Leaving Christianity for the wrong reason

Anne Rice announcement

I've never read an Anne Rice novel and don't know really much about her outside of the context of her vampire books.  This news article is very short and goes into extremely little detail.  My blog entry here is not exactly in response to Anne Rice's rejection of Christianity, but was loosely inspired by it.

If you've read any of my previous blog articles, you will know that I am certainly not a Christian or any flavor of a theist.  However, the reason to leave a faith like Christianity should not be for the reasons listed in the above article.  Human bastardization of your faith is no reason to abandon it.  There are many valid trains of thought that can lead to the abandonment of faith, but human error should not be one of them.

Ms. Rice's reasons stated were because Chrisitianity is "anti-gay ... anti-feminist, and anti-artificial birth control."  This may very well be true under Catholicism and other denominations, but is not inherently true to the faith itself.

Anti-gay

It's debatable whether the Bible is anti-gay.  Let's presume that the few places that it appears that way does mean that homosexuality is a sin (which I do not).  So are a billion other things that "normal" heterosexual Christians do all the time.  PEOPLE have made being gay some sort of mortal sin.  There's no evidence that the "sin of homosexuality" is any worse than any normal sort of sin.  Hypothetically, I would certainly put adultery above homosexuality in the severity of a sin, yet where is the outrage against adulterers?

If your problem with Christianity is with the homophobic insanity of many Christians, there are denominations that are much more gay friendly.  There are several that actually embrace it.

Anti-feminist and birth control issues

I believe these are both Catholic problems.  Many other denominations, while not particularly pro-woman, are not anti-woman either.  I think the more Evangelical denominations do preach the "proper gender roles" based on antequated ideas, but these are also human interpretations and manipulations.  I would imagine that Catholics and Evangelicals are also the culprits with regards to the hows and whens of having babies.

Odd bedfellows?

So this seems like an odd place in which I'm standing as an atheist.  However, I don't think it's that odd.  I think that religion and spirituality (or lack thereof) is a journey for most thinking people.

I would not recommend basing your world viewpoint on how some ignorant assholes (as many millions as they may be) twist it.  As Eddie Izzard so eloquently spoke, "Stalin was a mass-murdering fuckhead."  Stalin was also an atheist and gets thrown in our face by Christians all the time.  He does not define atheism any more than homophobic celibates in drag should be able to define Christianity.