Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Regarding God, the LGBTQ+ Community, and the Universe

    Whether you're a creationist or an evolutionist or in-between, you probably recognize that we humans are an evolving species.  
    Right now we look at the Middle Ages and wonder how people thought stench caused everything from chlamydia to the Black Death. During the Renaissance, just how did the Catholic (and Protestant, for that matter) church believe that geocentrism was vital to the authority of the Bible? We look at the colonial world and wonder how people attributed authority to the whiteness of their skin (not that our current time is doing particularly well on this front, either, ahem-ahem).
    But, seriously, in a few hundred years, it's likely people will be looking back on us and our ideas and our beliefs and wonder, what were they thinking?
    Just stop for a moment and consider one of the basic teachings of quantum mechanics. Most people know visible light is part of a wave of electromagnetic radiation. But did you also know that light has mass? Light has properties of both particles and waves.
    And so do the electrons and protons and neutrons in atoms, which compose our world. You have a wavelength, albeit an extremely teeny one.
    It's hard to picture. Now go read about quantum entanglement and comfort yourself with the idea that Albert Einstein himself rejected this theory.
    I've never heard of anyone able to visualize more than three dimensions, either, although the prominent String and M theories rests on the existence of ten or even eleven dimensions - including space-time. Because, time is a dimension just like up and down, back and forth, side to side.
    Let that sink in. Try to picture it and not have your mind blown (if you can, please go into science, we need you).
    Oh, and science still hasn't solved the mystery of consciousness.
    For all our technology, we still know very little about the universe. It doesn't fit how our minds are conditioned to think.
    I mean, just watch this video of the Andromeda galaxy: just one galaxy among who knows how many. Our universe is insane.


    So let's get a little more personal. Who are we to think that we can comprehend the entire spectrum of gender identity or sexual and romantic attraction? Who are we to think we can know what someone should be like based on their genitalia?
    It makes no sense. It takes a great amount of arrogance to deny what our fellow humans tell us about their experiences, to insist that our puny boundaries work perfectly in a vast and unfathomable universe.
    But the Bible, one might say. To claim that it gives us gender and sexual boundaries isn't arrogance. 
    And I would have to disagree. Because isn't it possible, just possible, to think we've been reading the Bible wrong, just like we read it wrong on women's equality, just like we had read it wrong on geocentrism?
    (Plus, isn't it possible to assume that a community that undergoes a tremendous amount of persecution and suffering for saying that they don't conform wouldn't say it unless it was true?).
 
    My fellow Christians, why do we want a God who boxes us in?
    Didn't Jesus come and show us that, oh hey, justice and love and compassion are the way of God - not the judgmental violence we humans still utilize even now, two millennia later? In a sense, doesn't Jesus challenge us to rethink our assumptions about what our lives, our mini-universes, should be like? Maybe He would like us to do the same to the whole universe, no?
    The fullness of God is incomprehensible. How can we then use a God so high above us to box us in?
    Certainly we could portray God's command not to kill as 'boxing us in.' But is the command, especially when coupled with Jesus' claim that even to hate is to kill, so much a prohibition as it is a pointer towards the proper action that occurs when we love each other? Because loving someone doesn't involve killing them.
    In contrast, I cannot see how, if you love someone, you won't let them marry if they are not harming anyone. I can't see how loving someone means they must identify with the genitals on their body, no matter the pain. That doesn't make sense to me.
    Relatively, we know very little about the universe, much less the God who created it. Can we please stop pretending we do?
    Feel free to argue (with love) in the comments.

Love,
Kelley
 

2 comments:

  1. Just a technical point: photons definitely have momentum and particle like behavior, but probably not mass (although that is not strictly proven, either). Otherwise this article captures many of the sentiments I have on the matter. We need more voices like yours discussing this issue.

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  2. Wait, you mean my Chem 101 professor LIED to me?!?! ;)
    Thank you, friend.

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