Acts, act 1

[sistawendy]

I'm done reading the Gospels. On to the post-Gospel, Acts of the Apostles.

Let's get one thing straight: Jesus & co. were commies. Acts 4:30 says, "[...] everything they owned was held in common".

In Acts 5, a couple who sells land but only gives part of the proceeds to the the Apostles just up and dies, one after the other, when confronted about it. The creepy never stops with these people.

But my historical interest started tingling when I read Acts 6. It mentions two factions, the "Hellenists" and the "Hebrews". The former is complaining about insufficient distribution of food to their (?) widows. The Apostles don't want to deal with that kind of mundane, temporal nonsense, so they delegate. The Apostles pray for and lay hands on these delegates instead of, you know, just asking them to handle it. Sheesh.

Maybe I'm just too low key to be seriously religious in any direction. And everyone who knows me knows that I'm anal-retentive about a whole lot of things. Or maybe, just maybe, being alive but not really living for twenty-five years taught me a few things about life and what it's for that these goddamn messiahs and their drones never figured out. Now I'm curious as to how common religiosity is among trans people, or recovering addicts, who are in a similar situation albeit for a very different reason.

Comments

[dark_phoenix54]

Yeah, their god is pretty damn creepy. I was exposed to religion as a child and it took me a while to get over it. The "loving" god scared the hell out of me.

[staxxy]

there is, indeed, good reason why the phrase "god fearing" exists. the christian god is wildly inconsistent and violent and even the best of his followers is downright creepy and kinda sketchy in a "join us or else" extortion way.

[dark_phoenix54]

Yeah, after a short time I started to wonder about the whole thing. I was shipped off to a Lutheran church with a neighbor, and that's where I got the fear of god thing. But there was religious stuff laying around the house- either my grandmother or grandfather had been a religious seeker. So there was regular Catholic stuff, Rosicrucian stuff, Christian Science stuff, and Edger Cayce's books. Which one was right? They all claimed to be right and the ONLY way to god and heaven! What a crock.

[staxxy]

for me, the end of my time in Christianity came when I was listening to a sermon on "thou shalt have no idols before me", delivered at a podium with the cross on it, a low table on either side of it holding a praying hands statue and a virgin mary statue respectively, a painting of the white jesus on the wall behind him on the right, and a painting of the crucifiction to the left.

for a "no idols before me" god, his followers sure had a LOT of idols and symbols and crap they prayed to. The idea is that these are all symbolically the One True God, but frankly the cross is just a wooden torture device, they could be anyone's hands, Mary may have given birth to Jesus but she herself wasn't part of god (nor were any of the saints, all of whom are worshiped in one way or another by MULTIPLE sects).

THat was kind of the last straw of blantant hypocracy inherent in the church that I could take. I left at the half-time of the sermon and was done. I had already done my biblical scholarship by then, and I did speak with the head pastor about my concerns (to his credit he told me that the church did indeed have a number of hypocracies and that I would have to decide for myself what I could live with; he had been grooming me to become a pastor myself actually), and ultimately decided that I just couldn't be at peace with all of it, especially given how poorly the christian sects treated anyone they could "other".

[corvi]

> Now I'm curious as to how common religiosity is among trans people, or recovering addicts, who are in a similar situation albeit for a very different reason.

There are surveys and stuff. This survey of 28k transfolk in the US from 2015 says:

• 66% of transfolk had been part of a religious community at some point during their lives
  
• Of those 66%, 39% have left a religious community due to fear of rejection, and 19% have left a religion community due to rejection
  
• 19% of all transfolk had been active in a faith community in the past year (I think this figure is around 50% for Americans in general, though obviously higher in older people and lower in younger people. Transness skews pretty young, I think, so age may be a factor affecting religious stuff too.)