Librangelical

I’m blessed in my marriage and as a Christian I thank God that my wife and I not only found each other, but that He gave her the strength to put up with me for all these years!

However, when faced with a militant campaign against the reform of marriage laws by evangelical Christians, I have to ask myself, what if I was born different..? What if I grew up to find that I was only ever attracted to people of the same sex..?

 

As a straight man, my sexuality is not something that I could ever be in any doubt about, so when I have friends who’ve only ever been attracted to the same sex, and for whom straight feelings are as incomprehensible as homosexual feelings are to me, who am I to question them?!

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Well I suppose I might say, “I have a Book and it says this…”, but it’s my interpretation of that book against their very sense of being. It’s my doctrinal belief against their suffering and strength in the face of persecution. And it’s my ‘spiritual’ understanding against scientific and medical knowlege which tells us that gender and sexuality, while unremarkable and settled for about 80% of us, is far more confusing, both physiologically and psychologically for another 10%, and down right messed up (by my exclusive religious standards) for the remaining 5-10%.

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So am I prepared to say that at the expense of the freedom, equality and physical & emotional well being of millions of people world wide, that marriage must and can only be between a straight man and a straight woman?

No, I’m not, and neither should you.

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“Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand”

“One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind”

“Therefore do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil”

“Because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and receives human approval”

[Exerts from Romans Chapter 14]

I’m sure some will argue that the scriptures that I’ve quoted above were given in a specific context, (the observance of ‘holy’ days and the eating of food which has been sacrificed to an idol). I would point out that: 1. This doesn’t stop the principles being applied in a more general context and 2. The ‘anti-gay’ scriptures generally quoted in opposition to homosexuality were also given in a specific context; that of temple prostitution, and as such have little or no application when it comes to loving, committed human relationships.

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I wonder what (if anything) we stand to lose by reforming the laws around marriage..? Will this take anything away from straight married couples or those entering into straight marriages in the future? Will it detract from the ‘institution’ of marriage, either as a social or religious convention?

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Millions of people get married in this country every year, and while many of them see the act in a strictly or broadly Christian context, very many more do not; some are Hindu, some are Muslim, some are agnostic and many are conscious atheists. Some have a religious ceremony and some make every effort to remove any spiritual aspect and have a purely civil ceremony. Are some of these marriages ‘better’ than others? Is there some kind of sliding scale with atheists at the bottom and True Christian Believers at the top? (And civil partnerships not even counted..)

On their website the Coalition for Marriage argue that same sex couples already enjoy all of the legal benefits of marriage in the UK under civil partnerships, but similar arguments have been made to justify discrimination throughout history; blacks had their own exclusive seats on buses in segregated America, so why would they need to sit anywhere else?  Similarly in South Africa under apartheid the state claimed it wasn’t about persecution, only recognising and separating out ‘differces’.  Some would argue that sexual orientation is a choice whereas race is not, but try telling that to the mortally persecuted and terrified homosexual minority in Uganda; many of whom would like nothing more than to be ‘normal’, but for whom there is evidently no choice.

The fact is that the Coalition for Marriage campaign is not about preserving any particular view of marriage, or saving marriage its self from some profound loss or denigration. Rather it’s about exclusivity and saying ‘this particular group are not worthy and don’t deserve to enjoy married life together or in the eyes of society’. It’s about intolerance, inequality, religious bigotry and social apartheid.

Just to be clear, (in case I’ve left you in any doubt), I do NOT endorse the Coalition for Marriage petition, and I would NOT encourage anyone to sign it. The legal institution of marriage should be available to all within society, whatever their gender or sexuality, (and if we are to retain civil partnerships in the UK then so should they).

As a Christian my beliefs might still be at odds with some in the LGBT community; I believe that unbridled promiscuity can be physically, psychologically and emotionally harmful, and that an exclusive sexual relationships within the bonds of monogamous marriage are a high human ideal. I would want to encourage anyone, of any sexuality to strive for that ideal, but how can I do that if I hold an exclusively hetrosexual view of marriage?

Therefore, in conscious opposition to the Coalition for Marriage petition and in support of marriage for all of God’s children, I have signed this petition, and I would very much encourage you to consider adding your own signature.

Until recently I had someone among my Facebook friends, (not someone I know directly but a mutual friend of some of my Christian friends), who posted a short article on Facebook about Ernst Haeckel, a 19th century biologist / naturalist well known for his long disproved and abandoned recapitulation theory which stated that embryos resembled different stages of their species evolutionary development through their own stages of development in the womb.

While Haeckel’s theories were certainly flawed, he was very much a product of his time, and it is certainly unfortunate that his flawed theories were so influential on 19th century thought and education, however, he is often quite grossly miss-represented by the modern creationist / ID camp as an anti-religious and deliberate fraud, particularly with regard to his now infamous illustrations of three stages of development in 8 different embryos (including human) showing early similarities before later divergence.

Firstly, the illustration commonly held up by creationists and attributed to Haeckel is in fact an 1892 copy of his original work drawn by Romanes, which has been further altered to show greater similarity and more animalistic characteristics in the human example.

Secondly, it is commonly stated by creationists that after being exposed by fellow Professor Wilhelm His in 1874, Haeckel was convicted of fraud by the Jena university court.  However, the only sources for this are recent hearsay.  It appeared in a failed 2001 Arkansas anti-evolution bill and has been quoted and re-quoted but there is absolutely no historical evidence to suggest it is true.

Finally, Haeckel is roundly demonised as a deliberate, outright and discredited fraud when in fact his work was largely derivative of the material available to him and represented the prevailing political / social and scientific biases of his day, much like many other fields of science at the time.

The post stated these common inaccuracies without question so I commented on it with a civil, well researched, reasonable and measured response pointing out the problems with the position as stated; Romanes’s plate had been attributed to Haeckel, and the usual picture of an outright and thoroughly discredited fraud had been painted.

The poster’s response to this?  They simply deleted my comment. (I usually compose length posts and comments off-line for editing and spell checking before posting them to Facebook but in this case I didn’t do that so I don’t have a copy of my response, otherwise I would have reproduced it here.)

Ignorance is not a sin, we all suffer from it, myself included, but embracing and deliberately propagating it (as I’ve implied in the title of this note) is a most terrible transgression.  To respond to an extensively researched and carefully written comment by simply deleting it is a response only to be pitied.

I’ve removed the person in question from my friends list so they needn’t worry about me challenging their dearly held ignorance any further but it is such a shame that it should come to that in regard to a ‘Christian’ friend.  I will not, however, enter into conversation or debate with those who reject honest and objective inquiry in favour of a narrowly interpreted all consuming religious dogma, and I publish this as a further example of the cancer of ignorance and deception which sadly infects some quarters of the creationist / ID camp.

Thankfully this is not always the case; the following Blogging Heads debate between Ronald Numbers, an agnostic evolutionist science historian, and Paul Nelson, a ‘young earth’ creationist and ID proponent should restore some faith in the integrity and objectivity of some of those engaged in this important debate…

 

There are several methods of applying ‘parental controls’ to a home internet connection; some ISPs provide content filtering either at their end, or built into the router they give you, and there are also several commercial applications which can be locally installed to apply restrictions and monitoring.

All of these methods have their significant drawbacks; router restrictions have to be carefully and exhaustively configured and will generally only be any good for blocking specific sites, rather than categories of content.

Installed apps can be expensive, relatively easy to get around, (for example they don’t apply to your kids mobile phones or games consoles!) and often have the big drawback that they need to install a database of sites to block which can just as easily be used as a reference for finding illicit material.

Of course it’s simply not possible to make any internet connection 100% safe, however, there is one solution which I believe offers significant advantages compared to the methods above, without any of the obvious drawbacks; OpenDNS.

Anyone can sign up for a free OpenDNS account at www.opendns.com, then simply change the DNS server addresses on your router to the OpenDNS servers; 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220, (and of course make sure the control interface on your router is secured with a strong password).

Once this is set up OpenDNS offers an excellent control interface where you can select a general level of restriction which can be tweaked to a fairly detailed degree by simply checking and unchecking the extensive list of categories.

You can also add specific domains which may occasionally be able to circumvent the OpenDNS restrictions (proxy sites can spring up overnight and may not always be immediately blocked by the OpenDNS proxy list), and as well as controlling what types of content are accessible on your network, you can monitor general traffic and any attempts to access blocked pages.

If you have a static IP address, (as the majority of broadband connections do these days), then that really is all there is to it.  And for those with a dynamic IP address, (which changes every time you connect to your ISP), OpenDNS can be easily configured to work with a DNS forwarding service.

OpenDNS aren’t the only provider of free DNS services, Google offer a DNS service which is aimed more at network security and performance than content control and there are others, however, all in all I’ve found OpenDNS to be an excellent tool which gives a high degree of peace of mind when the kids are using the internet unsupervised, but does not otherwise intrude on our digital life.

Most Christians firmly believe that homosexuality is a choice;  perhaps the result of environmental factors or emotional insufficiency during childhood, compounded by adolescent homosexual encounters or even abuse.  The problem is that (apart from being terribly miss-led lies) these beliefs are often subconsciously but firmly based on the fact that at some point in their lives (usually during adolescence / young adulthood) they themselves have had some sort of (what they consider to be) ‘gay’ encounter, be this a brief physical liaison, shared sexual awakening, dream, fantasy or whatever.

Invariably though, this experience occurred during a period in their lives when they were hormonally driven to extreme and sometimes un-controlled sexual arousal, was not based on attraction but only on lust, and was in no way formative.

What they always fail to realise or comprehend is that this pattern of experience is nothing like the experience of the average homosexual child or teenager, for whom attraction towards the same sex is just as inevitable, exclusive, natural and overpowering as attraction towards the opposite sex is for the ‘average’ hormonal heterosexual teenager.

My experience is the former and I have to confess that same sex attraction is as incomprehensible to me now as it was during my teenage years, however, having gone through a normal adolescence with all of it’s overpowering feelings and confusion I easily fell for the ‘Christian’ deception that this ‘lifestyle’, rather than being an essential part of someones nature, is somehow birthed in the forge of adolescent lust.  This lie not only dismisses part of the humanity of gay men and women, it also serves to anathematise them and their ‘influence’ as somehow dangerous and infectious towards ‘decent’ but vulnerable young heterosexual teens.

I’m thankful to the gay friends that I have now (and those that I had then and never knew it) for demonstrating to me unequivocally that who they are is no more a choice than the colour of their eyes or skin, it’s simply who they are.  And to those still miss-led Christian heterosexuals I say, just as you did with your faith, look at and rationalise the evidence…  Would the early apostles and countless thousands of Christians have given themselves to their faith, persecution and martyrdom for a lie?  Nor would countless thousands of gay men and women give themselves to a life of persecution, social isolation and even violence and death (and continue bravely to do so in countries like Uganda where they face imprisonment and possible execution) simply for a bit of easy unconditional sexual release.

It’s time for the church to live up to it’s reputation and God’s command to love truth and begin to deal sensibly, reasonably and honstly with the evidence which is all around.  Sure there are issues of promiscuity / immorality among homosexuals just as there are among people of all sexual / social / spiritual persuasions; humans can be pretty screwed up whatever group they belong to or lifestyle they lead, but they can also be noble, loving and full of uncompromising bravery and integrity, and to deny or denigrate these qualities wherever they flourish is shameful in the extreme.

I’ll be happy to discuss this whole area from a ‘theological’ (or any other) perspective in comments but anyone who insists that as a Christian I must believe and apply [their interpretation of] the Bible over and above the reality and morality that is plainly self evident in the world before my eyes can frankly (and somewhat ironicaly) go fuck themselves.

Someone recently asked me ‘where I was coming from’ in relation to one of the many challenging or contrary comments I tend to post on Facebook postings of a religious / spiritual nature.

I thought I’d edit and note my response here in order to ‘nail my colours to the mast’ as it were, so that if any of my friends or peers have wondered the same thing, or perhaps are just wondering why they don’t see me in church any more, they can be absolutely clear about the reasons…

I’d first just like to add that while I have no issue with the traditional conservative internal ethical beliefs of the average charismatic Christian, (only with the way they sometimes live out those beliefs), I’ve personally become not just more practically liberal, (because of Gods Grace and scriptural priorities), but also ethically liberal in certain respects, the most notable of which is with regard to homosexuality, which I am convinced in and of it’s self is perfectly acceptable to God as part of the rich expression of life which He has created.

The initial comment I made was in response to a post about “Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians” and I pointed out that, as I saw it, Christians were themselves often guilty of intolerance and discrimination, and that they should generally be more concerned with doing something about this.

It was at this point that my friend said that he wondered where I was coming from, the following was my response:

No need to wonder; I’m aiming that comment at the majority of charismatic / fundamentalist Christians who regularly display prejudice and discrimination towards homosexuals, Muslims, liberals, humanists, atheists etc. I’m not saying that there isn’t similar sentiment on both sides, but Christians will complain loudly about being ‘discriminated’ against while happily supporting, for example, hoteliers who refuse to accommodate homosexuals, teachers / tutors / adoptive parents who insist it is their right to declare discriminatory religious views to their young charges, anti-Muslim calls and groups who keep repeating the tired argument, “we wouldn’t have these freedoms in a Muslim country so why should they have them here”.

The list goes on and on but what it all boils down to is a complete lack of objectivity and a huge level of hypocrisy when it comes to discrimination and prejudice. Christians will declare that they only want to be able to exercising their ‘religious freedom’, when in fact there is not, and cannot be room for any such thing as ‘religious freedom’ in a just society, freedom must be impartial, because all of those ‘other groups’ which we want to be able to speak out against and in some cases discriminate against are coming from exactly the same position as us – having a desire to live according to their own beliefs and conscience.

I often respond and comment in this way because I passionately believe that this is a deep and widespread problem in the church, it’s not that we shouldn’t hold to a particular personal / spiritual ethic, but that we need to develop a balanced and *scriptural* application of that ethic and an appropriate respect and appreciation for the wider secular space in which we live and work.

God’s Righteousness should make us deeply conservative in our hearts towards God, but His Grace should make us abundantly liberal in our attitudes towards others, unfortunately we are often quite the reverse!

I feel so strongly about this that I no longer attend a Pentecostal church; the views that I freely express online would simply not be at home in most Pentecostal churches and while I still have good relationships with many people in those churches, I’ve offended others when challenging bigotry and I cannot make any apology for that.

Anyone who knows me will realise that this is a fairly recent thing – go back a few years and I was just another unit on the Pentecostal production line, so much so that the inner conflict between what I professed and did as a Christian, and what I knew deep down in my heart to be right was causing me to be depressed, guilty, and deeply discontented in my faith.

While I certainly wouldn’t ‘write off’ every aspect of charismatic Christianity, I believe that it is increasingly becoming an unhealthy branch of the church which is profoundly displeasing to God in some fundamental ways, and consequently harmful to the reputation of the Gospel.

So, there you have it – as frank and honest a statement of my position as I can provide )