If I didn’t know better, I might be inclined to think this man were gay himself

One of the only things I really want in life is to understand people, and to be understood. I think this is true for many of us. Understanding is a lot like love, and I feel safe in saying, therefore, that all many of us want is to love and be loved. When you have a lot of love and understanding, you usually find some peace, and if you put the three together, you get a great tune like What’s So Funny ’bout Peace Love & Understanding. Lately though, I’ve felt a little frustrated around two topics that come up a lot in social dialogue: God and homosexuality. On the God topic, I get frustrated because I feel like spiritual beliefs are something you share when someone asks you to do so, not something you run around screaming about. I just never see much of anything good happening whenever anybody actively expresses their beliefs about the origin and meaning of human life before it comes up through simpler conversation. And likewise, although I have close friends who pretty much cover all the gender orientations, I don’t really care much whom you want to have sex with unless you and I know each other and it’s somehow germane to the conversation. I’m just tired, really tired, of people telling me whether they believe in God or not when I didn’t ask, and people proclaiming their beliefs on homosexuality, whether they’re hatemongering freaks like Fred Phelps, the bent Baptist behind the “God Hates Fags” movement, or just a friend trying to further their civil rights in an obviously socially immature country. And all of this, it seems to me, has a simple basis: a kind of emotional immaturity that drives people to put the contradictions of life that they can’t accept into polarized perceptions so that they can find their “safe zone” and proceed to take some kind of high ground attacking things that make them nervous. The grounds for a lot of contempt for Christianity seems to be the simple fact that a lot of Christians misrepresent their own documents to suit their discomforts. The limited references to homosexuality in the bible, for instance, simply lump it together with other sex acts that are not for the purpose of procreation. You simply don’t see rabid fundamentalist Christians protesting prostitution, fornication or adultery the way they do homosexuality. And on the other hand, the more rabid atheists out there seem just as obsessive about attacking religion in a simplistic way that more than anything, sells books. This Salon interview with Chris Hedges explores, as Salon puts, it why “Atheists like Christopher Hitchens are as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists“. If you’re an admirer of “The New Atheists”, you might want to give it a scan; it’s not especially pro anything; in fact Chris Hedges at one point says – referring to Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens – that “what they had done for the secular left was to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right“. So, I have to ask. In a world where Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler has to make a plea to remove rape from the manufacturing process of cell phones, don’t we have plenty of other hot topics that we could agree on and actually get to work, instead of spending all our time ranting speculatively about morality and religion, like I’ve just done here?