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

[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.)