End Days for Solicitors at My House

I was visited again yesterday by a couple of religious ladies who were planning to save my soul. I find these people so very disturbing. Within minutes, they had told me that these are the "End Days" and that they can prove their assertion by quoting the Bible. I told them immediately that I honor their religion and their right to live their beliefs. Further, I told them that I, myself, am spiritual but not religious. I also told them that I am a gay man and that I hold the opinion that the churches of this country are waging a war of denying me my civil rights. I told them that I can not support churches of any kind, especially as I feel that the recent beating in Chapel Hill was fomented by the new fundamentalism that is being spread by the churches, and worse, endorsed from his bully-pulpit, by George W. Bush. They did not return to me the honoring of my beliefs. In fact, they implied that I was wrong (and going to hell, no doubt). When my self-admitted homosexuality floated over the air from my mouth to their ears, it caused a visible change in their collective countenances. Their smiles were wiped away by seven small syllables.

As they left, one of the ladies instructed me to read Timothy II, Chapter 3, verses 1-5. She suggested to me that the kind of "DIS-ease" that I am feeling from the fundamentalists in our society would be answered by those verses. I decided to read the text.

It was a bit like reading a horoscope. There were general references to people who would put their opinions and ideas ahead of those of God. High-minded, egotistical, self-serving people would be all around in the End Days: this seemed to be the general message of that text. I read the words and wondered if she felt that they applied to me, to the fundamentalists or to herself. I could easily see any one of us fitting that general description, especially when factoring in personal prejudice and religious belief.

My great fear, from having talked to these people in the past, is that they are treading on the shaky ground of self-fulfilling prophecy. More importantly, I began to question just what the End Days are supposed to signify? The End of the World? The End of the Church? The End of Democracy? The End of a Fallout-Free Environment? The End of our Lives? I am curious what they see it to mean, but not so curious as to want to engage any of them in conversation. People have been preaching the end of time since the beginning of time. I think it is a pathos of humanity to see through a glass bleakly. I suspect that they are going to get their way. If they preach to one another that they have to defend God’s word (I assume they must feel He is unable to let it stand on its own merit) against all that threaten them, then we will eventually go to nuclear war with another fundamentalist nation, or we will alternately see another holocaust with all those who don’t agree with these people going to the camps together.

I made a sign to place on my door today. I will no longer allow soliciting of any kind at my house. I especially do not want to have to recycle more paper from congregations that have no more respect for our God-given lives than to willingly go to their deaths. If they must die, let them die, en masse, within their own homes. I find it unacceptable that they would dare drag me and my innocent friends, of all religions and nationalities, along with them into a nuclear holocaust that they see as Armageddon, the Rapture or the "rising on a cloud of glory". I can not believe that they would argue over the life of an ill-conceived fetus and yet they will support a President who will lead us to war where thousands have already been killed. Obviously, they only value a life if it is a life that believes as they do.

Categories: politics Freedom+Of+Religion Freedom+From+Religion religion