I feel really lucky to have grown up with all religions presented as various ways people think the world came to be - my parents read me creation stories as bedtime stuff but I got like… the greek gods, the islands came from the spear of yahweh (didn’t get the penis analogy and I’m not sure my parents did either), it’s all a giant turtle, all in the same breath as the jesus stuff so for me it was just like huh, look at all these stories people thought up, that is fun! I think my parents did this because they were both raised religious - my dad has NEVER talked about it, and my mom has talked about it in terms of liking spirituality but not the doctrines. I think they wanted me to be able to figure out what I thought for myself, which as it turns out is not something most parents did in my age group.
So as I got older I started to get exposed to the ways everyone else interacted with religion, and it was basically exclusively stories like Milo told, or active physical/mental/sexual abuse, or people who didn’t believe in their own religion’s theoretical core values being like “well obviously The Gays are going to hell because jesus.”
I never even HEARD about the loving aspect of any of this stuff until much later because I didn’t grow up being told there was love involved, I heard the stories alongside like clifford the big friendly dog, and then met a bunch of hateful, spiteful, frightened people who believed those stories meant they needed to be awful to others (I know that’s not what it’s meant to be about, but this was me as a kid meeting [mostly] christians who saw an unbeliever child who was ignorant of their ways, and you can imagine how that goes). I guess I did hear preachers saying “god is love” and then spewing hate right after that on tv, but that just read as straight hypocrisy and I never saw the like… church picnic aspect.
As a kid the only religions that seemed okay were buddhism and judaism because they were all nice and weren’t telling me I was terrible for just existing (and, on paper, I’m the kind of person christians think is good! I’m a straight white male, their very tip top favorite kind of human. so what hope does anybody else have?). at least judaism wasn’t doing that in a language I could understand lol.
Anyway for my whole life I have existed outside of religion, in as much as that’s possible in america, so these discussions are useful for me. I have been working hard on not a) pitying and b) being dismissive of religious folk, but it has been a challenge because from the outside all I’ve seen is the wars and genocide it causes, the abuse of people just trying to be kids (as with milo), the hatred of any “out group,” etc.
I remember when I was in college and was an usher for the theaters we had there - a disgraced pastor rented one of our big 2k person+ auditoriums for his superchurch, and there were all these ladies who clearly did not have money or were experiencing actual coming to this thing, and always telling me how great he was, how his message was all about love, and maintaining relationships, and the importance of marriage, and etc etc.
MEANWHILE dude was saying, directly, “jesus wants you to dig deep tonight” while asking for money, and he had two bentleys, literally two bentleys parked behind the place, and with his message of the importance of marriage he had last year “lost a few of his followers” because he was cheating on his wife with one of the members of his church, and also he couldn’t have a set physical location anymore because he had been indicted with tax fraud, etc etc. and he was still raking it in from these people who were clearly in poverty and it was just like… this is not ambiguous!
So yeah, my whole life experience has really soured me on the whole thing! I have individual religious friends and I respect them as human beings but I do not respect religion, but I try to understand that they like it and it’s nice for them, and that’s basically as far as I’ve been able to get. Hearing stories like Milo’s just make me so pissed off that I have to like go cool off somewhere because it’s all made up!! it’s all made up pretty recently to oppress people! there was love in there back in the day, and a few people are trying to bring the love stuff back, but like… dang. I have friends who got sent to conversion or scared straight camps and there’s no love in there.
I guess I diverged from the point but I guess this is a long explanation for why I don’t understand the billboards I see around town lol
