(Via Jessica)
At thirteen I realized that I was different than many of my friends. While they braided each others hair, and put on make-up, I was listening to the Beatles, and talking about world hunger to those who were older than I. At thirteen there was one major difference that I noted and could not speak to anyone about…I was attracted to both men and women. I started going to a youth group that was held at a church close to my house. All the kids I knew gathered there, and my parents thought I would “adjust” if I participated in an activity that all the kids my age were participating in. I attended for a few meetings before the topic of sex came up …they said that sex was only for men and women, and that sex between members of the same sex was not only wrong, but would be punishable by damnation to hell. This did not sound right in my fragile mind, but I accepted that I was deviant and needed to keep my feelings to myself. Then I met Desiree. Things changed rapidly in my life, because I had never acted upon my natural urges before. I lost my virginity to her, and when a friend of ours outed us to the church, we were both told to leave and never return. It was at this moment I realized that the church was created by the unreasonable mind of man, and could oust you from society for being different. Sex is natural, and further more, homosexual urges are also natural. I fall in the “grey area” of bisexuality which is pinned by the church as “a cry for attention”…Religion is not only a tool to keep citizens under a “thumb” but also a way of keeping deviant behavior out, and keeping “good followers” on the so-called path of holiness (which of course is the path to hate, and war). I could never belong to an organization who boasts that “god hates fags”. If “god” existed…wouldn’t he just smite the un-worthy??? If “god” is a being of eternal love, why would he want his children (gay, straight, transsexual, or bisexual) to live lives filled with torment and persecution….wasn’t the whole point of christianity to live a peaceful life??? As I grew older I became more and more distanced from the church, and have been more and more happy each day since. The church will not tell me what is the correct way to live. Peace, love and happiness to you all.
(Via Wendy Hughes)
I went to Sunday School, in a Reform Jewish congregation, but always thought there was something missing in my Jewish identity. My family did not practice the traditional rituals ie Friday Night Prayers nor dietary prohibitions against mixing meat and milk. I was a teenager before I even knew about the Holocaust. I went to a French film, with a friend of mine who’d grown up in Israel, that had footage of the concentration camps, and said to him, “What is this?” My family had never discussed it. When I asked about it later, they just shrugged. It was not a part of their reality. My father’s family had migrated to the US before WWII, from Poland through Great Britain and South Africa, then to Canada and then into the US. And my mother’s grandfather on her father’s side had come as a teenager from Russia or Ukraine to avoid the 25 year army draft imposed on Jewish men, and prospered in the midwest… belonging to both a Conservative and a Reform temple. My mother says she remembers that they joined the Reform temple because it had a nicer cemetery. It sounded funny at first, but now I understand that old fashioned cemeteries have depressions in the ground and become overgrown, so a new cemetery can look “nicer” by comparison.
Anyway, I also now understand that migration is an engine of change… the surnames in my family are inconsistent. The very act of landing in America speaking a different language meant that some guy with a pen and a clipboard gave you a name you didn’t have when you left the old country.
In any event, as I was learning about my family background, as a Jew, in my confirmation class, the instructor taught comparative religion. I think it was supposed to show us that Judaism was the best of all possible religions, but I was a child of the sixties, and so-called Eastern Religion was soon on the horizon. I remembered the visit to the Buddhist temple when my friends were experimenting with Zen and hearing about the Beatles and their visits with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi… all the practices that constituted variations on spirituality.
Frankly, my generation was all about exploration into what boiled down to superstition. Astrology, ESP, gods, angels, UFOs, aliens, astral projection, time travel; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the stories of the bible and religion were no less fantastic than the ones in Sci Fi. They were just somehow branded into a formal and “accepted” respectable format.
I still have not fully figured out why some people buy it… and others don’t; why some people insist that they have a direct and palpable connection to the Spirit in the Sky, and I think there is nothing there but sky.
When I finally had time to go to college and take some anthropology classes and a couple of semesters of sociology and critical thinking, then called Argumentation…. it was refreshing to find out that it wasn’t just me who thought the world was all screwed up. The tension relaxed a notch or two when I discovered that there are political and sociological reasons that religions have power; that the hierarchies lie to their congregations, and that they rely on people’s fears and insecurity to control them. Those things have nothing to do with a supernatural being that answers prayers and runs things.
Finally, one day, my dear ex mother-in-law and I were getting ready to take a swim. I had been married to my ex-husband for only six years, but I’d remained friends with his mother, a very nice Jewish lady, for over 30 years after we were divorced. We used to go to get Jewish deli together, and she made the best chopped liver I ever ate. One day I decided to tell her how I feel. I said, “You know, I don’t believe in God.” She looked over her shoulder, and all around… we were alone in her apartment, but she whispered, “… neither do I.” And it started an important dialog. I think there are a lot of Jewmanists.
Probably it takes great courage to admit this in the face of the Holocaust… I don’t know what it means to be anything else other than a Jewish atheist. One of my best girlfriends is an atheist who grew up going to Christian school, and can quote chapter and verse of New Testament, but doesn’t believe; I’ll have to ask her more about it. But for me, it’s just the truth. I like being Jewish, but I don’t need, want or have to have a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things.
This is just an abbreviated version of my “coming out” story… there is so much more because it is unfolding every day. I am happy to be able to be human unencumbered by superstitions, unfrightened by fear of stepping on a crack, or not waving my hands the right way. I don’t want to feel superior to people who have not made the decision to come out yet… maybe they are about to emerge from their cocoon soon. I was delighted to find out that my grandson’s confirmation class was very non-spiritual 