Friday, June 30, 2006

George Bush does not own religion

When I was 15 years old I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I love Jesus with all my heart and soul, my faith is my life. I am not about religion I'm about relationship, I believe in having a relationship with God. My faith saved my life, my faith defines me, and I am a stronger person because of my faith not despite it. I want the world to know that Gerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and George W. Bush are not what Christianity is about.
When did being liberal and Christian become an oxymoron? When did loving Jesus mean hating everyone else? It's time for liberals to stop assuming every evangelical Christian is like Pat Robertson, and it's time for conservatives to stop imprisoning religion!!!
Jesus is love.

3 comments:

skyscraper said...

thank you for this post. i appreciated it a lot, because you're right about the 'liberal' world being paranoid of religions and such. i'm not a religious person at all (in fact i personally have a lot of big issues with religions. all and every religion), however, i fully respect people who do choose religions as an organized way to 'god' of their understanding, as opposed to an individualized way (i.e. spirituality). and i see religions as having a great positive impact on people's lives, and though i've also seen a lot of abuse of religions in furthering hate and murder (bush and his gang are some of those people, definitely), i still choose to believe that people are free to make their religion-related choices and cannot be despised/judged for that.

i am, however, very spiritual and always work on furthering my connection with the "outside" world and my own intution. and i definitely believe in a power that's beyond me and beyond all of us and above this petty human world. however, i've also noticed that us, 'liberals' and 'radicals' don't talk about religion and generally tend to be quite separated from anything that has to do with it. and i don't remember any conversations/sharing lately on this topic among us. it's like we shun from this topic, it's like it's not cool, liberal or important enough to talk about.

so thanks for bringing it up--it got me to thinking and analyzing a lot...

Journey_Wmn said...

I definitely agree with what you about being liberal and religion. I think that so many people get caught up with labels and then they try to pidgeon hold people in to their definition. There is nothing wrong with religion when not abused.

ben said...

exactly...especially for those of us who use some of the vocabularly common to more conservative types and don't sound like the typical religious liberal (UCC, unitarian, etc...), it's quite a struggle to be recognized.

i tend to just let the dissonance do my work for me. for me, it's orientation that really sticks out as a "Hey, wait...you can't be religious?! Can you?" moment. But there's other ways too...i just think it's best not to give too much energy to trying to prove ourselves as religious and liberal, but rather to assert ourselves as such so that it ceases to be surprising.

“I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.” ~Audre Lorde