Carrying the Idiot Ball
I’m pathologically liberal, despite an upbringing in one of the last pockets of the 1950s left on the planet. The Isle of Man is a tiny community halfway between England and Ireland and, by dint of its presence in the centre of a pretty hostile environment, it’s very conservative. Gay rights were a huge issue when I was growing up there, to
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I too am liberal, Christian and not a swivel-eyed idiot, foaming at the mouth with crazed zealotry. But I do occasionally get accused of being just that.
It really pains me that the cultural backlash against the church and the establishment (I think of church as very different from the concept of "faith") has made it socially acceptable for otherwise forward thinking individuals to label me, as you said, as a sheep, a fool and a hater of [insert current favourite target group here].
A good friend of mine once went on a huge rant about religion to my face, thanks to a song called "Christianity is stupid", not thinking once that a) I might have religious beliefs myself or b) inserting any other faith into that same sentence would have gone against his own liberal belief system.
He talked at length about how those with religion rammed it down other people's throats, how they were full of intolerance and hate. The irony of that statement didn't occur to him at all.
I never told anyone about this till now, but even though that incident happened many years ago, it stayed with me and still upsets me a little to this day.
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I appreciated your thoughts and your honesty. The drive for people to categorize and associate people in groups is a huge pressure nowadays. Maybe it always has been.
I am very religious and it is a big part of my life. If I were to take a political quiz, I am sure that I would show up in the conservative column, and I guess that is true, but in the polarizing environment in which we live these days, I'm probably not conservative enough for many, and too convervative for everyone else. I'm not even sure if moderate is the right term for me. When it comes down to is, the category I fit into is me. I am who I am. I try to become a better person one day at a time, but that doesn't have to mean anything in terms of liberal or conservative.
As far as religion, I feel pretty secure in my beliefs. Not that I never question, or follow like a sheep, but I try to stand for something and be rooted in some guiding principles. The big ones are love God, love my neighbor as myself, do unto others as I would have done to me, and loving others through service ("inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me"-Matthew 25:40).
Regarding homophobia (a term that I feel is a sweeping categorization itself), my feeling is that no matter how one views homosexuality in their morality, the important thing is how one treats others and feels toward them. Do they have love in their hearts or not? Neither party has to wholesale agree with the other in order to get along.
As others have said, I didn't intend to go on this long, but your entry stuck a chord with me.
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