Monday, May 17, 2010

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything


There are secrets that we still have left to find
There have been mysteries from the beginning of time
There are answers we’re not wise enough to see
He said, “You’re looking for a clue; I love you free…”


Relay for Life gave me a lot of time to think. It also gave me sore legs, exhaustion, and a bad rash, but that’s another story.

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, while walking around the track for the seventeenth some time, the topic of religion came up between me, Sami, and Andrew. It might have been something about the magic and peacefulness of the darkness, or the rush of inspiration that walking for a long time gives me, or maybe even the Java Monster I had drank the hour before…but I realized that I finally had myself figured out. What I think about life, and God, homosexuality, and all those tricky controversial topics: I finally knew how I felt about them. It was the shining point of clarity I had been waiting for. I was able to talk for hours about the things I believed in, and listen to what Sami and Andrew thought, and I felt…really free.

I was brought up in a fairly Liberal environment. My dad was my inspiration, a hippy, loving life and music, and while my mom wasn’t quite as extreme, she always voted for the Democrat, and was fairly open-minded about everything. While we went to church, God was never a huge factor in our lives. This is pretty similar to how I live now. How you’re brought up has a huge impact on how you think later in life. There is one major difference, though: God is a huge factor in my life. I still don’t go to church as often as I should. But I talk to God all the time, and He keeps me going, and He’s helped me discover myself.

First issue in question: homosexuality. I’ve never really been against homosexuals. But only in the past few weeks have I really become outspoken against people who prosecute them, trash-talk them, or say that being gay is a sin. There are grounds for this accusation; Leviticus 18:22 says, “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable.” So yes, the Bible says it’s bad. Seeing as the book of Leviticus is basically the good Christian rulebook for life, it makes sense that devout Christians would take this to heart. But let’s look at some other Leviticus verses.

Leviticus 11:6-8 says, “The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a split hoof; it is unclean for you. And the pig, though it has a split hoof completely divided, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.”

Leviticus 12:2-7 says, “Say to the Israelites: A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for several days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. On the eighth day the boy is to be circumcised. Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. She must not touch anything sacred or go to the sanctuary until the days of her purification are over. If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding. When the days of her purification for a son or daughter are over, she is to bring to the priest at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting a year-old lamb for a burnt offering and a young pigeon or a dove for a sin offering. He shall offer them before the Lord to make atonement for her, and then she will be ceremonially clean from her flow of blood.

Leviticus 23:3 says, “There are six days when you may work, but on the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.”

So according to the Old Testament, we can’t eat bacon or sausage (damn, my church is guilty, we’ve been putting sausage in those breakfast burritos), after women have a baby, they are considered unclean (also, they have to atone for their sins and make a sin offering …since when is having a child a sin?!), and we can’t work on Sundays (on our church mission trip, we worked just as hard on Sundays as we did any other day). Do we do any of these things anymore? No, obviously. We may have waaaaay back in the day, but things have changed. This says to me that the Old Testament is as outdated as the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. The idea that being gay was detestable is an old idea: the period in which that verse was written was a period in which being gay was looked down upon. Unfortunately, we seem to be going through a similar period now.

Here’s another way to look at it: there is solid proof that being gay is chemical; you’re born with it. So if God creates all of us, knits us together in our mother’s womb, and makes sure we all have the potential to be wonderful people with an amazing, fulfilling life, than why would he add in a trait that he despised? Being gay or a lesbian is about LOVE. Just like any other good romantic relationship. It just so happens that some relationships happen between same-sex partners and others happen between a man and a woman. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It’s not just the verses in Leviticus that I have a problem with. Honestly, it’s almost the entire Old Testament. God as he is portrayed in that half of the bible is different from the God I know, and he’s not a God I’d agree to worship. He destroys whole cities, he turns his back on sinners, he forces people to make offerings to him. He’s a supreme overruler in the sky who sits on his golden throne, manipulating the world to his liking and terrified that his royal subjects will decide to worship someone other than him. He’s jealous and vengeful and bent on “justice.” He kind of reminds me of Hitler or Stalin. It’s this that has made me turn me back on the Old Testament completely. It holds no credibility for me anymore and I’m really surprised it ever did. If it weren’t for the New Testament and how radically different it is, I don’t know if I’d be a Christian anymore.

1 John 4:16 says, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.”

God is love. This one phrase embodies everything I believe and love about the Christian religion. In the New Testament, God is suddenly no longer the vengeful, hateful God that we read about in the Old Testament. Suddenly he is worried for us, and the things we are doing, the sins we are committing that are messing up our lives so badly. Instead of trying to make us obey with fear, like in the Old Testament, he uses love. In the form of his son, Jesus Christ, he walks among us and shows us how to love again. He’s like the bearded white-robed Biblical version of Martin Luther King Jr., the way he uses peace instead of force to get his message across. He dies for us, so that we may be forgiven for all our sins and mistakes. And he rises again, creating an explosive new religion, telling his disciples to spread the word. The New Testament is so overwhelmingly positive compared to the Old Testament. They contrast like black and white. This is what I was thinking about the most when freezing my butt off walking around the track over and over last night.

I think that God is a completely positive force, and the devil is a completely negative one. I think that God manifests Himself as all the positive forces in the universe. He is in all love, whether it be between great friends or between lovers. He is alive in the powerful force called music; He’s there whenever I turn on my iPod or whenever a group of people bursts into song, and He’s in that breathless, intense, frozen moment that occurs just after the last shining note of a great marching band show. He lives in the wind, the trees, water and fire, earth and air, He’s the beauty and ferocity of the wilderness, he’s the stillness of a star-filled night, He’s the infectious hope of the first rays of sunlight after a long night of walking the Conifer High School track over and over. He peeks out behind every smile, every laugh. He shines out of the eyes of every person who has discovered his love and uses it as a driving force in their life. In addition to being a force of the universe, I do also believe in God as a sentient being. I think he created this wonderful life for us, he created us individually, and he watches over us and loves all of us every single day.

In contrast, I think that Satan manifests himself as all the negative forces in the universe. Sadness, anger, lies, hate, murder, poverty, jealousy, death, suicide, war. The list goes on. Whether Satan is a sentient being as well, I don’t know (though I certainly hope not), but I do know that Satan and God live in all of us. We all have good and evil inside us, but it’s our choice which we choose to act upon. We can turn to Jesus for that, because he died for our sins, and whenever we mess up or do something wrong, we know we can rely on his forgiveness. The entire past, present, and future of the human race is a struggle between good and evil, love and hate. On a small scale, the struggle is inside each one of our minds, every second of our lives, with every decision we make. On a larger scale, it’s between countries, and trying to replace war with peace. On a cosmic scale, it’s a war between God and Satan. Things can look pretty dismal. But in the end, do you know what’s always, always, always going to win? Love. God and love.

I don’t know if there’s a heaven. I don’t know if there’s a hell. If there is a heaven, I want to live a life full of love and living like Jesus so I can go there after I die. If there’s a hell, I definitely don’t want to go there, and I don’t want anyone else, even people I don’t like very much, to go there either. But if there isn’t either of these things (or even if there is), I know for a fact that heaven and hell both exist on earth. If there’s a possibility that this life is all we have, why don’t we make the best of it? We can’t live out our lives looking for answers, we can’t treat this life like it’s a test, or this earth like it’s disposable. Even if heaven is our eventual destination, this is where we are now. We need to create heaven on earth, and live like Jesus did. I hate the way most Christians are presenting themselves to the world: hypocritical, biased, hateful Conservatives driven by fear of what will happen to them if they do not obey their God. It seems like a lot of kinds of evangelism these days are fear-based. It’s good to be an evangelist, and to open people’s eyes to Jesus and his love for us. But we need to do it peacefully, and with love, like Jesus did. It’s our duty as Christians. I know I’m not the only one who thinks things like this. Maybe if we all began to see things this way, the world would be united by God, the way it was meant to be, and love will triumph over hate for good.

2 comments:

  1. Laura,

    I very much appreciated your post. I, too, have been blogging on similar issues of late, particularly on the gay or lesbian person of faith's experience ... I was raised Evangelical, and came out in 2000. Sorting through it all has been a long, long process. You can read about it on my blog -- and I look forward to reading more of yours. Thanks again for your message of love and optimism!

    Josh

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  2. Thanks a lot for your comment. :) It's nice to know people are reading what I write!

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