The complications in sharing an identity that others have hijack and utilize for harm and hate
I consider myself a Christian, in the most simplistic way possible regarding that signifier or identity. I put on that label, because I have full investment in this idea that the Nicene creed, and much of the Church traditions that I value and the men and women who lived the lives that wrote that tradition down, best explains my very personal devotion to a supreme deity that I recognize, identify, and try to grasp a mortal understanding for in my day-to-day life. Run-on sentences are my specialty. I feel like I want to answer as to the admitted evil being done in the name of that label, and I thought I'd start here. It's a dumb thing to want to do on a mid-day Friday, but it's been on my mind for a while and I want to put it down forever.
My faith is sort of...defined by how Paul Tillich mentioned, a universal truth that you cannot deny upon reception of it, through grace. I did not receive my religion through the pathways of evangelism, I'd guess, but through age and experience of opening myself up to that universal truth when I had the ears to listen. It's now grown into me, like a benign tumor, consistently reminding me of my obligation toward others.
I experience grace through the process of introspectively observing the Divine's love that sits like that tumor deep inside my id. If you want to know how I got to the point of observing it, I cannot tell you because it just clicked one day, specifically while driving. There is a divine love for each of us, within us, and it is readily available for you to receive the moment you seek it. It's humbling, an ocean to which you compare as a small drop, and it speaks in sensation - it's the love of a creator, toward its creation, as the love of a parent toward their child (as I have experienced it). It wants one thing, and one thing only, it has one ask: to love creation (everyone, including yourself, but especially everyone that isn't you), as it loves you. Unrequited, unasked, complete and total and unequivocal. It's a hard ask, I get it, but that's its ask.
It is a massive love, and one that only you can separate or sever from -- it's always there, but we can break from listening for it. What do you get in reward for listening to it, besides understanding where it is coming from, is also a pure truth explained in revelation by its love: you get to enjoin with it, you get to [i]be love[/i]. Our obligation, and this is a task assigned to us as manifest creation itself (the universe with eyes), is to make a Kingdom of Heaven, that love as it is discoverable in our hearts, in creation. Every action you take, every effort you should enjoin on this earth, should be and must be toward that goal - make its love manifest, here and now.
So, that's freaky right? That's dumb, right? Yeah, I get it. lol
I find that Christianity, in many of its traditions, forms a frame from which I build upon this unassailable faith. One of the things you learn upon opening up your receptors to this love is, it's multifaceted. It's thorough and perfect, and It is many and all at once -- I mean, if it's asking us to be a mirror reflection of Its love, and we are so varied and multifaceted, once you receive this revelation it becomes so obvious! I find the beauty in the mystery of the Trinity to be a small encapsulation of this revealed truth. You have the love the Father (from which begets, from which creates, from which the love is defined as inherently paternal), the love of the Spirit (a wholly different personhood -- through which you most commune with, in your personhood, with the divine love), and the love of the Human in Christ (a wholly different personhood -- through his teachings you learn just how to formulate the Kingdom in creation).
I mean, you can find any human teaching that can rightly assign the right symbolism and right mind and right words to meet a human understanding of this divine love, and there are a human-quantity number of methods to arrive at the final conclusion (love) regarding the universal truth. Christian theology helps me assign a human understanding to a truth that is beyond my understanding, so that's what I picked out of the pile. There's a lot of cultural conditioning behind it, I'm sure, but it makes me happy.
Okay. Phew. So where am I going with this?
Fuck evangelicals. I am intolerant toward intolerance, as commanded by my faith. Fuck them, fuck the Southern Baptist convention specifically by name, fuck these fuckers for wrecking my signifiers with their sin and hate.
this post feels masturbatory, but that's really all I wanted to say. I could go into detail, but my god are false religions (and I'm taking that phrase back -- a religion is false when through its fruits, it defies and defiles the divine love) some of the worst organized groups on this world.
Fuck those bastards.