1 post tagged “ethnocentrism”
Today, my feathers are ruffled and I feel a bit on edge because the same old topic, my old ghosts, continue to wrack me. Making psychological, sociologically and religious shifts in life's paradigm does not come without uprooting the foundation entirely. My mental house creeks. There was rot and mold that had to be ousted. There were roots which had entwined the pipes of this organism and I hacked them away. I speak in metaphor because speaking literally hurts my mouth (pride?), then later, the people who've always known me. But, inveriably, I'll write more and more till it trickles out of me. I've written this a million times, and erased it, clicked delete. So, I say this the best way I can. Now it has been years since I've moved away from a conservative and religiously closed-off life and I continue to find areas of detritus I have to shake loose. I've seen too much and done too much to know, we aren't evil. We're not born bad. We all make our choices. There is no one who has the one simple truth. There are billions and billions of years to have added up to this moment right now, and it can't be summed up with a glib sermon or the pointed finger of a white man who has only known his comfortable, christian bed, the one he was born in. Having heard from pentacostal and baptist pulpits a religion of isolationism and racism (yes, racism), the one that sends entire countries and cultures to a elected and prescribed hell, I reel inside. It's a shame it wasn't sooner that I saw reality. It's hard to see past one's own ethnocentrism. It is the same ethnocentrism within a self-serving system which reduces homosexuals to comic book characters or shapes them into monsters; I can not and will not sit in another conversation and say nothing when I hear such atrocious sentiments. I can not be divided into two camps of thinking. I must say what is right and stand up honestly for what I know is real. We are all equal in the eyes of God. All. Equal. There are billions of people whose hearts beat and blood flows just like my own. There are women round our world holding their own babies in their arms, feeling the love I feel and aching for it never to end. These people are not doomed to any hell, any more than I am. There are problems which pious prayers will never answer... but love will. The eyes of my heart were jaded once. Now I see, always so imperfectly, but I see how the language of love is the substance which is GOD. Any more than that, I can't say for certain. I've stopped claiming that I know the one truth. I'm human like you.
I've heard people call themselves recovering fundies... and I've thought about that a lot. But, you know me and how much I hate labels. Still, I do feel often that I am recovering from something. Today my brain hurts a little. And it should.
