If You Were as Angry as I Am, You Would be Furious Right Now

This will be the first thing I’ve written (and finished) in some years. I hate that. I hate that this is why I’m writing again, because I’m just so angry. There was a time when words were so powerful to me, when it felt as if I would burst if I didn’t get them out in time. Words granted me a freedom I didn’t really have, made me feel like my voice was stronger than it really was. And now I want nothing more than for that to have been true, because it certainly never will be again. Now my words are empty and fading into a void where I might as well be dust floating through space, because now I don’t matter in a way that I haven’t not mattered in a while.

I stopped believing in God when I actually took the time to give It more than a moment’s thought. The whole “weaker vessel” thing has never sat right with me; I am, biologically, worth hundreds of men. I have yet to meet a man that could convince me that I was weak. Justifiably so. And what kind of nonsense is the idea that God would create a world for people, give them freedom of choice, punish them for exercising it, and then declare that once people finally get this all figured out and start doing well (“peace and security,” if you will) that he’s coming back to make them sorry for ever having succeeded without him? Yeah, so care, very empathy. It truly radiates unconditional love.

I’m glad that I was able to get out, that my lack of belief at the time was enough to save me from the horrors of participating in organized religion. Now it isn’t. I’m once again subject to the will of a deity created to curtail freedoms, to oppress and to discriminate, and I don’t even fucking believe in the guy! I removed myself from the world of religion because it was so obviously corrupt that it disgusted me; because women are second-class citizens to God; because the entire story is just threats of punishment if you don’t procreate (like anyone was going to stop doing that just because there wasn’t a god to tell them to have babies); because I don’t require the threat of damnation to be a good person, and if I did I wouldn’t be a good person; because spitting in the face of science, the art of learning the world around you, seems pretty disrespectful to any supposed god (God makes the universe and you learn about it and promptly say “fuck that, my several-thousand-years-out-of-date book says a stupid thing and that’s the hill I’m going to die on.” That has got to be so frustrating for an omnipotent being. The overlaps between religious zealotry, ignorance, right-wing bigotry, and the incomprehensible resurgence of “flat-earth” theories are pretty much just a bunch of concentric circles.)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have a problem with faith. By all means, have as much faith as you like. The problem I have is with faith that falls apart under any amount of scrutiny. You can’t be “pro-life” if your idea of “pro-life” is actually just pro “forcing people to produce more taxpayers” or “all lives matter (except the ones that don’t).” I have a problem with faith that manifests only when needed as an excuse to treat someone poorly. I don’t know who might be surprised to hear it, but where I live in the south it is totally normal to hear people still using anti-Semitic phrases at work, to hear people in not-so-disguised mumbles use any of a number of racist epithets, misogynistic language fueled by backwards thinking and a dedication to ignorance, to openly mock and ridicule people who are more interested in preserving the livability of our planet than with appeasing an indifferent god. And I work at one of the good places. Do you know what every single one of those people have in common? Christianity. So forgive me when I say that there is nothing Christ-like about Christianity.

Some “Christian” woman I worked with took the time out of her day to openly complain after a workplace training session encouraged people to treat others the way they want to be treated rather than how you might like to be treated. Essentially, they made it clear that if a person is transitioning and you make a point to use their deadname or to intentionally misgender them, that is harassment and they will treat it as such. That seems pretty damned reasonable to me. If you tell me your name is Sandra but I insist on calling you Samuel, that’s a basic display of disrespect at best, and at worst a confident display of aggression. And to do that to a person on a consistent basis? Yeah, you’re just an asshole.

My coworker espoused her belief that having to pee in the same room as a trans person violates her religious freedoms. I can’t imagine how, because it isn’t as though anyone is making her transition. Her argument was that using a person’s preferred pronouns is “affirming sin.” But how would you know what that person’s assigned at birth pronouns were? Are you not basically asking every person to reveal their genitalia before deciding how you’re going to treat them? I’m pretty sure Jesus would have let you pee in the room with him, even though you’re a bigoted jerk. Her argument was just as transparently baseless as the disgusting fallacy that gay men are pedophiles, and here she was proudly arguing in 2022 that having trans women in a women’s restroom is dangerous to women. Not only is this simply untrue, it is based on her belief that trans women aren’t women (also not true). So what are they? Where can they pee? Can they pee? Are they allowed? We’re talking about a human function that disregards gender and sexuality, color and creed. She’s trying to prevent someone from performing a natural bodily function to protect her own sensibilities, which is dangerous by itself. Clearly she isn’t motivated by any love, or sense of empathy. There’s no way you could spin this to paint yourself in a good light. Jesus wouldn’t. He didn’t. This isn’t about protecting people; this is about control. But she’s “not transphobic.”

All of this is only relevant because it has served to infuriate me further. Why would a religion whose entire supposed purpose is to spread love target marginalized people and spread hate? What is pro-life about forcing someone to live in misery, whether it be because of an unwanted pregnancy or not being able to live free from the petty confines of gender or sexuality? Why do they care at all? If Christians think it’s their duty to rid the world of “sin”, someone needs to very plainly explain to them that it literally is not their prerogative to do so. I do not care that you believe in a god. I don’t, so his rules and laws do not apply to me, just as no one expects a Christian to give two shits about the laws of any other religion, let alone abide by them.

The issue of abortion has revealed the true intentions of so many people who call themselves “pro-life.” Lawmakers want women to die, end of sentence. Forcing a ten-year-old child, a rape victim because a ten-year-old child is not an adult and can NEVER consent, to give birth is criminal. Allowing a woman to die because the already-dead thing in her uterus might have been so cute if it hadn’t already fucking died is criminal.  Forcing a rape victim to carry the child of their rapist to term is criminal. What is pro-life about condemning and punishing victims while protecting their abusers? God did abortions. Still-birth was a common tool he used to punish the disobedient. David and Bathsheba’s child was born dead because God said “no” to a baby conceived “in sin.” While I don’t want to split hairs on the definition of sin as a non-believer, I think it would be pretty evil to call rape, incest, and abuse anything other than sin. What was that about being unwilling to “affirm sin?” Talk about a double standard. Are you still pro-life if my child ends up being gay, or trans? I could have aborted and saved you the trouble of torturing them for the rest of their lives. They don’t care about babies, or children, or life, because they have no regard for the life already here. This is what has been revealed.

Anti-education efforts in the US have pushed religious extremists to the brink of their political power, allowing them to sow dissent based on nothing; but you can’t reason with the unreasonable. Allowing “faith” to replace fact has plunged us into this dystopian “fake-news” place where people think that “doing their own research” just means finding the right article or the right idiot to validate their idiocy. Right-wing extremists have done everything they can to convince their base that science is something besides fact, that the nature of reality is negotiable. But it isn’t. The truth is that women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, have been systematically abused forever and the sacrilegious, sanctimonious “Christians” trying to ensure that those people stay underfoot where they belong by stripping them of their human rights and making concerted efforts to erase and dehumanize them are the villains of this story. It is the antithesis of “pro-life,” and being unable to recognize that speaks to how deeply inhumane most religions are.

So I’m done. I’m done acting like I give a shit about your religious beliefs and convictions, because they’re hurting people. Whether you’re willing to acknowledge it or not, religion is being used as a tool of oppression, as it always has been. None of this is new. And I’m done “affirming” anti-human sentiment. Trans people are people. Gay people are people. People of color are people. Women are people. Everyone deserves to live a life unfettered by the demands of other people’s opinions.

I think of all the mothers I know, how much most of them would do if it meant providing an ounce of peace, security, happiness, to their children. I think of the nature of God, and wonder if his love could compare to that of a mother. Because the mothers I know love their children. Their gay, trans, queer, agnostic, atheist, sinful children. And they would never harm them, or ask them to let a man break their bodies so that he can punish them for being broken, or force them to question their own worth and place in the world. I do not know any mother that would tell me I was weak, or undeserving, or insufficient. 

That’s more than can be said of God.