Roz's huge rant about Christianity and homosexuality

What follows is not so much an exposition as a self-discovery - I am writing in order to find out what I think rather than to express a position I have solidly worked out in advance. And not all of my facts or opinions about fact are necessarily accurate - they are what I know, think I know, surmise or regard as a best guess in the circumstances. It just seems to me that the churches are as thoroughly confused as I am, and that there are some premises sitting in the evangelical anti- gay position which could do with some serious deconstruction.

( Read more... )

And just one thing more

Reading all the comments on my previous post, there is one thing that unites former believers with believers and that is the knowledge of how it feels to have religion in your life. It's interesting to read people like [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] of whom this isn't true and to whom much of that sense of religion as lived experience is completely alien.

One of the best things I've read recently about religion and disillusion is my friend Avedon in her blog The Sideshow - some of what I said in my post came out of our chats about this.

Avedon is at http:/www.sideshow/soct03.htm#141346

I don't want the bigotry back and I don't want the priests and nuns and monks and parish worthies meddling in my life. I miss the automatic sense of everything as serious and I miss the comfort food of ritual and I miss the sense of being part of something quite important.

There is a wonderful line in Browning's 'The Bishop of St Praxed's Orders his Tomb' where he talks of lying near the altar 'where god is made and eaten every day'. I've always loved Browning for that - a Protestant who got the emotional appeal of that aspect of Catholicism.

Going back to mass when my aunt died was weird, just because everything had changed - and you can't go home again, certainly not to a Church run from the centre by John Paul Woytola and the evil Ratzinger.

When I listen to Haydn or Bruckner or Vivaldi masses, though, as I do, I miss the simple piety and certainty, even though I know it to be, for me, a drug and a delusion.

And as a teaser for the memoirs, a little chunk of this from when I was twelve and still male...

( Read more... )