Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The view from Out There

I blog at several sites including the progressive Daily Kos, its religious offshoot Street Prophets, and my own blog at Gay Married Californian. I briefly blogged at TPM but gave it up (I just didn't "get" with that community) and I have resisted getting a user ID at Pam's House Blend since BP already complains I am too addicted to the computer, though i read Pam's blog regularly.

There is a huge HUGE amount of anger against religion generally and Christianity in particular on the progressive sites, especially from the GLBT community. As you know I live in a bridging position between believers and non-believers so I do my best to oil the waters. No, not all Christians are mouth-breathing bigots. No, not all atheists are God-bashing fundamentalists. Sometimes I feel like a complete expatriate from both communities (and having lived as an actual expatriate for a few years, I know what that's like).

Still, it was with some interest reading the statcounter for THIS blog that I saw a hit that came via Pam's House Blend, from a post about a "blender" who has a GLBT Christian blog. So I trotted over to the Blend to check out how they linked to us. I was rather chuffed to see that we were mentioned in the comment thread by someone who listed other GLBT friendly Christian Blogs and not a little amused that all the blogs so listed were our Friends' blogs, ie, the usual Episcopal suspects.

HOWEVER, this provoked a number of rants in the following comments against TEC's slow movement on GLBT rights (and rites), as well as some actual misinformation about the status of GLBT clergy (whether they are "allowed"). I guess it depends on perspective and where you are. For BP and me, part of the Roman Catholic diaspora, things are SO much better in TEC, and being part of an inclusive community that's moving towards "official" recognition of us both institutionally and locally is something to be celebrated. Others, clearly, find it's moving too slowly.

But if any of you folks have Blender IDs you might want to head over there and set them, er, straight.

2 comments:

David said...

No, not all Christians are mouth-breathing bigots. No, not all atheists are God-bashing fundamentalists.

Sigh... The difference is that, in pure numbers, most atheists / agnostics / humanists are not fundamentalists. But most Christians are. That's something we sometimes forget, being segregated in our Progressive Christian Internet Ghetto :/

JCF said...

I think that, on the Internet, EVERYONE registers more extreme than the average (Y'know, the middle-of-the-road---where the dead armadillos are ;-/).