The testimony of a redeemed lesbian (oh, and drug addict)

Last week at church, we had a guest speaker come up and give her “testimony” about how God changed her life. It was relevant to the group they have called “Celebrating Recovery” that helps people break their depilating addictions: drugs, alcohol, sex, whatever. This girl looked about in her mid twenties and talked about how, since she was 13, she became involved in alcohol, drugs, and sexual promiscuity with both guys and girls. She continued to say how these things tore her life apart, she was homeless, a junkie, a miscreant, hated her life, etc. She went on a roller coaster with having God in and out of her life, until finally something clicked and her relationship with God helped her overcome her addictions and become “a fully redeemed woman through the blood of Jesus Christ.” And good for her, because she’s obviously not lying in a gutter somewhere dead, or an empty shell of a person trudging through addiction, but she’s living her life and happy and fulfilled.

However I was confused mainly about her dealings with lesbianism. She continued to relate her same-sex relationships with her falls back into her degenerate lifestyle. I agree that excessive anything can ruin your life, especially drugs of course, and even sex. But I honestly don’t think homosexuality is inherently a doorway to degeneracy. I personally don’t think they’re related at all, and I think there are equal proportions of healthy and toxic relationships among hetero- and homosexuals everywhere. Nor do I think promiscuity itself is wrong either – if people are single and consenting, go for it and enjoy yourself. It’s the addiction and abuse that are the additives for disaster.

Now of course her opinions are very biased because of her religious perspective, since the bible admonishes homosexuality and promiscuity in so many ways. She openly renounced her promiscuity along with the substance abuses, however she was rather vague on the lesbian part. She never openly renounced her homosexuality, and several questions started running through my head. She knows her own self more than anyone, so perhaps she’s accepted that she is naturally a lesbian and can’t change that. If that’s the case, then I think if she wants to adhere to Christian morality, she has two choices, both of which I feel are ultimately disastrous:

1) She can attempt to pursue a normal relationship with a man, get married, have kids, etc. But you can’t stay married to someone you’re not in love with or attracted to, and it just sounds like the breeding grounds for a fabulously dysfunctional and abusive family  – a scenario probably all too typical among closeted homosexuals trying to lead a “normal” life.

2) She can attempt to maintain a life of celibacy, which I think goes against the grains of general human nature. We are physical creatures bent on one purpose: to reproduce. Hence our inherent sexual nature that only kindles when intentionally suppressed. It’s this kind of deliberate suppression of a desire that leads to a destructive binge.

I’ve asked this question before, and always seem to get different interpretations, but I wonder if homosexuality is really supposed to be admonished by the Christian faith, any more than eating shellfish or wearing two different materials of fabric. If all sins are the same in the eyes of God, then every Christian alive today is going to hell. Unless some of those old laws don’t apply anymore, which of course is up to an individual’s own interpretation of the book they came from. I honestly think this girl should listen to her heart, embrace the fact that she wants to be in love with a woman and not a man, and find a solid relationship with a woman who empowers her. I think she can still love a woman and love Jesus at the same time, since he did, after all, make her this way right?

Genesis and the history of the universe

I've been reading the book of Genesis from the beginning, and I must admit it's quite challenging to me on many levels. Every time I read a particular story that sounds pretty fantastic, I poke around and see what other people have to say about it. It's lead me to put together an entirely new interpretation of the creation story than if you took the book of Genesis literally, word-for-word. After a little research, I’ve put together two basic timelines for comparison. One is the Naturalist timeline, based on as much scientific data as we have available today: archeological, radioactive, chemical, genetic, etc. The second is a timeline based on the events listed in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis.


Naturalist timeline:

Universe forms from a single point and all matter is expelled outward.

Earth forms and solidifies from swirling nebulaic dust. Sun begins to form about the same time. Earth is a rotating celestial body, being bathed on one side with light and radiation energy from our developing sun. You could say these are the earliest “days” and “nights”.

A giant object strikes primitive earth, blowing a tremendous amount of matter into orbit around the earth, forming the earth’s only moon.

The earth’s surface cools, earth's first atmosphere is formed from volcanic activity and steam escaping from the crust. Oceans had not yet formed, as there was not enough water on earth yet.

Icy protoplanets and comets impact the earth, vaporize, and eventually settle onto the earth, covering the entire surface with water.

The first land masses appear as a result of the cooling of earth’s crust and mantle.

First life appears in the oceans in the form of single-celled organisms. Blue-green algae, archaeans, bacteria. Due to the incredibly high-energy asteroid bombardment of earth at the time, it is possible that life developed and was extinguished more than just once.

The many land masses merged into one supercontinent, called Rodinia.

Ocean is filled with all existing phyla of life, albeit in their primitive forms. Supercontinent of Rodinia breaks up into smaller land masses.

First primitive plants appear on land.

Bony fishes and other complex marine life evolves. First amphibians appear - essentially the first animals to live at least partially out of the water.

First winged insects appear. These are the first living creatures that fly through the air.

Land masses again form into one supercontinent called Pangea. Reptiles appear; along with winged insects, these are the first animals that can live solely out of water.

Dinosaurs and the first mammals appear, and follow through the 3 periods of dinosaurs: Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretacious. The supercontinent Pangea breaks up and the resulting land masses start to resemble modern-day continents.

The first birds appear in the Jurassic period. Most of modern plant life evolves during the dinosaur era.

Dinosaurs end in extinction probably due to asteroid impact or high tectonic/volcanic activity. The first marsupials develop.

The first large mammals develop and proceed to thrive successfully.

First hominids appear – these are the first primitive primates to walk upright. Australopithecus Afarensis is among the first known hominid species. Megalodon (ancient giant shark) appears in the seas.

After about 20 different hominid species, the first modern humans (Homo Sapiens) appear in east Africa. Prehistoric beasts are aplenty: mastodons, saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, giant ground sloths.

Human civilization develops as humans leave Africa to populate the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. The migration is mainly fueled by the increase or recession of ice ages, which provided either an abundance or shortage of available food, and also geographically unlocked different parts of the globe.


Biblical timeline:

Universe forms. Earth and oceans form.

Light from the sun provides the first days and nights.

The sky/atmosphere develops, separating the earth’s water from the rest of the universe.

First land masses appear. The land produces all modern complex plant life.

Every other celestial body in the universe develops (or at least appears visible on earth), appearing as our solar star during the day, and our moon and other stars in our night sky.

Life develops in the oceans. Birds develop.

Life appears on land in the form of all complex modern life.

Modern humans appear on land, namely the Garden of Eden, hypothesized to exist anywhere from Iraq to northeast Africa (in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers)

Human civilization develops in Mesopotamia until God scatters humans across the globe after the building of the Tower of Babel.


Reading these two sequences of events gives obvious notice of their differing order, and the lack of mention of many events in the Biblical timeline. The timespan of the Naturalistic timeline is about 15 billion years, with the earth forming and all life on earth developing during the last 4.6 billion years. So for each item in the list, figure anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of years. The bible gives a timespan of 6 days. However in recent years, as more Christians accept scientific data showing the true age of the earth, these “days” have been interpreted as ages or eons, so that the biblical timeline extends to hundreds of millions of years and more closely reconciles with the actual age of the earth.

This last note about the 6 “days” or “eons” gives rise to a very important note: If you take the first chapter of Genesis literally, it doesn’t even remotely agree with an overwhelming amount of scientific data that has been discovered since Genesis was written. However if you choose to interpret the story as a metaphoric narrative, then it can be loosely reconciled with the naturalistic history of the universe. But of course this is where the whole of the faith comes to a gripping paradox: if the creation story itself must be interpreted a certain way to make sense, and is not necessarily the literal infallible word of God, then what else in the Bible can we take this way? If Genesis can only make sense when taken with a grain of salt, then it leaves the entire faith up to interpretation.

There is much in the bible that is pretty historically accurate, although sometimes a little contradictory. It was written by many different sources over thousands of years, but when brought together the core of the different stories overlap pretty well to give a fantastically detailed history of north Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Middle East over the last several thousand years. But like the history of the universe and earth, it fails to mention what was going on in the rest of the world. That doesn’t make it inaccurate, just incomplete. I don’t think it challenges the validity of the bible just because they didn’t give a detailed history of South America, I just think the people who wrote it had no idea about the rest of the world, just the parts that they were directly experiencing. But many people will say that this itself challenges the divinity of the bible. If its authors were being channeled by God’s divine and all-knowing word, why wouldn’t they write about things that no man could have truly known at the time, such as the existence and extinction of dinosaurs? Or at least the proper order of the development of life in the sea, land, and air? It could be said that the history recorded in Genesis is really a matter of the authors' perspective and limited understanding of the world. Maybe God did impart to them the infinite nature of the universe and the exact formation of the earth, but they really only understood and wrote down a small fraction of it. This still of course challenges the literal word-for-word infallible nature that the bible is supposed to uphold. However personally, I don't have a terrible problem with it if that's the case. If these people were gifted with such an overwhelming insight, I think they did pretty well with what they had to work with.

It is also safe to say that science isn’t always 100% accurate either. Just the discoveries made in the last 15 years through genetics has already shed new light on old scientific facts. However science is much more accepting of changing data then religion. Despite politics and profits, over the course of time science will always gravitate toward new and provable data to mold its most updated explanations of the universe. Whereas religion already has their answer, and they will pick and choose (or re-interpret, or ignore) data as they see fit to property reconcile with their holy doctrine.

I’ve heard it said “Science has questions that may never be answered. Religion has answers that may never be questioned.”

It’s this kind of thing that reminds me just how freakin’ small we are.


Interactive slide showing the scale of the universe

If you want to read the Genesis of the bible and believe that it literally describes the exact creation of the entire universe – all 14,000,000,000 light-years of it, every galaxy, nebula, black hole, red giant, neutrino, quark, and preon – then that’s totally your choice. Given the information that man has discovered since the time the bible was written, it might be beneficial if you take it with a slight grain of salt. It could be a vast metaphor. It could be completely made up. It could only pertain to our planet, not necessarily the whole universe because we didn’t need to know that at the time. Or let’s say God was transcending the knowledge of the universe into the meager minds of humans 4,000+ years ago – do you think there’s even a slight chance they might have missed 99% of the point, and just paraphrased the best they could?

Anyway, when you’re presented the whole of the known universe in a silly (yet impressive) little internet applet like this, I think it simultaneously brings two things to light:

One: we know for a fact that the universe is bigger and more complex than anything ever imagined by the guys who wrote the bible on dried tree bark. I mean these guys didn’t even have the vague concept of a celestial body, including the one called Planet Earth that they lived on. They had no concept of sub-atomic particles or ultra-violet light waves. So to think this simple explanation of the creation of the universe and all complex life on earth, which happens in just a few pages, can word-for-word accommodate for all that we know exists is kinda silly.

Two: I think by illustrating how much we know about the universe, it also illustrates how much we DON’T know about the universe. As I’ve discussed before, the human perception and comprehension of our reality is pretty limited. We only exist in 4 dimensions: length, height, width, and time. And we can’t even control anything about that last one, we’re just along for the ride. Yet we know there are countless other dimensions that are provable mathematically, that actually do exist, yet we will never be able to experience. At the smallest end of that “scale of the universe” chart is the theoretical quantum string. Who’s to say this isn’t exponentially more enormous than truly the smallest bit of matter, or that it doesn’t continue shrinking to infinity? And neutrinos… what the HELL are those things? They travel through matter at the speed of light and actually go back in time. All the time, everywhere, right now, as you’re reading this.

Who’s to say there isn’t something tying together every sub-atomic particle in the universe, perhaps even an intelligence that exists in every point and dimension simultaneously? If it all exists now, it had to have been created from somewhere, but who or what created it? God? Chaos?

Who. The. Fuck. Knows.

I think the concept of God goes beyond any scientific concept or theory human beings could ever dream about. And yet science has shown us innumerable things that every religion in existence fails to mention. It’s a toss-up, folks. So take your pick, and be very happy with it. But it’s not advisable to proclaim that your choice is the “truth”. It’s more like “the best conclusion you could come up with based on the evidence you were given.”

Creationist logic

There’s a lot I don’t care for about the logic process of creation scientists. I think the bible is a wonderful history book in so many ways, but on the surface, much of it seems very questionable and requires research to get your brain around. It also requires – get ready for the cliché – a leap of faith.

I’m reading the book of Genesis right now, and it’s really hard to take a lot of that stuff at face value. I’ve only gotten through about chapter 10 (the story of the Tower of Babel), and I had to stop reading and start doing some research. The general core of the story contradicts almost everything we know about the history of our planet as a celestial body and the fossil record of life on our planet. When reading about what different creationists have to say about the archeological evidence that supports these biblical stories, it seems they’re looking at the equation backward, and I can’t say I’m comfortable with that. Let me elaborate.

Let’s say you’re trying to determine where the origin of the human species came from. You would examine all available evidence that you’re capable of collecting (which is limited by the technology available to you), and that would help you determine the answer to your question. Evidence + More evidence = X.  Where “X” is the variable, the missing information that you don’t know, or in this case, the origin of the species. In other words, you look at all the things you know are true to help you answer the question that’s unknown.

The creationist logical process seems to be the reverse of this. They may have the same equation, Evidence + More evidence = X, but in this case, their answer is ALWAYS the same. X = God. So they work backward from their constant answer, only to look over the evidence to find the bits of information that best fit their already predetermined answer. Here’s an example of this:

The creationist answer to the origin of the human species is that God created two human beings: Adam and Eve. And the two of them were responsible for eventually creating every human being alive today. This act was pretty much repeated after the Flood, when Noah and his wife, three sons, and their wives were allegedly the only living humans. And they again were blessed with the task of kicking out babies and ancestoring everyone alive today. And since the bible MUST be the 100% infallible, perfect truth (otherwise the entire faith falls apart instantly) the answer to the question of the origin of the species must be God. And then the creationist must work backward over the evidence available and try to find pieces that fit this predetermined answer. However, innumerable glaring problems erupt from this equation immediately, incest being the most obvious. Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters (only a handful of which are mentioned by name), which means if those children were to eventually reproduce they would have to do it with each other, or with their parents. Yes, that means you have sex with your brother, sister, mom, or dad, and bear their children. Offspring born from that close of a gene pool have almost inevitable chances of congenital deformity, and many would be instantly fatal. Let alone if this process were to be repeated for thousands of generations. We know this for a very certain fact.


There’s of course the question of the actual origin of life and the evolution of humans from more primitive forms of life. Unfortunately we don’t have evidence of the actual act of spontaneous creation and then reproduction of a single-celled organism, and the concept is actually quite theoretical. However we do have quite a bit of evidence of species development over time through the fossil record. So a bit of holes here, however the scientific version of the equation still has the unbiased “X” at the end, hoping to fit together any and all available evidence to answer the unknown. Where the creationist already has answered “X” as “God”, and then selectively chooses their evidence trying to make the answer fit.

Now I do honestly feel that so much of the bible is metaphoric in ways that we may never understand, or so much of history has been condensed into a few short sentences that, at face value, makes no sense. It would be like taking the last 100 years of history, and summarizing with the sentence “There were great wars, and man learned to speak words over thousands of miles without a sound.” Or it’s like waking up from a dream that could have lasted an hour, but you only remember one or two completely disparate details and find yourself incapable of making any sense of it. But the way I feel about the creationist way of pre-supposing God as the answer to every mystery of the bible just to have it make sense doesn’t make me that comfortable.

Noah is kind of a douche

Genesis spends several chapters talking about the heroic work of Noah with his whole ark-building business, collecting and housing every animal on the planet for several months while God washed the entire world away, then repopulating the earth full of humans with just him, his wife, and his sons and their wives. Sure there are innumerable logistical problems with this story – actually finding and keeping every species of animal in one place for that long, repopulating the earth with such a small gene pool (which means he had to get it on with his son's hot wives, go Noah), no fossil record of a true global-wide flood (though much evidence does exist of catastrophic floods in many parts of the world), etc. Nonetheless, the Bible spends a good amount of precious scripture telling us the noble tale of how Noah was single-handedly responsible for continuing life on earth.

However, ironically in the final chapter of Noah's bold life, he gets drunk on wine from grapes that he grew and passes out naked on the floor of his tent. And when his sons find him there, they are kind enough to cover him with a sheet, all the while keeping their back to him to respect their father and not gawk as his old wrinkly naked drunk ass on the floor. And what does he do in return? Gets pissed and curses his grandchild Canaan to be a slave to his sons for the rest of this life. Thanks Grandpa, I was in the yard shooting marbles during your happy hour and now I'm a slave to my dad and uncles forever.

And apparently nothing else worthy of mention happens in Noah's life for the next THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS until he finally dies.

Not quite sure why this last story was so important that Moses and his scribes included it in the holy scripture, and it was copied down meticulously hundreds of times by the highest of Hebrew scholars for 2000 years, so that we could read about Noah saving the world, then being a drunk old fart.

Still searching...

First I’d like to say that my lack of posts recently has been a bit of a downer to me, and I apologize to any who have been frequenting my site and reading my humble insights only to find the same posts staring at you for weeks on end. My newly forming art career has taken much of my time and mindshare, and it’s been hard to find the time and concentration to post regularly. That doesn’t imply however that my search is over, or there aren’t a thousand ideas in my head all day long about God and the universe. Just the opposite in fact. Anyway, rather than trying to put together perfectly organized, well-researched, and very time-consuming posts, I’ve decided to make it more of a stream of consciousness, a place for me to simply share my thoughts and feelings. And anyone wants to present some research to either back up or refute my thoughts, then please do.

I’ve lately been spending a lot of my driving time to and from work listening to podcasts or videos on the internets, thanks to the wonders of the iPhone 4. It’s an endless sea of arguments, discussions, debates, and seminars for and against Christianity, or any religion for that matter. And it’s great for stirring up fodder for some new blog posts. And saves time on my “research” for certain facts when talking about a topic. Hopefully this will allow me to post much faster, since I might be able to recall ideas or evidence from memory, rather than constantly researching while I’m writing. I also might take the liberty to spontaneously share an idea I’ve had, with no argument being made, something that I am sometimes hesitant to do.

Anyway, thank you for all for reading, and I hope to share more thoughts and insights more often.

Using the Bible to prove itself

I’d like to address an argument that I hear often about the credibility of the bible. Many people assert that the bible’s credibility about so many events (such as fulfilled prophesies, the life/death/resurrection of Jesus, etc) is non substantial because there exist few extra-biblical sources of these alleged supernatural events. Not to say that the historical events in the bible didn’t happen, i.e. the Jewish exile from Jerusalem. But to use the prophesies made in the bible to prove events recorded later in the same work is considered by many a circular argument. In other words, using the bible to prove itself is a weak argument.

However I would like to present this idea. The bible itself is not one book, but a collection of 66 different books, written by 44 different authors, over a period of 1500-2000 years. It is a compilation of volumes assembled into one book over a period of time, first the Old Testament as the standard Jewish bible before the birth of Jesus, and later the New Testament about 400 years later due to the efforts of the Roman emperor Constantine, the council of Nicaea, etc. I believe if one book asserts a certain bit of information, and a different book written by a different author in a different time period verifies that information, that is a valid comparison.

That would be like people claiming the same facts in different issues of Time Magazine, written by different authors decades apart, are not substantial because they both appeared in Time Magazine. Assembling the books into a compilation doesn’t discredit the information one bit.

And if you’re wondering about the variations of the text that could have taken place over time (mistranslations, deliberate editing, the game of telephone that changes as the story is re-told a thousand times), after studying much about the ancient Jewish culture, it seems this is considerably unlikely or virtually non-existent. The ancient Hebrews took their culture very seriously – and very meticulously. Before the texts were actually written down and were passed on by word of mouth, it was frowned upon to alter the core of the story in any way. Slight details and nuances were acceptable to change, depending on the characteristics of the storyteller, but the core work was always intentionally kept intact. And they had their entire population telling the same stories, so any variations would have been noted and corrected simply by the vast amounts of people who already knew the correct story.

And once the text was finally written down in the original Hebrew or Aramaic (Old testament) or original Greek (New testament), only the most educated scribes were tasked with meticulously transcribing every character. And the review process was exhaustive, so that there was a near 100% accuracy of each new text. Even if one character was found to be erroneous, the entire text was thrown out and destroyed. Not to mention that every time the endless oceans of Middle Eastern sand cough up an older version of any part of the bible, the accuracy compared to the previously older versions is near 100%.

So with all that, I think that it is a valid argument to use different books of the bible, written by different authors at different time periods, to prove facts or assertions also found within the bible.