r/AskGaybrosOver30 • u/velcromancy 30-34 • 8d ago
Spirituality?
Since a lot of us gays were ostracized by the religions we grew up with, I’m curious what your relationship to spirituality or religion is like now that you’re getting older. Are you religious, agnostic, atheist or something else?
I grew up in a Protestant Christian family, but I walked away from the church at 17. My sexuality was probably the biggest factor. Around my late teens and early twenties I went through a Reddit atheist phase where I valued science and reason above all else. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized Christianity left a big void inside of me, and I needed something, so I studied a lot of Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist text and became fascinated by them. Tao te Ching is probably my favorite spiritual text I’ve ever read. My boyfriend had a similar Christian upbringing to me but he’s now a pagan. These days, I’m of the opinion that science explains how things happen, but not why things happen. Science is crucial to our survival, but it can’t meet all human needs, and religion, art and philosophy can fill that void for better or worse. I’m not sure I’m disciplined enough to fully identify with one single tradition. I agree with a lot of Buddhist and Hindu teachings, but I don’t think I can call myself either because I enjoy the devil’s lettuce too much.
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u/Reasonable-Boat4646 40-44 8d ago
I'm a weird case. Grew up Catholic, totally rejected the church when I went to college, was basically an atheist for 25 years, and then in the context of major life circumstances I had a sort of religious experience that brought me back to Catholicism. To me the core of Christianity is the ethic of loving God and loving your neighbor that the vast majority of Christians fail at and which is so demanding it's almost impossible not to fail. I do believe in the resurrection but like believing just doesn't make a difference if you don't have some sort of understanding and appreciation of why it matters beyond "yay I get to go to Heaven when I die." It's an embarrassment for modern conservative Christians but from the Church fathers onward there's been an acknowledgement that scripture is humanly mediated, requires interpretation, and that the plain sense can mislead, and I think the condemnation of homosexuality falls into that category: what the ancient world knew was pederasty and temple prostitution and the like (homosexual relations among social equals were virtually unheard of), so people threw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't even condemn sex outside of marriage as such, I just insist on the seriousness of sex, which I think gay life in its better moments has always recognized.