Jewish purity code, then there is no contradiction between homosexuality and Christianity! Homosexuals are not actually sinning! …Or were they? I read some rebuttals to Helminiak’s arguments, and I hated to admit it, but it seemed like homosexuality fell into the category of sin and not an ancient culture’s purity code that contemporary Christians could disregard.

And yet I still couldn’t reconcile the idea of a loving, caring God with homosexuality being a sin. If homosexuality was not a choice, then why would God give someone the desire to have a loving, sexual relationship with someone of the same sex only to tell that person that their God-given desire was wrong? It seemed a little, um, sadistic on God’s part. It also seemed ridiculous to me that Christians just told gays to live lives of chastity. Sexuality, I had learned from my investigating, was much more than just being attracted to certain people. It was part of the core of who a person was. To me, that sounded like gays were being told to deny who they were. Why would God make someone a certain way only to have that person deny that part of him or herself? That didn’t make sense to me either.

I was also very uncomfortable with the “moderate” Christian view of homosexuality, which is, “Love the sinner and hate the sin.” I do believe that it is possible to love a person, even though I might not love everything that s/he does, but as I said before, a person’s sexuality is much more than just who a person sleeps with or wants to sleep with. It’s a part of who you are as a person. I also didn’t actually see any loving the sinner when it came to my Christian friends and homosexuals. Most of them wanted nothing to do with gays, and if they did interact with them, they only saw them as potential converts and not real people. I had a Christian friend tell me that homosexuality scared her because she didn’t know very much about it. Well, homosexuality had sort of scared me. That’s one of the reason that I’d decided to learn about it. But my friend wasn’t interested in my approach. The Bible said that it was a sin for a man to lie with a man, and that was all she needed to know. Maybe if she’s come to this conclusion after doing some sort of research I would have been able to accept her opinion, but she showed no interest in such research and saw no reason why she should do any outside of reading the Bible, let alone actually getting to know someone who was gay!

After a couple years of research, I decided that the only conclusion that I could accept was that the Bible’s writers had gotten the part about homosexuality wrong. The rest of the Bible, I thought, was still infallible, but I couldn’t accept that homosexuality was a sin. I decided that if the Bible’s writers had known what we now know about homosexuality, they never would have considered it to be a sin. I still held that the Bible was the divinely inspired word of God (and I don’t know how I reconciled that with my belief that what the Bible said about homosexuality being wrong) and I remained a Christian, but that was the first time in my life that I considered anything in the Bible to be incorrect. (Not surprisingly, a couple years later, I began to question how accurate the Bible was on a number of other issues until I rejected the Bible as nothing more than a book containing knowledge from a specific people of a specific culture at a specific point in history. In other words, I realized that the Bible was like any other ancient book and that it was not divinely inspired.)

However, in between the time that I decided to reject the Bible’s teachings on homosexuality and when I rejected the Bible altogether, I was more open to reading books by homosexuals and about homosexuals. I read Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and David Sedaris’s essays. I learned that my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, had probably been a bisexual or a lesbian. I was also more open to listening to music by homosexuals and bisexuals, and it was during this time that I discovered Ani DiFranco, Rufus Wainwright, Sinead O’Connor, and Melissa Ferrick. I learned that I’d been missing out on a lot of culture, not to mention good music and good reading, by dismissing people who weren’t heterosexuals.

Most importantly, I made a lot of new friends, and some of these friends were bisexual or homosexual. My friendships with these people only affirmed what I’d already decided was untrue: that homosexuality and bisexuality were not sins and that people who were not straight were not inherently bad. Some of my non-heterosexual friends were better people than I was! And many of them weren’t even Christian, but they were still keenly interested in the same questions that I was, like “What’s the meaning of life?” “What happens after we die?” and “If there is a god, what is this god like?” Sometimes we had different answers to these questions, but instead of arguing about them, we shared our opinions and got to know one another better. In fact, because most of my homosexual and bisexual friends were not Christian, they were the people who first showed me what interreligious dialogue looked like and how people with different ideas about religion could still get along.

Having friends who were homosexuals and bisexuals also made me realize that they really were just people. Homosexual rights might be important to them, and homosexuality or bisexuality influenced who they were, but they really weren’t that different from straight people. They have the same needs a wants, the same interests, the same strengths and weaknesses. They are certainly as capable of being in healthy, loving relationships as straight couples are! I won’t say that their sexualities didn’t matter to me, because they were important to them so they were also important to me. But I didn’t reject their friendship once they came out to me. For instance, a lesbian friend and I both shared a love of travel, reading, obscure music, and dogs. I actually got to know her pretty well before I found out that she was a lesbian, and when I found out, the news barely fazed me. I felt as though I’d discovered that she didn’t care for chocolate or read murder mysteries. It was more information about her and it gave me more insight into who she was, but I still considered her a good friend and a good person. Her being a lesbian didn’t change my friendship with her.

And I might have missed out on that friendship, and other friendships, if I hadn’t been exposed to homosexual characters in young adult novels. Some of these books caused me to question what I’d always been told about homosexuality. They’d also made me see that homosexuals and bisexuals and transsexuals were as human as I was. They weren’t dirty. They weren’t disgusting. They were people, and they deserved to have the same rights and dignity as anyone else. These books gave me the greatest gift that I think any author can give a reader—they made me see the world in a new way, in a way that I wouldn’t have even considered had I not read them. They held up virtues of compassion and empathy, and they gave these messages to me not through heavy-handed didactic morals but through realistic and well-developed characterization.

And to any writers out there who have tried to use their books to promote equality and understanding between diverse groups of people: your books have made a difference. Your books may be the only way that readers can interact with people who are different from themselves. Or your books may be the first of many interactions between readers and people who are unfamiliar to them. The world needs young adult writers who are willing to tackle big and often taboo topics, like sexuality. The world needs writers who convince us to question our assumptions and think in new ways. My life and my understanding have been deeply enriched by such writers, and, even though it might sound corny, I can’t thank them enough for opening my mind with their books.

Some young adult books that include topics related to GBLTA issues that I enjoyed:

Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block

Girl Goddess Number Nine by Francesca Lia Block

The Rose and the Beast by Francesca Lia Block

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Luna by Julie Anne Peters

Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger

Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger

The Beauty Industry Makes Idiots of Us All: What the Iranian Protests Have Taught Me About American Standards of Beauty

Before I begin this post, I have to apologize to my mother. She is a wonderful, caring, intelligent, and creative woman. This post does not represent her as she is all of the time, and it’s meant to be more of a reflection on society and its values than it is on my mother personally.

With that being said, something happened this week that made me a little disturbed. On Thursday last week, my parents and I were watching the national news on TV, which was covering the protests over the “election” in Iran. For those of you who haven’t been following Iran’s election, here’s what was going on: Protestors, dressed in green, were peacefully marching down the streets. They were causing no one any harm. They were not violent. They merely wanted a right that we Americans take for granted–the right to have free and fair election of their president. They believed that Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad had been unfairly elected and they wanted a new election rescheduled. The Iranian government responded harshly to the protestors’ peaceful march, and the news coverage was grim. People were being beaten, some to death, by police. (If you would like to see videos of protests and get more information, follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdK35ZkbdIc&feature=related.)

I was watching this and feeling sickened. I was also hoping, fruitlessly I knew, that the Supreme Leader would let a new and fair election be held. (He declared on Friday that he would do no such thing.) My point is, my reaction to this was horror at what was happening to these protestors and hope that their sacrifices would not be in vain. I was thinking these thoughts as the news showed footage of the marchers in the city, when my mother said, “They’re all so thin! They look the way Americans used to look back in the ’70’s!” (And when my mother said “thin,” she meant “attractive.” Trust me, I’ve heard my mom bemoan her weight, which, by the way, is perfectly normal. I’ve watched her go on ridiculous diets. And I’ve heard her compliment her friends on losing weight. When my mom says “thin,” it means “beautiful.”)

I could only stare at my mother. People are being killed because they want the freedom to fairly choose their country’s president. People are bravely defying their government. People are risking their lives for a cause that they believe in. And my mother’s only thought is, “These people are good-looking”?!

I’ve read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth. I’ve read Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman  and Eve Ensler’s The Good Body. And I never quite believed them when they said that all of our society’s concern about women’s appearances is a red herring to keep women from thinking about serious things, like actually taking on positions of authority in society. I never quite believed that all of this worry about women being beautiful enough could really serve to totally distract women from important things going on in the world. Surely, I always thought, women are smart enough that even if they do worry too much about which brand of foundation to buy, they can also think about things like the global economy, the environment, international affairs, and other important topics.

But now I’ve seen a women watch people protesting a rigged election and can only say, “They’re so thin [attractive]!” Really? Is that all she can think about? Never mind the political implications that these protests have for Iranian politics. Never mind what gains Iranian women could make if a new election is held and Mir-Hossein Mousavi becomes Iran’s new president. Never mind what effect this election is having on global politics. None of that is nearly as important as the fact that the protestors are thin and attractive! Yes! That is what we should take away from all the news coverage and YouTube videos of these protestors! They are good looking, so who cares about what they are actually trying to accomplish! I can only sigh, shake my head, and wonder how in the world someone could watch people literally dying because they want freedom and change and only think about what these people look like!

Sadly, I don’t have to wonder too much. Undoubtedly, at some point, there was a commercial break, and our household was invaded by ads for beauty creams, makeup, bras, lingerie, and God know what else women desperately need because they will be UGLY-terrified shrieks–without these products! And, oh my Lord, being ugly is the worst thing that could ever happen to a woman! No, seriously, it is. Our society tells women that if they are not beautiful enough, no one will love them. No one will care about them. No one will respect them or treat them with kindness. They will not be able to advance in their jobs because, statistically speaking, more attractive people are more likely to get promotions. In other words, without beauty, a woman can have nothing. If you’d been told this message from the day you were born and for your entire life, you’d be terrified too. You’d waste your money and time on the anti-aging creams (none of which work) and StairMasters.

So what do we women do? We buy make-up. We buy clothes. We buy diet products and exercise machines. We spend money on gym memberships and workout clothes. We consume Slim-Fast and other brand name low-fat, low-calorie, tasteless bars of something that is not nutrients.

And the waste of money isn’t even the most disturbing part. What’s even more disturbing is how much we women hate ourselves. No matter how we look, there is always something wrong. We are never enough. We are never good enough. We are never perfect enough. Women spend their lives consumed by self-loathing because they don’t look like supermodels. Guess what, ladies? Supermodels don’t look like supermodels either. They spend hours having their hair done and their make-up applied by professionals. They have special photographers who take pictures of them from just the right angles. Then, these pictures are sent to computer labs. This is where the woman in the picture, who was previously just a woman with a lot of makeup and hairspray, becomes a supermodel. The computer trims baggy thighs, lifts sagging cheeks, smoothes wrinkles, and plumps thin lips. Then this image can be smeared on a billboard or copied onto a magazine and women all over the country can be told that unless they look exactly like that picture, they are not beautiful.

The standards of beauty for women in the West are absurd! Even worse, they are set down at the only definition of beauty. There is no definitive definition of beauty. The definition of beauty is a social construct. When I was a little girl, I had a book of Russian fairytales in which the heroines of these stories were always described as “plump and lovely and ladylike.” They were a far cry from the Disney princesses that I saw on TV. (These Russian fairytale princesses were also unusual in the fact that they often actually did things to try to save themselves from their horrid situations instead of sitting by wishing wells and humming, “Someday my prince will come…”) What beauty is changes from society to society. It even changes within societies! There is nothing inherently beautiful about big boobs, a miniscule waste, and blond hair. That is only considered beautiful because our society says that it is beautiful.

And, because beauty is just a social construct, it can change. We can decide that our society needs a more inclusive view of beauty–a view of beauty that allows all women to be beautiful. Ladies, however you look–fat, thin, average, flat-chested, full-chested, big thighs, no thighs, normal thighs, thin lips, full lips, asymmetrical lips, green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes, grey eyes, thick hair, thin hair, grey hair, brown hair, red hair, blond hair–tell yourself that you are beautiful every time you look in the mirror. Tell yourself that you love your body. It will feel false and ridiculous at first, but eventually you will start to believe yourself, I promise. Do things that make you feel good as a person, as a woman. Appreciate yourself and your body. Eat what makes you happy, not what you think will make you thin. You are beautiful, and you are deserving of love and respect, no matter what you look like. And girls, do we really want to be like supermodels? Look at that idiot Carrie Prejean! I would hope that we’d all aspire to something more than that.

Not that this is all women’s faults. We buy into it, yes, but men certainly don’t help us fight against it. There are men out there who pressure their wives and girlfriends to be skinnier, prettier, more exciting. These men are just assholes who should be glad that they have any sort of female companion, because if they keep treating her so badly, they’re going to lose her. There are men who look at porn and expect their wives/girlfriends and their sex lives to be just like what they see in videos or in Playboy, never mind that pornography does not represent a realistic or even desirable image of what sex should be like. These men need to grow up. And women, why do we even want to please jerks like these guys? Why should be pander to their immature fantasies? They don’t deserve us. (There are also some wonderful men out there who treat women with respect and realize that what our society says about sex and beauty is all a sham. I applaud these men.)

So, instead of worrying about how we look, we women should learn to love ourselves and be happy with our bodies exactly as they are. Then maybe we can start worrying about more important things, like the Iranian protestors, for instance.

Happy Father’s Day!

Just a quick shout-out to all of the dads out there: Happy father’s day! Spend the day trying to be a good role model for your children. They’re looking up to you, whether you realize it or not.

What Dialogue Looks Like

I’ve been discussing what dialogue looks like, and I happened to think of something: When I was at school, a friend and I were having a discussion about capital punishment. We disagreed—she was for it and I was against it, but our argument didn’t lead to anger or bitterness. We were just talking. She gave me her reasons for her position and I gave her mine. We actually found that we actually had a lot more in common than I would have thought we did. (We ended up discussing exactly what makes people do what they do and whether nature or nurture has a greater impact on how people develop. We were able to find some common ground in the fact that we both thought that nature and nurture both share responsibility for why people behave the way that they do.)

Now, I hate to admit this, but I usually go into an argument seeing the issue as a win-lose situation. I must assert my views as superior to another person’s. I must use facts and logic and reason and if I can’t convince the other person, then I can at least make her/him look like a fool, which might convince anyone who happens to be listening. Yeah. For all my talk about dialoguing and discussion and understanding, when it comes to topics that I’m passionate about, I can be just as base and emotional as anyone else.

But, that didn’t happen in this situation, probably because I respect my friend. She doesn’t fit my stereotype of people who support the death penalty (I usually see them as rabid fundamentalists who snarl, “An eye for an eye!” and “We’re going to kill you, you dirty son of a bitch! But God loves you!”) and I know that when she makes up her mind about something, she thinks through it thoroughly first, so her arguments were reasonable. In this situation, I didn’t see her as an ignorant opponent that I had the duty to enlighten. She was just my friend and if she wanted to express her opinions, I knew that she would let me do the same.

After our discussion, however, my old habits of thinking came back to me and I wondered, “Doesn’t somebody have to win? I mean, sure, now I know where she’s coming from and she knows where I’m coming from, but the law has to be for or against the death penalty. The courts have to rule one way or the other. Doesn’t somebody still have to win while another person loses?”

The answer: Um, maybe. The thing is, as soon as I thought that, I recalled something I’d read while researching my religion seminar project. The point of the article was that through contradictions in views, we can actually come to a deeper understanding of what our own views are. We can also learn new things about ourselves and our views. The only way to learn about our own opinions and ideologies is to examine the opposites. You can’t see only one side of the argument and claim to know the whole argument.

So, I changed my thinking. Instead of seeing the issue in a win-lose manner, I asked myself, “What can I learn from this discussion?” And I realized that I had a lot to learn.           

The surprising thing is that all of my arguments about why I believe capital punishment is wrong stem from when I was a Christian. I didn’t see a way that any Christian could support the death penalty. Yes, the Old Testament said “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but hadn’t Jesus overridden that rule when he said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who hate you”? The way I saw it, only God could choose who was to live and die, and we had no right to kill criminals, even if they had committed atrocities. (Even as a little kid, I held this belief. I remember being about seven years old and thinking about the fact that murder was against the law. But the fact that murder was punished by killing the murderer meant, to my seven-year-old mind, that the person who gave the criminal the lethal injection was also guilty of murder and would have to be killed too. So the person who killed him would have to be killed and eventually I concluded that the whole human race would die if this were the case.) I also believed that no one was outside of God’s grace. If someone had enough anger and hate in his or her heart that he or she had committed a capital offense, that was just because he or she didn’t know the saving love of Jesus. For this reason, murders should be given the chance to convert to Christianity and be saved, not merely fried in the electric chair. I loved stories of serial killers confessing their sins to prison chaplains and being baptized. God had forgiven them and they were going to heaven where all the pain in their hearts would be healed.

When I left Christianity, I took my ideas about the death penalty with me. I’d so internalized my idea that the death penalty was wrong that I hadn’t bothered to re-examine just why I thought it was wrong. Until my discussion with my friend. When I heard her reasons for being for the death penalty, all of my old Christian arguments leapt to the forefront of my mind. “Life is sacred!” I wanted to shout, but then I stopped myself and asked, “Why is life sacred? Because God says so? How do you even know that there’s a God?” Fortunately, I knew enough about sociology, economics, and psychology to make some arguments that actually made sense and didn’t depend on an omni-benevolent deity (the idea of which this friend and I also discuss in great depth and agree probably doesn’t exist)

What surprised me though is how long it’s been since I’ve examine my beliefs. I was also shocked that I had very little information at my disposal to back up my claims. I could argue against the death penalty from a Christian perspective, but I’m not a Christian anymore, so I needed something stronger. The arguments that I did have would only impress a Christian, and this friend wasn’t a Christian, so anything that I would have said about serial killers being born again wouldn’t have meant anything to her.

She also made a good point about capital punishment for serial killers. We didn’t delve too much into the death penalty for one-time murderers. We focused specifically on criminals who were sociopaths. The death penalty for someone who murders multiple people and eats them or chops up their body parts and stores them in a freezer seems a little more palatable than the death penalty for the guy who got angry and shot the man who was sleeping with his girlfriend. I had to admit that there does seem to be some grey area there.

When I usually think of the death penalty, I think of stories about innocent men (I’m sure such stories exist about women too) who spend years in jail, going through agonizing appeals, and are finally convicted to death row. Then, a few years later, some new DNA evidence is revealed that proves that he didn’t do it! The man is unceremoniously kicked out of jail with nothing—no money, no clothes, no apologizes. He has just lost five, ten, maybe even twenty years of his life, years that he could have spent with his wife and children and grandchildren, but he was falsely convicted of a capital offense and almost killed for something that he didn’t do. When I hear these stories, my gut reaction is usually, Better to let all of the real murders live to let just one of these innocent men not have to die unnecessarily!

And I think that I do have a point there. I also think—and I would need to look up statistics on this—that the majority of death row inmates are probably not sociopathic serial killers. However, let’s take the cases of those who are. Should they be killed?

It’s an interesting question and I never really thought about it. When I was a Christian, I would have said that Jesus could heal anything, but now that I don’t have Jesus to fall back on, what am I left with? Sociological theory, well, that speculates that sociopathy is a result of the general individualism in our society that has led to the break up of the family and other close bonds. Psychology? Well, there’s no cure for sociopathy. At least, not that we know of. Therapy, as far as I know, seems to be ineffective. So, what are we supposed to do with these people?

Obviously, I need to do more research, but the first thought that comes to mind is that, well, we could look for some sort of method to rehabilitate these people. To do that, we’d have to keep them alive. (Although my friend did suggest examining their brain chemistry once they were dead. Although, with the brain-imaging technology that we have now, we could examine how their brains worked while they were alive too.) I mean, if we came up with a method for rehabilitating these people, then healing them would certainly be a better option than killing them. (And, no, I’m not talking about rehabilitating them in a Clockwork Orange kind of way. For instance, supposing that serial killers’ pathologies were caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, sort of like clinical depression, and psychiatrists developed a drug that could restore a normal chemical balance to the brain, much like depression medication. Then, obviously, the more humane thing to do would be to give this pill to serial killers and not execute them, though life in prison probably wouldn’t be out of the question.)

However, as it stands, we don’t have such a pill and we don’t seem to be developing anything like it. So, in the meantime, what should we do with these people? Though they usually seem to suffer from horrible traumas in childhood, as far as I know, therapy doesn’t seem to help them. (This is how my friend and I began talking about nature versus nurture—the idea that people are biologically born to act a certain way versus the idea that the environment in which you are raised in affects how you act. We agreed that there is a certain mixture of both involved in why people behave the way that they do, but we couldn’t decide how much each contributed. Considering that psychologists wiser than us have been debating this issue for decades, I think it’s okay that we didn’t come to any definite conclusions.)

Anyway, whatever we do with the serial killers, my point is that, by talking with someone who disagreed with me, I realized that my own position was is pretty weak and I hadn’t examined my views on the death penalty for a long time. And I also became aware of some grey areas in which the death penalty actually might seem okay. And I also learned that people who support capital punishment are not always just ignorant fundamentalists who get love reminding everyone how much they deserve to suffer for their sins. People who support the death penalty can be rational, reasonable, intelligent people. And I don’t have to prove myself right or worry about taking my opposition down. People can disagree without making themselves right and the other party wrong. People can dialogue.

Overall, I think that it was pretty positive experience, and I definitely will try to keep it in the mind the next time I run into somebody who doesn’t think the same way that I do.

Is Pink a Stupid Girl?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oGBvN3rAi0

I know that the song “Stupid Girls” by Pink is a little old, and I hope you’ll forgive me. I don’t tend to follow mainstream music very closely, so I’m always a little behind the times.

 Despite the fact that it’s a little dated, I still think that “Stupid Girls” is a relevant song. (“What happened to the dream of a girl president?” the song asks, and Hilary Clinton certainly got closer to the presidency than any woman ever has been.) I think we need songs like this! And I’m glad that there are songs with this kind of message in the mainstream.

 But what kind of message is this song sending out? Overall, I think it’s positive. Girls shouldn’t have to adhere to traditional gender stereotypes—if a girl wants to play football with the guys, well, she should! It contrasts Pink’s persona—a free spirited, sharp, independent girl who can take on the guys and think for herself—with the personas of celebrities like Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, and Jessica Simpson (to name a few), who try to make themselves look like cute, perky, bubbly, shallow, ignorant ditzes.

 I especially like the chorus: “Maybe if I act like that/That guy will call me back…I don’t wanna be a stupid girl!” It seems to say that if a girl has to be nougaty to attract men, then being smart is better than having a boyfriend.

 However, there are a few moments in the video where the visuals seem to contradict the message, particularly the cuts to the recording of the woman and man in the bedroom and the woman washing the car. Exactly what is the point of these scenes? Hmmm… Scantily clad females exposing themselves to an anonymous gaze…Looks like modeling for the male gaze to me.

 Sadly, in almost every music video about female empowerment, it seems like there has to be at least one scene where the girl gives the men what they want. Madonna videos were full of these contradictions. Hell, even Ani DiFranco’s “Blood in the Boardroom” video has a scene that could be construed as pandering to the male gaze, where Ani is sceen in a black bra and panties rolling sensuously around on a tarp. Granted, she is also smeared with menstrual blood, but I’m not sure if the thought of a girl getting her period is enough to make that scene a turn-off to every guy out there.

 So, is Pink a stupid girl? Overall, I don’t think so. The positive messages in this video far outweigh the negative ones. And the song itself, which lacks the images of a girl in a bikini top washing the car, is great! There ought to be more pop music like this.

Crossing the Rubicon: Wading into Religious Pluralism

(For the sake of understanding, I’m going to define some terms very quickly: Exclusivism is the view that one’s own religion is the only truth and that all other religions are false and their adherents are destined for eternal punishment. Christian fundamentalists are exclusivists. Inclusivism is the view that one’s own religion is the best way to the truth and that one’s own God is the only true God, but one admits that people of other religions might come to know this God by a means other than their own religion. A Christian who says that Gandhi will be in heaven because he was a Christian without knowing that he was one would be an example of an inclusivist. Pluralism doesn’t concern itself with whose religion is true and whose is false and focuses instead on understanding between people of varying beliefs. A Christian who visits a Jewish synagogue with some Jewish friends, attends their religious holiday celebrations, and listens to them explain their beliefs to him or her without butting in and telling them why those beliefs are “wrong,” would be an example of a pluralist.)

In the religions seminar that I took last quarter, the professor described religious pluralism as “crossing the Rubicon.” She even drew a river on the board and wrote “exclusivism” and “inclusivism” on one side of that river and “pluralism” on the other. (I love it when professors draw on the board!) She then explained what this diagram meant.

If you’re going to take an exclusivist or inclusivist view of religion, you don’t have to change what you believe too much. You still believe, more or less, that your religion is right and that everyone else’s is wrong or at least not as good as yours. Your God is still the best God and the most powerful God and you are His blessed chosen. You don’t have to question a lot of doctrine or rethink much theology. To hold these views, you don’t have to think too much about what you believe. You also don’t have to change many of the tenants of your faith.

Pluralism, though, is quite different. When you are a pluralist, you have to be able to put your beliefs aside. You have to be able to say that there is something more important than being right or being saved or being united with God in a pleasant afterlife. You have to see understanding between people as more important. You have see people getting along in this life as more important than fighting over whose God is better or whose doctrine is most true. Instead of seeking converts, you seek friends. Instead of being content with tolerance, your goal is an open-mind. And to reach some of these goals, you have to rethink some of the major tenants of your religion. You might have to question some important theology and doctrine. You might even have to decide that these goals are more important than some of the rules of your religion. When you become a pluralist, you cross the Rubicon, and you might have to leave some important aspects of your own religion behind.

This doesn’t mean that pluralists have to abandon their faith completely. Pluralism is not the same as universalism, which says that all faiths point to the same God and we will all be with this God in the afterlife, no matter what religion we follow. Pluralism is also not the same as eclecticism, which combines practices of different religions to make a whole new religion (such as Zen Buddhism, which is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Taoism). Pluralism doesn’t even have to be religious syncretism, which is the practice of different religions simultaneously, though they are not blended into one religion. A pluralist still practices his or her own religion. However, a pluralist interacts differently with those who do not follow the same religion. Instead of trying to convert them or simply allowing them to go about their religious business as long as it does not interfere with anyone else’s, a pluralist tries to understand someone else’s religion. A pluralist tries to see the world from the point of view of a person who practices this different faith. A pluralist sees someone of a different religion as one of “us” and not one of “them.” And a pluralist does not worry about whose religion is “right” or “wrong.”

Obviously, this is a very difficult mentality to cultivate. Thinking that your own beliefs are right and true and never trying to see otherwise from someone else’s perspective gives one a feeling of security. It feels safe, especially since you don’t have to question what will happen if you do try to understand people of other religions. You also don’t have to question truths that have been passed down to you in your own religion, which was set down by people much smarter than you and must be right because everyone you know has gone on for centuries without questioning it at all. You might–horror!–begin to see them as human beings just like yourself. You might be forced to admit that some of their beliefs do make sense. You also might lose your zeal to convert them to your own way of thinking, and you even might begin to wonder if all of this talk about hell is as dire as everyone makes it out to be. You might cross the Rubicon, and the other side of the Rubicon is uncharted territory. Not many people have been there; you don’t know what you might find.

As scary as crossing the Rubicon might be, I really think that it’s the best chance the religions of the world have for getting along with one another. If we could all try to understand each other’s beliefs instead of fighting about who is “right” and who is “wrong,” the world would be a much more peaceful place. The lines between “Muslim,” “Jew,” “Christian,” “Hindu,” and “Buddhist” would be blurred until we all just saw each other as people, people with a right to have their own system of beliefs. 

We also might be able to take constructive criticism from each other and perhaps improve our own belief systems as well. Instead of Muslims shouting, “Greedy materialists!” at the Christians, who merely shout back, “Oppressive militarists!” we might have Christians saying to Muslims, “You know what? We are awfully materialistic, and our greed has harmed other societies all over the world, not to mention the damage that it’s done to the environment. We really ought to go about changing this…” while Muslims say to Christians, “Yeah, we could do a better job of supporting human rights and providing freedoms to our people…” Does this kind of conversation sound far-fetched? Probably, but that’s because the understanding has got to come first. Think about it: you’re more likely to take criticism from a friend that from someone whom you view as an enemy.

I think that atheists, agnostics, deists, freethinkers, de-converts–whatever we want to call ourselves! For now, I’m going to put everyone in those categories under the label of Humanism for simplicity’s sake–have a role to play in this too. While we may not be religious, we can still practice exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. There are people who think that religion should be done away with completely and we should all be Humanists, who don’t need a God to give us morality. There are people who think that religion should be tolerated and religious people should be able to go about their little rituals and prayers, so long as they don’t try to interfere with us. And then there are people who, even though they do not wish to practice religion themselves, are willing to consider the world from the point of view of someone who is religious and try to understand them.

Crossing the Rubicon can be just as difficult for Humanists as it can be for religious people. For instance, I know from my own life, that too often I merely dismiss Christians. I assume that because I used to be a Christian, I must understand all of them and know how all Christians think. This is simply not true. Though I might not want to practice Christianity anymore, I should still try to understand Christians and be willing to see the world from their perspective. I should be willing to talk to them, to find out why they believe what they believe. It’s something that I will probably always be struggling with, but that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try.

I would also argue that being willing to understand religious people can be a little scary for even Humanists. It involves stepping outside of the safe boundaries that we have set up for ourselves. (Yes, even freethinkers have boundaries.) We might have preconceived notions about religion that we feel safe clinging to because they give order to our lives. They allow us to classify people as “us” and “them.” We’re human and we like our neat little classifications. They make our lives much simpler.

But if we want to get along with each other, we’re going to have forget about simplicity. We’re going to have to cross the Rubicon and let it carry us away from our safe, secure boundaries. We’re going to have to be willing to redefine our views of all sorts of people. And we’re going to have to see the world in complexity instead of simple binaries of “right” and “wrong,” “true” and “false,” “us” and “them.” Maybe we will have to give up a lot of beliefs that we hold as absolute. Maybe we will have to rethink a lot of our most important assumptions. Maybe we will have to change our religions and worldviews and leave the judging up to God, if we happen to believe in God. This doesn’t mean that we have to drown all of our old views in the Rubicon. It just means that we may have to let some of them float away. But the new worldviews that we create after we’ve all crossed together could be even better than the old views that we leave behind.

Feminism and Christianity: Oil and Water or Optimism?

 I think Christianity has the potential to be one of the greatest promoters of feminism in our world today.

No, really, I’m serious. Christians often like to say that many of the budding church’s converts were women because Christianity offered them so much more freedom than the larger culture did. Everything that I’ve read seems to indicate that this is true. Women were some of the earliest leaders in the church. Paul’s command for women to keep silent in church gatherings seems to make the most sense in a historical context. I’ve heard two interpretations for it: One is that women were allowed to speak in church, but many of them were abusing that right and using it as an opportunity for gossip. Paul, understandably, wanted women to talk about such matters, which would have been irrelevant to the church gathering, at home. The other interpretation that I’d heard was that traveling Gnostic preachers were spreading heresies by teaching them to women who wouldn’t know any better. These women were then spreading these heresies in church gatherings, and Paul is urging these women to stop. The command about braided hair and gold and pearl jewelry can also be read in a historical context–depending on the culture, braided hair can be a symbol of modesty.

So why is Christianity so patriarchal now? Well, I’ve mentioned previously that when the Roman Empire fell, aestheticism and a hatred for this present world became highly valued in Christianity. Along with this came a hatred for women, and unfortunately, this idea has never really left Christianity. There also no denying that, as progressive as Christianity was in its day, it was still strongly influenced by the patriarchal cultures of the Jews, the Romans, and the Greeks, which surrounded it. In its time, it did reach out to women in a way that hadn’t been done before, but it didn’t continue with its progress.

I still see no contradiction between being a Christian and a feminist. When I was a Christian, I thought that the church could be changed. Hymns could be re-worded so that their language was more inclusive. So could the Bible, which could refer to God as “she” when God was being described with feminine attributes and “he” when God was being described with masculine attributes. I was proud of the fact that the 70’s feminist movement’s roots can actually be traced back to women in the Christian church attempting to win the right to become ordained ministers. Sure, a lot of Christian men that I knew (and even women) wondered what the big deal was. So what if God was referred to as “he?” Everybody knew that God was not human; he had no gender. (I still want to snicker when people say that.) I even did some research into writings that claimed that the earliest churches had referred to the Holy Spirit as a Goddess. I thought that Christianity and feminism were, for the most part, perfectly compatible.

There were a few flaws in my thinking. For instance, if a large enough portion of Christians became open to more inclusive pronouns referring to God, how would one decide which pronoun to use? Would this change in pronouns just end up reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes? And what about the Christian view of sex? Though the earliest church might have been more open to women, it was still very prudish, and a distrust of sex is bound to foster distrust for women. And I’m still not sure of the truth of the Holy Spirit being considered a Goddess in early Christianity. Even when I wanted to believe it, it sounded like wishful thinking on the part of some Christian feminists. Still, I didn’t see a reason why my feminism and my Christian faith should conflict with each other.

However, eventually I had to wonder, if God meant women and men to be as equal as all of the Christian feminists said, if the Bible wasn’t meant to be interpreted as subjugating women, then why had God allowed Christianity to become so patriarchal? Surely, if all of the debasement that the church had heaped upon women for centuries was against God’s will, wouldn’t God have put a stop to it sooner? Why would God even allow it to happen in the first place? I couldn’t come up with an answer. Christian feminists like to blame culture, but shouldn’t God and Christianity, if they are the one and only truth, transcend culture? After meeting people of different faiths, learning about other world religions, and studying the history of how Christianity became so anti-feminist, I concluded that Christianity doesn’t transcend culture. It’s constructed to meet the needs of the culture that it inhabits. Sometimes it influences a culture that it encounters. Just as often, culture influences it. Christian rules about how women are to be treated, just like all the other Christian rules, were cultural constructs that seemed to have nothing to do with God.

I certainly won’t say that feminism pushed me away from Christianity. I still have some hope that the Christian church can begin to give women the equality and respect that they deserve. The two ideologies can be compatible. However, feminism, just like fat acceptance, did play a role in my de-conversion.