When I was a child, about 6, we used to have neighborhood “weddings” on the steps of the Baptist Church on our street. The girls wore their mothers’ lace curtains as veils. I, however, was ALWAYS the priest. Pretty weird, considering I was a Catholic kid and never even knew a “Protestant”. I kissed a [...]
well i’m 16 now but i’ve always kind of felt different than other girls, i could never put my finger on why i felt this way though. I live smack in the middle of “The Bible Belt” USA and thus i was brought up literally being brainwashed that homosexuality is the biggest sin one can [...]
I know that when talking among my own minister and many of my friends, we have often talked of this Jesus and what kind of a man he would be today if he walked among us. I have heard many things – an activist protesting social injustices such as the death penalty, treatment of the poor and ill, and as he would fight for all he believed in against abortion at some stage; a community organizer of a magnitude we have never seem before (step aside with your fancy talk, President Obama, Jesus is here!); an environmentalist on a stage somewhere shaking hands with Al Gore; and someone we could all look up to as a model of how to live our lives honestly and with dignity.
For those of you paying attention to last week’s blog, you will remember when I first let it slip that I was adopted in Alice, You’ve Really Stepped In It Now!!!!, I wrote, “I have an allegory to being born into religion and that complete acceptance, that blind faith, that so many in the religious community have.” I compared that fact of being brought up in a completely different, loving and wonderful family not genetically my own was akin to being raised Catholic, Islamic, or Jew. It was a fact I had accepted as the truth that the people who took me home from the hospital the day after I was born were my parents, the same way children born into one religion would almost always stay that religion their entire life, regardless of knowledge, life experience or morality.
As Alice blindly and without much forethought ran down the rabbit hole into Wonderland (or was it?) so do children born of their parents follow them into the family’s religious fold. It is a predestined plan, one the child has no control over and once indoctrinated will fight to the death for those beliefs as strongly as their parents before them.
