Guest Speaker

These are my prepared remark (which may be subject to revision) if I am ever invited to speak at my old college.

*****

Hey, how are you all doing today at the start of a new quarter?  Good?  Good.  Do they still take attendance to make sure you actually go to religious talks?  Well, that's good too.  It's wonderful to live in a system with such faith in the transformational nature of its fundamental ideas and practice, is it not?  I kid, I kid.  Well, I probably don't actually.  You should ask them why the daily practice of your religion is assumed to be so unappealing sometime.  Or better yet, ask yourself.  Either way, it seems like it would be better to ask yourself why it is necessary to corral an entire generation into actually practicing the religion that has theoretically been the center of your lives since you were children and is theoretically supposed to be the center once you are pushed out into the world without RAs and deans to check on your daily practice.  I mean, if you're going through the motions of a religious practice you don't find meaningful, would not both parties be served by that feedback?  You might be better off finding a practice that DOES mean something and your school might have to ask themselves why a religion defined as universally transformative doesn't seem to grab anyone anymore?  Or is this just me reading into something that isn't there?  Just me?  Okay.  What do I know anyway?  I'm just some guy.

*coughs*  But that's not what I came here to talk to you about.  Well, it is, in a way, but I didn't mean to start with such a cold slap to the face.  "You're doing you religion wrong!" I say.  "Well, thanks for being such a gracious guest," you might reply.  I should be gracious.  I want to be gracious.  But I admit I find it challenging.  Not very long ago I once sat where you sat, and I admit some elements of the school system frustrated me then too.  Well, when I say not that long ago, I mean 15 years, which isn't long ago for me, but is probably considerably longer for you when viewed from the slo-time field all youth are trapped in.  This is just an illusion of course, soon enough time will start slipping faster and faster until you want to grab the edges of your time bubble and beg it to slow down.  But you won't be able to grab hold to anything, just metaphorical air, and before you know it, you'll be 35, on the verge of the first of many happy mid-life crises and wondering how you got to be 40 pounds heavier and so far off track of the life you were expected to have.  And, if you're sitting in that pew and buried as deeply in the closet as I was at your age, you'll be emerging from said closet as well, blinking in the light of a new and confusing dawn, wondering how the hell you would do something as damaging and hurtful to yourself as pretending to be something you're not, for people who don't know what they're talking about for all these years.  As a side note, to anyone who IS gay and closeted and terrified and feeling trapped, there are more like you than you know, and if you email me at the address I asked to be put in the program today, I can introduce you to other Adventists who find themselves stuck in the same situation.  Ya'll would not believe how many gay Adventists there are out there struggling to reconcile being gay and being Adventist.  I don't know if you've noticed so far, but accepting the openly gay into the church has been kind of a hard sell so far.

But where were we?  Oh yes, the closet.  How could a good Adventist boy like me get trapped in such an unhappy place?  I know it must seem like the fault of the devil, or some-such, but it is really that hard to believe?  Growing up in this church, on what day are you told you are first a sinner?  It is the day you are born, is it not?  I mean sure, we look like innocent babies, mostly interested in warmth and milk, but what we really are, are desperate, born sinners with a crippling milk addiction.  That is the proper frame, is it not?  We are born to do bad things, and constantly tempted to do bad things, and it is only by the grace of Jesus that we are forgiven, and momentarily granted the relief that comes from knowing we are good to get into heaven.  Right up until our next sin.  Which might be tomorrow.  Or maybe it's now, as any of a million unclean thoughts flits its way through your head as some dinosaur from the distant past drones on and on about something or other in an assembly you don't really want to be at.  Really, you think of me as a dinosaur? Honestly kids, I'm only 37.

My point, so bluntly made, is that this religion teaches you, from day one, to hate yourself for being a sinner.  They never use quite those words, but the net effect of what you are taught is to believe, in the deepest core of your being, that you are WRONG and you'll have to be killed for being so awful, and the only way to remove this feeling is to beg an authority figure for a hit of sweet, temporary bliss in the form of forgiveness of real, deadly sin.  Deadly, because God'll kill you if you don't get right.  If you don't go through the motions, if you don't fall into line, if you don't go to worship 5 days a week, if you eat pork, if you wear jewelry, if you swim on a Saturday, if you do anything more heretical than clap awkwardly at a concert, if you think lustful thoughts when your crush walks into a room, if you're a dude and you want to kiss a dude, and if you think those things and do those things without forgiveness, without throwing yourself on the mercy of the court daily, you're gonna die.  And your parents are going to cry, and you're going to burn forever.

And I'm sorry, but the people you love are lying to you about all of this, all of these reasons to hate yourself.  Although don't be too mad, most of them are just repeating the lie their fathers told them.  The first lie is that you're wrong from the day you're born.   The second is that your have to grovel in despair over crimes both real and imagined, before authority, human or heavenly, to feel right. To be good.  I do not mean to imply we are all born good either, of course.  We are born to make mistakes.  We are born to be selfish, we are born to be compassionate, we are born in the tension between our darker desires and the better angels of our nature and living with other people born the same way.  So yes to be a jerk is in our nature, but so is being kind.  Isn't it weird that someone would tell you to focus solely on the one, and not the other?

The first lie is that making a mistake damns you for all eternity.  The second lie, is only authority can forgive a mistake.  In my experience, on a practical level, the first person to forgive after a mistake is yourself.  The second is whoever else your mistake might have harmed.  And then you clean up your mess, attempt to repair any damaged relationships, and then learn from what you did wrong.  And then doing it all over again when you fall down again.  Phenomenal cosmic powers are typically not a necessary part of that equation.

 The first and second lie, is that your mistakes are not just mistakes, they are violations on a universal level that will destroy you and everyone you know if the correct rituals are not followed.  They are an exaggeration of natural human behavior around making, correcting and forgiving mistakes.  They are normal guilt and empathy turned into an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The third lie is a contradiction.  The third lie is that all sinners are equally sinful and all sins can be forgiven and that some sinners are more sinful than others and not all sins can be forgiven.  The third lie is that Jesus loves you, except when you're WRONG and then he has to hate you, and that you can be welcome in a church full of sinners, except as a sinner, you are not welcome.  The third lie is that your body is a temple, and you must tend it, and it's okay if you don't tend it really.  The third lie is that all are sinners are welcome children of God but that only the gluttons, the liars, the gossips are children of God.  The third lie is that the holy spirit will guide you in telling you which sins are worse than others, which mistakes are sins and which are not, and that you never need to be taught the difference between your ingrown, emotional and cultural biases and the influence of the holy spirit.  The third lie is that only God can judge and that the church and the elders and the rest of you have to do some supplementary judging in the meantime.

It is not hard to go into the the closet, when you are told you're wrong every day.  It is not hard to go into the closet when you are told again and again that all sins are equal, but some sins are worse than others.  It is not a big step from, "I'd better not tell anyone I had a pork sandwich last night," to "I'm a guy and I'd better not tell anybody I wanted to kiss that handsome guy last night."  It is not unreasonable to hide, when you know your sin is one that God may forgive, but no one else in your community will.  It is not unreasonable to despair, when your entire community is governed by rules which humans must necessarily break in the course of being human, and that the rules your nature makes you prone to break will be punished, and the rules their nature makes them prone to break will not be.

 "Oh Betty, you shameless gossip, Jesus loves you, give us a hug."

"Oh H, you shameful faggot, Jesus isn't about loving other men, you gotta get out of here."

It's not hard to lose passion for your religion, when you people say "Jesus loves you" in a way that clearly means, "Jesus only loves people like me."

I would assert today, that the reason you need an attendance system to keep young people in a spiritual practice day-to-day, is that there is a core contradiction between the message of Jesus and the behavior of the church.  Your mouth says, "yes, come, there is love and room for all." and your hands say, "Well, except for the gays, and other unclean.  Hanging out with you freaks may have been fine for Jesus, but it won't fly here."

And so rather than admit that the church may have some work to do in reconciling its practice and structure with the message and behavior of Jesus (or may, in fact, be irredeemably broken as long as those who are in charge remain in charge), and rather than admit that there are things in your church that do not make sense, and preaches a lot of mixed messages which cannot all simultaneously be true, which leads to genuine confusion and unhappiness in the lives of its members unless they just stop thinking about it and go with the flow,we all smile and nod and go through the motions, pretending nothing is wrong.   And those of you with the socially acceptable sins can stay and worship, and those of us who have to hide more of ourselves than we're comfortable with, slowly fade away until it feels like we can breathe again.

I went into the closet for the same reason young Adventists fall away from the church every generation:  They can't reconcile what they were taught with their actual lived experience of the world, but they're not ready to alienate their friends and family.  So they and I smile and wave while slowly backing away.  And, if they're anything like me, they don't return because they find more beauty, truth and love outside of the Adventist church than they ever found within it.  No, the devil did not make me say that.

So, in closing, before I am chased out of here with pitchforks and torches, I would like to encourage you NOT to fade away from the church.  I encourage you to run way from it as fast as you can.  If this church embodies everything that is good about the world, then I encourage you to practice it whole-heartedly.  Conversely, if the practice and teaching of this church don't resonate with you, please don't fade away.  Please RUN AWAY towards something better.  There's no reward and quite a bit of pain in pretending to believe something you do not, and pretending to be something you are not for years and decades at a time.  There's no virtue in practicing something you believe to be a lie.  It doesn't matter what your parents say, it doesn't matter what the church says, if you don't want to be here, if this is not who you are, if you can't be who you are, and love the consenting adult you love and still be accepted as fully human and loved as the next person in this community . . . then you have to go.  Run fast.  Run far.  Run hard.  Keep searching.  But get away.  Get some space to breathe and be yourself.  I promise you there are more beautiful and wonderful and truthful things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Adventist philosophy.

For instance, they have a fancier hand-clap out there that they call "dancing."  It's pretty great.

Leaving Adventism, Part 2

I can't specifically remember the first moment I thought, "Hey, my religion might be bullshit," but I remember one of the first times.  I sat in the Gem State Academy chapel, my cheeks burning.  It was the culmination of one of the many prayer weeks, and the preacher had just made the altar call.  I was ashamed and angry, and my face felt flushed.  I was being asked to come to the front as a symbol of my willingness to serve Jesus, and I was terribly conflicted.  On the one hand, I wanted to be a good person, which I and everyone I knew equated with following Jesus.  And on the other, someone from my religion, which prides itself on intellectual argumentation and religious scholarship, was using heavy-handed emotional arguments and peer pressure to get me to make a meaningless gesture as a token of tribal identification.  It seemed mindless and manipulative.  And while the preacher framed my natural resistance to manipulation as "wrestling with the Holy Spirit," the angry thought running through my head was, "Hey, maybe this is all bullshit."

It took me a long time to more or less settle on that conclusion, but the evidence kept mounting.  And instead of dealing with it, I just noticed the cognitive dissonance that kept cropping up, and I just kind of passively faded from the Adventist scene.  After I left college I would only attend church sporadically, although I couldn't really tell you why.  I just did not like it and did not belong there.  And it wasn't just the fact that I was a closeted and therefore unhappy homosexual, although that was an important part of it.  It was also that the more I was outside of the church, the more I realized the church's explanations for just about any damn thing did not square with my experience of the world, and just choosing to ignore my experience when it conflicted with Adventist teachings was not an option for me.  Not forever anyway.

I did two of the hardest things I've ever done on Oct 31, 2011.  I told my parents I was gay.  And then they asked a question I should have seen coming: "well, what does this mean for your Adventism?"  Because if I could throw out what the bible says in "plain english" about being gay, then what else in the  bible was I willing to get rid of?  As it turns out, quite a bit of it.  I didn't specifically say at the time, I just told them there were bits I liked and would keep, and the rest I had to take a step back from.  In other words, I didn't consider myself an Adventist anymore.  I'm honestly not sure which of those two revelations shocked and hurt my parents more.

Honestly, I probably should have told them both of those things 15 years earlier.  But I dragged my feet for a variety of good and bad reasons.  Partly because most of my family and friends are Adventist and I wasn't ready to face the push-back or the pity or the patronizing attitudes like, "If you just understood the bible and christianity better, you would stay," or "If you weren't so easily tempted by Satan you would stay."  Because I watched a camp director I was friends with describe his son's decision to be truthful about his sexual orientation and embrace it without shame as choosing "to serve Satan."  Because I knew, having watched it happen to other people before, that my friends and family would assume that the boy they all thought was so bright and observant, who had been raised his entire life in Adventist churches and schools, had somehow managed to miss the truth and beauty of the Adventist religion and lifestyle.  That I could not possibly have processed Adventist philosophy and found it wanting, I must have misunderstood, been tempted, been an unobservant idiot.

The idea angers me, honestly.  Perfect I am not, but I know what I know, I know what I learned, I know what I saw, and and I know how much Adventism doesn't fit with my experience, knowledge or philosophy.  And while my person life philosophy is still a work in process, and I expect to be wrong, and make more mistakes and reserve to change my mind about a few things in the future regarding life the universe and everything, I can tell you this:  I have some serious fundamental problems with Adventism.  And I can tell you why.

To begin, I don't remotely agree with the basic world view or eschatology.  In Adventist thought the world is fallen, and must become more and more fallen as time goes on.  Eventually, God will withdraw his presence, the world will get really bad, Christians, especially Adventists, will be persecuted, and eventually Jesus will return to smite Satan and any human who does not worship God. In Adventist teaching, the world is always only a couple of years away from the return of Jesus, because the world's just THAT evil.  People outside the church might be well-meaning, but are fallen. When it comes down to it, they have been tricked by Satan in some big or small way.  It is the job of every Adventist to save them, to bring them the truth of the bible and this world view and baptize them into the church.  It is a calling.  If they do not convert these people, they will DIE in a lake of fire at the end of time.

To be blunt, this simply does not square with my experience or any rational observation of the world.  It took me a long time to get out of the adventist mindset to notice, but as it turns out I think a lot of things have gotten better for a lot of people.  More people are fed, more minorities have the civil liberties they deserve, more sickness can be cured.  I don't quite buy the liberal idea that the universe MUST bend toward progress, equality and justice, it seems pretty obvious to me that civilization is a thin veneer that will tear if people get scared enough.  But, I don't see a world just endlessly spiraling towards misery and destruction.  Yes, there's a long way to go, yes they're a lot of idiots who could push it that way, but that is only part of the story.  There's also progress and hope and change for the better all over the damn planet, much of it brought about by people who aren't Christian.  To see a world spiraling towards sin and service to Satan you have to ignore large and significant chunks of it that aren't doing that by any rational measure.  I don't see a spiral to ruin in the world.  I'm not sure why Adventists see it.  I DO see an increasing distrust of religious authoritarianism, but that only feels like the end of the world and all things good to authoritarians.

Further, in Adventism, the basic nature of man is fallen.  You, as a human being are born to sin.  In Adventist teaching human beings are incapable of being good on their own.  The ability to be good stems directly from submission to God.  They speak of the outside world as a dark and fallen place where people can't help but succumb to their base urges all the damn time, without God giving them the strength to resist the temptation to steal, cheat and lie.  They say this, despite making forays into the outside world all the damn time, and encountering decent people who are not stealing, cheating or lying without submitting to God first.  I don't know how Adventists reconcile this discrepancy, but I cannot.  In my experience, some of the most respectful, kind and decent people I know are atheists who grew up in non-religious households.  Yeah, I've known some atheists who are tremendous assholes, and some Christians who are real nice people, and vice versa.  But the assertion that people can't choose to be good without God is just false on it face.  Millions and billions of people do it every day.  And even if you want to argue that that's still God choosing to help them anyway, you must concede it's God choosing to help them even though they don't worship or follow him.

In my experience, people choose to be kind, truthful and decent for a variety of other compelling reasons.  They like how it makes them feel.  They like how people trust and like them.  They have their own non-religious or non-christan value systems about how it's wrong to kill, steal, lie and cheat and think it's important to honor that.  They see that when they act decently, the end result for everyone involved, including themselves, is better.  They do all this without fear of divine punishment.  To assert that they can't possibly be doing this without submitting to God first is ludicrous, because we have that data:  they do it anyway.  At least some of the time.

I'm not asserting the reverse is true either, that people are born to be good.  I'm just noting the obvious, which is we are not perfect, but we still manage to be decent to each other most of the time.  And it's profoundly disturbing to me that Adventists, and christians more broadly, frame a lack of perfection as perpetual failure and an inclination for evil.  More specifically, that they raise children and brainwash adults into believing that they should feel bad just for existing, as innately imperfect and evil things.  Not only is this teaching wrong because it does terrible things to a human's self-esteem, it's wrong because it's a obvious and terrible lie.

What has kept you from murdering your friends today?  Your enemies?  Lying, cheating, stealing, raping, beating?  Have you fought the urge to kill at every moment of your life, constrained only by a christian conscience?  Do you enjoy watching the suffering of others?  Do enjoy causing the suffering, death and humiliation of others?  Is your negative behavior your proudest moment?  I'm not asking if you've never been tempted to do an immoral thing, or have never done something you regret, that's happened for everyone.   I've had moments I'm not proud of where I was angry, lashed out, did something selfish I thought I could get away with, told a lie when I should have told the truth, etc.  Furthermore, I can imagine circumstances that could tempt me to do worse things than I have out of desperation or anger.  But I don't enjoy the suffering of others.  I'm not inclined to kick puppies.  I'm not thinking about how to cheat people when I'm talking to them. When I see other people hurt it makes me hurt.  And it doesn't take a great deal of self-control not to operate as a monstrously evil bastard in my day to day life.  And you know what, I don't think it takes that much effort for anyone else either.  Yeah bad stuff happens.  Yes there is systematic injustice to confront and fix. Yes someone can make a series of choices that lead to progressively bad choices.  Yes, people make evil decisions for stupid reasons.  But I don't think, in their deepest self that that "bad" is who they naturally are.  Because they are not, by nature, evil.   And I think it's wrong and immoral to convince them they ARE evil and fallen, just to guilt them into joining your religion, as if that was the only way they could ever hope to be consistently good.

Which is the next thing I disagree with Adventism on:  It's wrong, in my opinion, to attempt to convert people to ideas you have no proof for.  I think it's absolutely fair to have some belief system, about what it all means, about why we're alive, where we go when we die, what the basic nature of man is.  But the key feature of those beliefs, the reason they are beliefs and not facts, is that there is no actual proof for any of those ideas.  They may soothe existential worries, and that's great, but I think it's absolutely wrong to attempt to coerce people into believing something you can't prove, no matter how good it makes someone feel.  I absolutely think it's wrong to prey upon people's fear of death in weak moments, in order convert them to your unprovable beliefs for any reason.

There are two essential claims made for why someone should be an Adventist.  One, you get to live forever (and more importantly aren't killed and then re-killed in a lake of fire).  Two, your life on earth will be better, because these beliefs lead to better thoughts and therefore better behavior and better results in the here and now.  I heard over and over in my youth that the Adventist lifestyle was self-evidently better, and that Adventists living that lifestyle would be such happy and well-adjusted and fulfilled individuals that people would naturally be curious about and eventually willing to join the religion to get the same benefits.  But very few people actually do that so they also insist church members must go out and save their friends, using emotional appeals and manipulation (Jesus died for you, you'll die forever if you don't join, don't you want to feel like a good person not like the terrible asshole you are now?).  How little faith do you have to have in your philosophy or religion when you can't actually let it speak for itself, after proudly proclaiming it speaks for itself?  Either your religion leads to such a good life that it speaks for itself, or you have to go out and convert people to get them to join.  Doing the one kind of puts the lie to the other.

Of course, the basis of these beliefs that they are so keen to impart to you is the bible, and the belief that the bible contains infallible truth, is the true word of God and can be read in plain english.  Personally, I don't see any reason to believe the bible is more true than the Quran, or the Bhagavad Gita or the writings of Nostrodamus.  But even if I were to concede, for the sake of argument, that the bible is true, I have a tremendous problem with the inconsistent ways Adventists interpret it.  As I mentioned in part 1, they have no formal method for determining which parts of the bible were cultural, and specific to the time it was written, and which are timeless truths.  In practice, it seems to me, Adventists interpret the bible as is culturally convenient, unchallenging and in accordance with their pre-existing biases.  They rely on "intuitions from the holy spirit" in order to distinguish truth from lie, with no training or discussion whatsoever on how to distinguish "the urgings of the holy spirit" from "accumulated emotional biases."  They consistently refuse to understand the main principles of the text, when they conflict with arguably interpreted rules that are less challenging than the principle.  The bible is the Truth . . . except when it's not . . . depending on your feelings.  I don't find these standards of interpretation or logic particularly impressive or likely to yield much truth.

As far as Ellen G. White goes, I think I would have liked her as a human being, but I'm not sure I believe she was a prophet from god.  She was hit in the head with a rock when she was young, which dented her brain and put her into a coma for a while.  A few years later, she started seeing visions.  I think the simpler explanation is she had some minor brain damage that resulted in periodic hallucinations.  She seemed nice though, especially as she aged and relaxed on the condemnation and embraced compassion a bit more.

Which leads me to the most major problem I have with Adventism:  the unhealthy and unnecessary dominance of authoritarianism over grace.  I honestly believe there is a beautiful core to the message of christianity that's been absolutely corrupted by a very human need for certainty and control, and Adventism is no exception.  I think the ideas that God is the all-powerful and all-knowning embodiment of love and also bound by rules and vengeance and must kill you for being imperfect are absolutely irreconcilable.  Adventists usually do some handwaving about "the divine mystery" when this kind of thing comes up, but that usually just means "we can't explain it, so try not to think about it."  The ideas don't match.  They can't be reconciled.  God can't be both of those things.  The basic story of christianity can't be "You are so bad that only the threat of hellfire can keep you in line." and also be, "you're so kind and so moved by the suffering and death of Jesus that you want to follow him."  God can't be a kind and wise person who only loves you if you serve him as a slave because that correlates with no definition of kindness or wisdom I've ever encountered.  And the only people it serves to ignore the voice saying "this makes no sense" are the people at the top of the very human religious organization here on earth, or at least the people who suspect they may believe a crazy thing and don't like to be reminded of the obvious problems with their story.

Which is what rankles me,  the prioritization of the organization and rules of the organization over the message.  They don't challenge the cultural biases of their congregations because they want those congregations to stay and give money, and the only challenge they do give to their members is to submit to God and the church.   The stuff about grace, love, humility and whatnot is given lip service, but when it conflicts with the needs of the organization, the organization wins.  They single out people who are different in a way that conflicts with the general congregation's cultural biases, on the basis of broken and cherry-picked rules but irregardless of important christian principles, and make them feel unwanted and unloved.  So my divorced and gay friends end up leaving the church because they can't feel the church's love in the church's disdain for who they are or choices they had to make to have a better life.  Meanwhile, the remaining congregation, who will look you in the eye and tell you all sins are equal and that all men are pre-disposed to sin, therefore no one can look down on another for their sin, are NOT run out of the church even though they are fat, or lazy, or prideful or shameful gossips or cheaters or otherwise breaking the rules.  It's comfortable hypocrisy in the name of goodness and humility and I can't stand it.

And this mindless enforcement of the rules, absent reason and kindness leads to all sorts of terrible traditions and rules, the worst of which, to my mind, is how they forbid dancing.  Dancing is not a part of Adventist culture, because there is a fear that it will incite lust in the participants which might tempt them to break another rule uninformed by principle that insists people not have sex before marriage lest God kill you dead.  Our old joke used to be, "Why do adventists forbid oral sex?  Because it might lead to dancing."  Worst of all, they claim this will make you a happier person, because you remove yourself from temptation.  They forbid dancing, one of the basic expressions of human happiness and intimacy, and call it joy and freedom.  That is insane and there is no biblical principle they can point to that supports it.  It's just an arcane rule, based on another arcane rule, that nobody can really explain but that people follow anyway for fear of rocking the boat or burning in hell.   If your religious philosophy claims love as it's central tenant, but freaks out when two people dance close together in a loving way, or two men show each other love and physical affection, it might be prudent to ask why that disconnect exists.  I did, and I couldn't find a good reason, other than mindless authority, tradition and culture.  The life of Jesus and the core principles of the bible have very little to do with it.

The core of christianity (and Adventism) is quite nice in some ways, of course.  Jesus comes along and says, "Hey, you know what might change the world?  Being kind in response to violence.  Tending to the sick, feeding and clothing the poor, abandoning the crass accumulation of wealth and embracing personal and spiritual growth, loving yourself and loving your neighbor, not judging people.  You know, not being a dick and maybe being helpful to someone other than yourself."  That part I have no problem with.  The part I have a problem with is where the church comes in after and says, "You see that nice guy?  He died because you're an evil jerk.  You're bad and you should feel bad.  Now his dad's real pissed off for killing his kid and because of how bad you are, and he's basically going to have to kill you twice in order to make his point proper, and the only way to get right with him is to abandon your own thoughts and free will to his will, which we have conveniently written down and interpreted for you.  Now, I know you're asking, how can I know you really speak for him?  Well, it's true because it's true.  And hey, if you submit now, not only will you not be murder-killed, but you get to live forever and grow wings!"  Well, I'm paraphrasing here.

I think Jesus, like Buddha, had some good ideas that can still change the world if actually followed.  I think the authoritarian framework that came after, including Adventism's onerous rule system, is essentially emotional blackmail that is less concerned with changing the world, than with false certainty and control.  I do not believe a message of love and grace is at all reconcilable with the idea that God will someday return and smite Adventism's enemies because that act is monstrous, not loving or gracious.  Why would you as a practicer of love and grace and a follower of Jesus want harm to your enemies, and why would the ultimate expression of love and intelligence in the universe smite them?  Is God so limited that he can't sit you down and present a compelling argument?  Rules, punishment and hierarchy seem so obviously human, not divine, in origin that I can't believe they were ever successfully grafted onto ideas of love, humility, tolerance and grace.  I don't see anything humble or gracious in the authoritarian assertion that one segment of humanity has found all of the Truth and the rest of us must submit or burn forever.  I see no love or compassion in telling people they are shit and should feel bad, giving them only submission to human authority in the name of God as a reason to feel good.  In short, Adventists and other authoritarians seem more like people who like the idea of following Jesus more than they actually like following Jesus.

Finally, even if I hadn't left because of all of the above, I would be forced to leave as an unrepentant and not celibate gay man.  The church thinks that sex outside of marriage is a sin, therefore, since I am not allowed to marry another man in the eyes of the church, I must be celibate forever, or God must kill me.  It also thinks that homosexuality is a "lifestyle choice" that could tempt any man, that there is no such thing as a sexual orientation, just perversion, and that otherwise straight children can be turned to the gay side simply by seeing happy homosexual couples out in public.  It thinks that three bible verses about slavery and rape and not by any possible reading about committed homosexual life partners are applicable to committed homosexual relationships.  This is not only ignorant and wrong, it's so wrong it makes me question what other ideas they hold they aren't similarly detached from reality.  It's tragic because they end up using all this ignorance as a reason to run openly gay people out of their churches.  Because given the choice between loving the sinner and hating the "sin", they choose the hating over the loving more often than not.  People leave, not because they can't let go of their sin, but because they can't see the church's love for them through the church's hate for a piece of their nature that they can't change.  It's all so unnecessary.  I've never felt closer to God than the day I first had sex with a man.  It was the first time I felt like a complete person, like I finally fit in the world and understood who I really was.  And my former church finds that idea appalling, that I could and would gain any solace from being loving and affectionate with another man. Apparently Jesus was about love, but only so much.  And loving, accepting and socializing with the outcast, so long as it was culturally comfortable.

Adventists keep using that word, "love."  I think it means something different than they think it means.  And ultimately, that's why I had to go.

No Gravity at the center of my brain

I've been working on my second and mostly final leaving adventism post.  It's very cathartic, but I can't figure out whether it's a simple blog post with general thoughts about why I left my childhood church, and therefore imperfect and incomplete, or a blistering indictment of Adventism that will devastate any arguments in it's path for all time.  If the latter, it's doing a terrible job of being that thing.  So it will probably be a blog post, as coherent as I can write it at this time.

I think I'm feeling a little trapped by this very Adventist notion that I can't leave the church, unless I present a compelling and biblically sourced argument to support my ideas.  But, of course, I don't agree the bible is the basis of truth and all argumentation must rest on the texts therein.   To have any sort of successful debate on a topic, all sides must agree on a basic premise.  Adventists generally like to start with "we all agree the Bible is truth and Ellen G. White was God's prophet" and go from there and just kind of awkwardly disengage from people who don't agree with that.  But I don't agree with that premise, so we can't have an argument using the bible as a source.  I guess the premise I would agree to is "Adventism is a legitimate religious and lifestyle choice."  and what I'm arguing is that that lifestyle choice leads to worse outcomes, at least for me, than my other available options.  The Bible doesn't really enter into it.

So, fuck it.  Imperfect but cathartic argument incoming.

I Got 28 Problems

For some insane reason, it seems important to me to explain myself, and why I no longer claim Seventh-Day Adventism, or christianity in general.  Well, the last half isn't quite true, but it's true enough.  So I'm going to take a couple of posts to explain it, in more detail than you require.  Everyone is immediately forgiven for choosing not to read this.

I get the impression, largely from family, but from christians in general that one can't simply leave their faith except in error, inability to truly grasp christian teachings or by clearly choosing to do evil after being successfully tempted by demons.  I get this impression from the hundreds of times I heard someone's motivations for leaving the church described in these ways.  As I am problematically vain about my intellect, I feel compelled to explain that no, it's not just because I am a simple lamb who wandered into a den of temptation and got hoodwinked by the first smooth-talking drag temptress that sauntered my way.  I left because I no longer believed just about anything Seventh-Day Adventists believe, which seemed like a pretty good reason at the time.  I have more to say on that process later, but for now, I'd like to start with the basics.

 I am not a Seventh-Day Adventist because I don't believe in any of their 28 fundamental beliefs.  Even though I was born into this church, and it took me a long time to leave it, I am not living under its shadow, living a "sinful" life in defiance of what I was was taught to be right.  I have decided what was taught to me was NOT right (in part, but in important parts), and that I could not in good conscience try or claim to follow it.  My problems with the 28 fundamental beliefs are many, so let's just start at the top and work our way down.

From the opening paragraph:

Seventh-day Adventists accept the Bible as their only creed and hold certain fundamental beliefs to be the teaching of the Holy Scriptures. These beliefs, as set forth here, constitute the church's understanding and expression of the teaching of Scripture. Revision of these statements may be expected at a General Conference session when the church is led by the Holy Spirit to a fuller understanding of Bible truth or finds better language in which to express the teachings of God's Holy Word.

I don't agree with any of this, but the bolded parts seem the most important.  I do not claim any christian creed, let alone the Bible.  And I certainly don't think there are fundamental beliefs I must take from therein.  Why would I think that?  It starts and ends as a tautology:  believe the Bible is the holy word of God because the bible tells you to believe it is the holy word of God.  This is the basic reasoning inherent in a chain letter, and like a chain letter it boils down not so much to an argument but a threat.  "Believe in this book or die forever."  I have so much more on that topic but it will have to wait until the next post.  For now, let me just say I don't take kindly to random books trying to make me afraid of the unproven and untestable.  And my life experience has not been that Bible believers are the most happy and well-adjusted people.

The second bolded passage could probably fill a post on its own, but it's hugely problematic.  It essentially gives each congregation and the general conference leeway to cherry-pick biblical passages as they see fit or "as the spirit moves them."  Which I might feel is an unfair generalization if they weren't on their 32nd year of discussing whether women are capable of being spiritual and moral leaders of churches and on their first year of tentatively discussing whether running gay people out of their churches might not fit with christian principles.  In short, I know they understand the idea of present and eternal truth because I've heard them preach about it and they freely wear mixed fibers and have a conspicuous lack of red tents dotting their church lawns.  Therefore, if they were serious about discerning cultural from timeless truth and ongoing spiritual growth, they would have a formal method of periodically reviewing church beliefs as culture changes, and would apply what they understand of the context in which those verses were written, the core principles of the bible and  modern society's biases to try and separate the two.  I can't be part of or even a respect a religion that changes "when it feels like it," which is what it must mean to be moved by the holy spirit, a feeling, rather than as is deemed necessary by their intellect, understanding of the basic principles of their religious book and their experience.

As for the 28 beliefs, I will try to be concise, but I feel it's worth it to go through each one.  I'm not going to provide exhaustive reasons for why I don't believe these and I'm not trying to convince anyone else to disbelieve, but I do want to go over them to show that I've thought about each of them.  For the sake of not repeating myself, please note that the primary reason for not believing in any of these as stated is they all require me to believe that the Bible is true sans evidence.

The Last Shall be First to Leave

Taking a few moments from their 30-year-old discussion on whether women are capable of being spiritual leaders (currently, women's ordination is viewed as a "mistake" by the General Conference, because people with penises are always pointing forward), the Seventh-Day Adventist church recently decided it was time to revise their position on homosexuality.  They are very proud to announce that they have changed one adjective in describing the brokenness of homosexuals to be slightly less condescending and caustic.  They have decided not to describe homosexuality as a "disorder" and instead label it a "disturbance" (like we're the dark side of the force).  The statement now reads:

Homosexuality is a manifestation of the disturbance and brokenness in human inclinations and relations caused by the entrance of sin into the world.

Yes, thank you for stating your prejudice in slightly less inflammatory terms.  They also are now willing to refer to the homosexual as "loved by God" instead of just a "children of God", although there's only a hair's difference between those two statements and "homosexuals exist", because Adventists believe God loves everybody.  They are now also excited to announce that they have taken the great risk of including compassion in the closing statement, which now reads:

As His disciples, Seventh-day Adventists endeavor to follow the Lord’s instruction and example, living a life of Christ-like compassion and faithfulness.

Which is a funny cap to put on a public statement about how there's totally a splinter in that other guy's eye, because that's what Jesus would have done.  Made sure you knew you were broken, and needed to  grovel before him before he would allow you into his community.  My favorite are the quotes from the committee members.  First, the old inspirational hymn, "we are good, and are persecuted":

The institutions of marriage and family are under attack.

Somehow, they are under attack.  We'll get back to you on just exactly how straight christians are going to be prevented from marrying whomever they choose in their churches any day now.  Followed by the response to a committee member suggesting they eliminate the "disturbance" line:

Though many of us have family members who are homosexual, we understand the thought process, we still embrace them, we still love them, we still care for them.  However, as a church, we must take a stand for what is right. 

What could be more right than declaring that two men loving each other above all else has no historical or biblical precedent (*cough*  *cough* David and Jonathan *cough*).  But especially the line, "we understand the thought process," because no, they don't.  They certainly think they do.  In the Adventist world, not living according to the cherry-picked "rules" found in the bible means living "apart from God" and it is their contention that no one can live happily apart from God.  And not just the gays, anyone living outside of Adventism is considered fallen, led astray by the devil, and doomed to a live of darkness and depression unless they submit to divine authority, by casting all notions of self aside, and instead living by their very poorly argued and maintained rule system.  So, if you're gay, you're not playing by their rules, and are by default living outside of their rule-system, and therefore must be unhappy. Because only living by the rules makes you happy  Ipso facto.

Except, they're so busy running gay people out of their congregations, they never let them stick around to see that that's not exactly true.  Nor do they every seem to notice that there are a wide variety of people leading happy, moral lives outside of their church.  And if they'd actually deign to talk to gay people, they might hear how happy dating the gender they're attracted to actually makes them.  Even then, in my experience, they don't really hear gay people (or me) when they say that kind of thing.  That there's nothing inherently unhappy about being gay.  It's kind of great!  It's just as great to find a fulfilling, exciting homosexual relationship, as it is to find a fulfilling heterosexual relationship.  But, since that can't be true according to their belief system, the average Adventist is still likely to believe you are either deluding yourself at best, or led astray by Satan and soon the other shoe will drop or in the worst-case, that you are an agent of the devil, actively seeking to undermine God's Holy Authoritarian Bureaucracy.  Knock, knock.  Who's there?  Gays out to destroy your marriage by being happy.

So no, they don't understand the thought process, otherwise they could not say it is not "right" that gays be in happy marriages of their own.  For one thing, you'll notice they don't specifically state just HOW marriage is under attack by gay people.  Will straight people leave the institution of marriage in disgust if gays do it too?  Is marriage really a form of group think?  Are most married people looking around to see how other marriages are doing it and modifying their own accordingly?  Do polygamists ruin it for everybody?  Why or why not?  Are marriages more concerned with people outside the marriage or more concerned with the people within it?  What does it mean to not be in the "right" marriage?  What specific harm does two dudes hitching up cause your community?  What great evil comes from two men declaring their life-long commitment to each other?  They do not say.  It is just "understood" that first gays marry, then ???, then the church and marriages everywhere are poisoned forever.  Exactly how, is left as an exercise for the bigoted reader.  How gay marriage hurts marriage more than divorce and infidelity is left as upper level Cognitive Dissonance Jujitsu, for the advanced irrationalist.

Look, I have no interest or investment anymore in the acceptance or approval of the Adventist community.  Not only would they NOT have me, as a openly and unrepentant homosexual who will just not stop loving other men (and all the horrors increased tenderness brings), but I don't believe in any of the 28 fundamental beliefs anymore, and I have no interest in being part of an institution that insists you abandon the empirical evidence of your life experiences and your critical thinking when it conflicts with poorly interpreted, and cherry-picked biblical passages.  And I don't see what hope their is for an institution that still thinks it's a mistake to have women as leaders (because they can't bring themselves to see them as equal).  But as someone who's still deprogramming myself from a lot of the terrible ideas I was told as a kid, and has a large amount of friends and family who still consider themselves Adventist, this shit drives me crazy.  The truth is, I've found substantially more acceptance and compassion outside of the church than within it.  Ironically, I see Adventists chafing under a poorly maintained rule system as pretty unhappy people.  My parents are currently having a very hard time because their religion insists I'm a bad person, even though that dramatically conflicts with their experience with me.

And what's especially frustrating about all of it, is it doesn't need to be this way, even from within their system.  They allow every other open sinner among them.  They allow people with anger problems, with gossip problems, with forgiveness problems, with compassion problems (clearly), with fidelity problems to sit among them every week in the pews without complaint.  Even from the viewpoint of "homosexuality is a sin", what is the logic of excluding the gays, while allowing the meat-eating, jewelry-wearing, freely divorcing remnant to remain?  They either believe in the power of Holy Spirit to change lives, to cure anger problems, eating problems, pride problems and "gay problems," or they don't. And they shouldn't believe in ex-gay therapy, of course, God continues to choose to not cure even those desperately trying to be straight, and even ex-gay organizations are admitting that now.

 Personally, I think they exclude gays because having happy, committed homosexuals week after week in their congregations, would show the "gays are inherently depraved and unhappy" rhetoric to be a lie.  They can't allow gays to exist among them, because they have no confidence that any of their rhetoric around homosexuality is even remotely true (quite rightly, considering they don't actually take the experience and knowledge of gay people into account).  White people can't tell black people what their experience as black people is, men can't tell women what their experience as women is, the religious can't tell the non-religious what their experience is, and straight-people CERTAINLY can't tell people what their experience as gay people is.  The only way any of those groups get to know what the other group's actual experience is is to interact with them and listen to them and BELIEVE them when they relate those things.  And until the Adventist church is wiling to put their belief system where their mouth is, and let their rhetoric stand against actual contact and socialization with Adventist gay people, they don't know SHIT about homosexuality and should not claim to.

Or would socializing and making friends with people their community normally shuns and looks down upon be too un-Jesus-like?  Ah, modern christianity:  followers of Jesus, as is comfortable and convenient.