Gay Girl Geek

Let me start this out by saying: I am agnostic.

What does that mean? Well, it means I'm skeptical about the existence of God. And it means that I reject the Christian religion that I was born into.

See, I don't really understand Christianity. There are a lot of questions that I have about it that no one's been able to answer to my satisfaction. And frankly, it reminds me of a cult. A mainstream cult, but a cult nonetheless.

Let's look at the facts. Oftentimes, Christians are encouraged not to ask questions – to accept the church's teachings as truth without any further verification. In fact, when I've asked my mom's pastor for some sort of backing, he quoted a bible verse to me – that says that the bible is true! Hrm... the bible is true because it says it is. Interesting.

Furthermore, what are Christianity's qualifications for getting into heaven? You don't have to be a good person – you just have to accept Jesus. In fact, it doesn't matter how good you are – Jesus is the “way the truth and the life” and no one reaches God unless they go through Jesus. Some part of me likes the sound of this. I mean, I agree that everyone is bad - “we've all sinned.” If salvation is based on how good of a person you are, where is the line drawn? How many good things do you have to do before the good cancels out the bad?

But basing salvation solely on belief in Jesus also disagrees with my gut. There are somewhere around 6.7 billion people in the world. 2.1 billion of them are Christians. That's 33%, and probably includes a lot of people who aren't actually “born again” Christians. So God is damning more than two thirds of the world. Doesn't sound like a loving God to me. Nor would a loving God threaten people with hellfire just to get them to “love” him in return.

I find the Christian portrayal of God rather disturbing and contradictory. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, why did he allow Eve to take the fruit from the garden of Eden? The Bible says that God knew everything about us before we were even conceived, so saying it was Eve's free will is contradictory. Saying that Satan convinced her to do it is even more contradictory, because it gives Satan power equal or greater to God's. So the only option left is that God allowed evil to enter the world – and why would a loving, righteous God do that?

The more I examine Bible stories, the more I realize that they don't really portray what I learned in Bible school. Take Noah, for example: the story isn't really about all the cute animals coming to the ark one by one. The story, to me, is about God getting pissed off and killing a whole bunch of people because they wouldn't listen to him. And not just killing them; damning them to eternal torment. Sure, he gave us a rainbow and promised not to do it again. But it still gives me a not-so-good impression of our Holy Father.

Or how about Abraham and Isaac? Isaac was Abraham's long awaited only son, yet Abraham was willing to kill him if God so desired. Christianity teaches this as a positive story – God stopped Abraham before he did it. But that kind of religious fanaticism just scares me.

I could go on and on. But the bottom line is, I don't understand where Christians get the idea that God loves us. When I think about the old testament and the bible stories I learned as a child, I see a jealous, petty, angry, and vain God. A God who cares more about the advancement of his religion and his purpose than he does his followers. And I don't think a God like that is worthy of my worship.Even if I did believe in the Christian God, I wouldn't want to be associated with his followers. I know you can't judge a group by its most extreme members, and I apologize to my Christian friends for this whole section, but let's look at those extreme cases for a moment. Throughout history and currently, Christianity has been used to justify bigotry, racism, homophobia, war, and general ignorance and intolerance. In general, conservative Christians tend to believe that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong, sinful, against God, and going to hell. They believe in freedom of religion, as long as by that you mean the freedom to choose which sect of Christianity you want to belong to.

No. I don't want to be associated with a God or a group of people like that.

So what do I actually believe? Why do I call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist? Why not become a Buddhist if I hate Christianity so much?

When it comes right down to it, I don't think that anyone really has the answers. I think religion is humanity's attempt to explain the unexplainable – and that's fine, as far as it goes. But as soon as you start claiming to know what happens to us when we die, I'm going to call you a liar. No one knows, and no one can ever know.

As I said above, I don't think the Christians are right. I don't think the Buddhists or the Hindus or any other group of religious people are right, either. If I had to throw my lot in with a religious group, I'd go with the atheists, but they might be wrong too. Hell, maybe the Romans were the ones who had it right 2000 years ago. Who am I to say?

I believe in people. I believe that everyone is both good and evil. Even the evilest person in the world has some bit of good in him, and even the best has done something evil. We're all fucked up, and we've all made mistakes. We're human, it happens. Part of what defines us as people is how we react to our mistakes and our flaws.

I believe in good and evil, but not as perfect concepts. I think it's “good” to help people, and “evil” to harm them. So it's dumb to describe people with those words, because everyone has hurt someone, and everyone has helped someone. To me, morality should be based on the golden rule, and to an extent, the wiccan rede: “An it harm none, do what ye will.”

I guess, in a word, I'm a humanist.

As far as the existence of God: I'd like to believe that there is a God. I'd like to believe in a personal being who loves us and cares for us, who created the world with a good purpose in mind. But the evidence in the world around me seems to suggest that such a being does not exist; or if he does, that he is not omnipotent. I can't rectify a loving, personal, and all-powerful creator and the hell that exists in the world around me. But I haven't totally ruled out the possibility. To make a comparison an atheist friend of mine is fond of: I haven't completely given up believing in unicorns, even though I'm pretty certain they don't exist.