Christian for fifteen minutes

Today is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my conversion to Christianity, so it seemed like a good idea to commemorate it by posting yet another talking head video:

This follows on from yesterday's video about Christian atheism.  My conversion experience happened soon after leaving home.  I was in a hall of residence at a university and very much missing my friends, though not particularly my family.  I was feeling isolated and depressed, and was befriended by Christians.  I already believed in God, so it didn't seem like too big a jump to become Christian, but my misgivings were around the idea that questioning would become problematic.  I was assured that it would not be, so i took the leap of faith and committed myself to Christ.  This is in the entirely conventional evangelical sense of being a "born-again Christian".  That is in fact what i am, in spite of appearances to the contrary.

Almost immediately afterwards, i had huge problems.  I tried to ignore them, prayed about them, searched for answers in Scripture about them, all to no avail.  I hid them from other Christians, but wrote screeds and screeds of stuff about them.  Then i went home for Christmas.

When i came back, i decided to confront the issue head-on.  I raised the first issue with my friends - rejection of other religions.  Later on came the equally troublesome issue of Christian homophobia.  I continued to raise similar issues throughout the rest of the year.  Many of my friends were fine about it, but a few saw me as recalcitrant and uncooperative, and that my approach was as if the problems were uniquely mine.  I think they had a point with the last bit, which was quite insightful, but even now haven't managed to do anything with it.

After nearly a year, i completely gave up on the religion, having decided that St Paul was the worst thing to have happened to the planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and went on to live a largely secular life.  I could mention how God pursues people who have done this at this point, but it would probably annoy the secular readers, so i won't.  Suffice it to say that i was not impressed by religious approaches, although i still found them interesting.  Jainism was a particular interest of mine, as expressed on YouTube.

The years went by, i became anarchist and vegan, did postgrad, got married of all things, had children and then, after twelve years in the wilderness, came back to Church.  This time, i did it on my own terms, and also on God's, but then i would say that wouldn't i?  In the meantime i had learned of various things associated with Christianity which were more positive, such as the Student Christian Movement, and realised that the Christianity i had been "sold" was not the whole story.  This is an ongoing process.

Now, this may not be very Christian of me but i don't really care whether someone believes in God or not.  It doesn't seem to be the most important thing about them to me.  I would be more interested in their political and ethical beliefs than their religious beliefs.  I think people are increasingly polarised between a narrow version of Christianity and a narrow version of atheism, and those two narrow versions have a lot more in common with each other than people like to admit.  What we need to do is forget our differences and work together to make the world a better place.  This conflict is a waste of energy and does nothing to benefit the weakest, poorest and oppressed.  That's what we need to be doing:  building a Paradise on Earth.  That's an urgent priority and we have to stop squabbling and do what we all know we're meant to be doing with our lives.

"Are you a...gay Christian?"

Here's "today's" video:

Ah, didn't expect it to do that.  If you're seeing roughly what i'm seeing now, the preview is in a weird place.  Anyway...

In this video, i argue that believing both in a loving God and the idea that mutually consenting homosexual sex between two adults is sinful in circumstances where the same sexual acts between people of different genders is not is a logical contradiction.  In a sense, it almost doesn't matter what the Bible says and when there seem to be contradictions in Scripture, most Christians attempt to reconcile them or consider them insignificant.  Two examples are the idea that pi is three, which seems to be mentioned in 1 Kings 7:23, and the idea that all Cretans are always liars and that Epimenides, a Cretan said that so it must be true, mentioned by Paul in Titus 1:12,13.

It would of course be silly to get hung up on both of those in one way, although in another they are quite interesting.  The reason the Bible gives an integer value of pi is probably that irrational numbers could not be expressed or understood by the people of that time and place.  Christians generally take two approaches to this.  They either say it wasn't perfectly round or take the sensible route that i just took.  A similar approach can be taken to the liar paradox apparently expressed in the letter to Titus - Paul doesn't literally mean "always" and therefore there is no problem, and on the whole readers pass over this without a hiccough, and rightly so.  One part of my argument here is that the only difference between those easily explained away "contradictions" and the idea that a loving God condemns homosexual behaviour is that the proposition that God is love and the proposition that homosexual acts are sinful is that more text separates the two, and that they occur in different documents which happen to be bound together in the same codex.

Furthermore, and this is an important point, Biblical literalism leads one to a most repugnant conclusion in this case.  Paul is often seen as referring to pederasty, in other words a relationship where mature men have sex with adolescent boys.  In our culture, this is child sexual abuse.  Since he also uses the word "malakoi" - soft, "effeminate", as the KJV would have it - he is referring to what we would think of as the victims of child sexual abuse, not the perpetrators.  He is saying that, just as the law of the Old Testament barred certain people from the temple because of defilement, such as menstruating women and castrated men, because they are in a sense that horrible concept of "damaged goods", so are the victims of child sexual abuse be barred from the Kingdom of Heaven.  That is where a literal interpretation of these verses takes us.  Now, i feel absolutely confident that few or no Christians, fundamentalist or otherwise, would accept this conclusion, and that's to their credit, but it needs to be recognised that when they reject this conclusion, they are choosing to moderate their reading of Scripture in a way which is not literal.  If they're prepared to do that, there seems to be no ethical or hermeneutic reason not to reject homophobia too.

So, that's a grim, depressing paragraph.  On a lighter note, this blog entry owes its name to this Rowan Atkinson sketch from 'Not The Nine O'Clock News':