Religious Difficulties

I've started keeping up with the blog at http://www.venganza.org/, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You can get more info at the website, but it's essentially a fake religion created in response to a Kansas schoolboard's attempt to install creationism as an equivalent to science. There are quite a few atheists on the site, and a fair amount of Christian-dissing, but the original idea is to squelch our country's ironic penchant for religious intolerance.

I posted the following in response to a news article about a conflict between pro-life and pro-choice protesters at a college in Missouri:

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and admit that I consider myself a Christian. I’m a child of two biochemists who don’t see any conflict between science and Christianity, I think the Bible is a flawed book open to interpretation, and I’m happy to accept the unprovable parts of my beliefs under the banner of “faith;” nor will I dispute the unprovability of it… but I have stopped identifying myself as Christian.

Nowadays, in the US, whenever I see a symbol of Christianity, or read/hear someone state “I’m Christian,” my first reaction is not “Oh, goody, a follower of Christ’s message of love and tolerance.” No, it’s “Oh, great, another narrow-minded, brainwashed, anti-intellectual conservative who will automatically hate and exclude me from worship because God made me gay.”

I’m not ready to give up my spiritual beliefs, but I feel like “my” church has betrayed me. Just as extreme Islam has made westerners equate “Muslim” with “terrorist,” the word “Christian” has been co-opted by social & political terrorists. Where are all the “centrist” Christians who should be rising up against this identity theft?

Oh, wait, that’s me…chased out of the church by the witch-hunters–again.