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?

Well, if God is the one highlighted in the film Jesus Camp, you should be afraid. Very afraid. I usually find it in poor taste to denigrate the faiths of others (admittedly, I’ve made an exception for Mormons and Scientologists), but in the case of Kids In Ministry International (the organization featured in the film), I don’t see how I can keep my mouth shut. From the opening scenes, in which the rather hefty, third-generation Pentecostal preacher Becky Fischer preaches about fasting while her gut seeks escape from her waistband, to the creepy scene in which a church full of children reaches out their hands and weepingly prays to a life-size cutout of George W. Bush, the rather even-handed documentary calmy reveals a horror of child indocrination into a politicized, bellicose form of Christianity that is only equalled by the stories one hears about the madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. With no voiceover or commentary, the film paints a picture of an overweight, ignorant, and self-righteous group of people convinced that their militant, idioglottic (see Becky Fischer’s bizarre and convoluted rationalization for speaking in tongues) form of Christianity will save the world from itself, and probably within a generation. If you haven’t seen a chilling horror film in a while, Jesus Camp should be on your list. Because of the friend who recommended it to me (thanks a bunch, Sasha!) I think I’ll be having nightmares tonight.

One of god’s little warriors:

You know that old rule about how you shouldn’t discuss religion, politics, or sex in polite company? Well thank God the Internet is hardly what you’d call polite company, or I wouldn’t have much to talk about. For awhile now, I’ve found myself a little irritated by some of the more rabid atheists in the public eye (at least one of whom seemingly can’t be mentioned without mentioning his excessive drinking). I’ve always been aware that one of the reasons for my joy in goading atheists into a debate was that if they truly held that the foundations of their belief were logic, their side of the argument was doomed at the outset. Agnosticism is one of the predictable results of applying reason to the topic of God, but to attempt to proclaim the absolute non-existence of something is absurd. Much like saying humans have never been to the moon simply because you haven’t. This idea gets summed up nicely in the compelling book Cosmos and Psyche in a few passages where the author points out that in the final attempt to remove all projected beliefs about the universe, one is ironically forced into what is perhaps the ultimate expression of the very anthropocentric approaches that one is attempting to destroy by proclaiming that in a theoretically infinite and largely unexplored universe, rational human thought is the only thing that matters. Chris Hedges also sums it up well when he points out how much atheists have in common with religious fundamentalists, and how their common ground is really an emotional immaturity that renders them incapable of accepting the ambiguity and complexity of life, which forces them to retreat into a personally safe, inflexible, and defensible world view. To the self-aggrandizing Four Horsemen (c’mon, can’t you guys even come up with your own iconography?) I say: “Where is your lack of God now, ignorant atheist!?!?” Heh.