This is something I faced with the union a few years ago. Priorities are swell, but long meetings systematically exclude people with childcare obligations, people with disabilities, people who rely on public transit, and people who need to work multiple jobs to survive. There was a time, early on, when I told myself, Well, you MAKE time. But I soon realized--smarter people than me compelled me to realize--even thinking like that is a luxury not everyone can afford, and it really skews who gets heard at these things.

Glad you've uncovered that!

I had an auditory learner in my class last year. He was very cool. A little disconcerting at first, because he never took notes, but he was brilliant.

I learn well by reading, reasonably well by listening, and abysmally by visual/spatial means--diagrams make EVERYTHING worse--but best of all by writing, of all things. If I've written it down, even if I never read it again, it's there forever, or at least as long as I need it.

That's been my experience, but not of God.

Well, that's the thing: I recognized suddenly that Phelps and I did not follow the same supreme being. But he saw the Bible as authoritative; I saw it as one side of the story. He saw human beings as essentially evil due to the Fall; I saw every one of us as beautiful, loved, and holy parts of a greater whole. He looked at the world and saw a crumbling cesspool; I looked at it and saw...well...heaven. My understanding was more at variance with Christianity than his, and calling myself a Christian was no longer that important to me.

Since that time, I've found that there are kinds of Christianity that, had I been exposed to them at the time, probably would have made a good spiritual home for me. Justin's Christianity, or that of my friends David and Kathleen, for example. Heck, if I'd run into Fred Clark back then, I might even have wound up an Evangelical. But the thing is, none of them MIND that that's not what I call myself. The only kind of Christianity I would want to practice, then or now, is the kind that thinks I'm fine now.

I mean...what I saw was as big as the universe. Bigger than language. Bigger than narrative. Bigger than boundaries. I can understand the ancient Hebrews, and the early Christians, seeing that and trying to fit it into stories the best way that they could, from their own perspective at the time. And sometimes, even now, when I'm reading the Bible, parts of it echo my understanding in ways that they never did before. But the leap of faith I used to have to take to believe that it was all God's infallible word doesn't just seem unjustified now; that leap lands me in places that are at considerable variance with my own understanding of what I serve, and it's been that way since before I left Christianity.

There are kinds of Christianity that make me think it didn't, and kinds that assure me that it pretty much did. But I mean, that part isn't the part that matters, is it? What matters is now, and that's a lesson I keep having to learn over and over.

Kathi, it was more like this:

1) had an experience that did not jive with the God I learned about as a Christian, but couldn't conceive of a cosmology without him in charge
2) spent two years trying to adjust my Christianity to account for it
3) realized--with a nudge from Fred Phelps, granted--that what I'd found was not God, and that all my previous models of the universe needed to be junked and rebuilt from the ground up, with THIS at the centre of my life

Kathi, that seriously, honestly sounds like what happened to me when I was fifteen. For me it wasn't skirts, though; it was the whole concept of joy. After a couple of years I just couldn't reconcile it with Christianity as I had known it, but you've known it differently, thank goodness.

Rude and disruptive, I'd agree. But demonic? I mean, it's a term I see used a lot in the Evangelical world, but it bugs me when Christians use it about each other. About me, I can see. I don't agree, but I can see. But somehow I think if I'd been there with you on Friday, you wouldn't have said that about me, even though technically I'm worse. The people who disrupted the service at least think they're doing God's work; I would have been respectful, but I...don't.

Something like 25 000 children will starve to death today, and millions more are in slavery or in sweatshops or toting machine guns as child soldiers. We could stop it, but we don't. If this is what humans do to each other, while demons orchestrate outbursts at prayer meetings, then aren't demons the more righteous entity by far?

It just bothers me to see people who agree with each other about everything except this one tiny point turning that point into a cosmic battle between good and evil, when there's so much else wrong with the world, that more of us DO agree on, that we can fix.