The Contradiction Of Religious Teachings On Who & How To Love

‘Don’t lose yourself to someone else but find your other half!!’ ‘God made you in his image but being gay is a sin!!’

Something that is made ridiculous with language, trying to give something unspeakable words, is the concept of falling in love (and how that should be done, according to religion): What a contradiction.

‘Ridiculous’ because of how bizarre it is to fall in love with someone who was, not too long ago, a stranger. To completely lose yourself in someone as though there is no separation anymore, ‘when two become one’ (no, not a Spice Girls reference. Slightly older than that, a Bible reference: Ephesians 5:22–33- we learn that husband and wife are to form one unit. They are to think and act in unity and express a level of mutual care and love for each other that is deeper than any other human relationship).

‘Deeper than any other human relationship.’

Moving out of our family home, away from the people who literally put us on this earth, to be with someone who we convince ourselves that we can’t stay on this earth without. They become our ‘everything’, and we forget that there is a separation/that we are our own person.

But, the institution of marriage is set up in such a way that we are made to forget this. ‘Don’t lose yourself in someone else’, they tell us, while simultaneously pushing shared bank accounts on us, ‘What’s mine is yours’, ‘Find your other half.’ Unsurprising though, really, when marriage is rooted in religion, and religion is rooted in systems of oppression/the upholding of the patriarchy but still, a massive contradiction.

It’s no coincidence that ‘God’ is depicted as being a man, and that we are told that we can only seek redemption from our sins by finding and worshipping this ‘man’…

(And then people wonder why women seek male validation/why we find ourselves becoming so obsessed in love that we lose ourselves to someone else)

We are told that the only way to secure our space in heaven is to give ourselves up, to spend our lives worshipping a man as though we need saving. As though what we need saving from isn’t the supposed ‘savior’ that thrives on oppression, control, and coercion.

Telling us that we must live our lives in a certain way in order to ‘secure our spot in heaven.’ Contradiction after contradiction.

Government and God are interchangeable, both are about upholding division in society, upholding an us vs them, superior vs inferior dynamic.

While I’m not religious in the traditional sense (i.e. I don’t prescribe to any organised religion), I do believe in God. Not in a ‘man in the sky’ sense, but rather in a ‘higher power’/’universe’ sense. And I do also agree that ‘God’, in the sense of God being metaphysical, not a literal person as organised religions tell us, did make us in its (not his: its) image, for my belief is that there is no separation- we are all one consciousness, experiencing itself as individual human entities for a little while. We are all, at our core, the universe itself (where God is the universe, and God made us in his image, so too are we (the universe).

Made of stardust, we are all children of the universe.

And so, based on this, the concept of division (in any aspect) is nonsensical. Homophobia doesn’t make any sense, because the concept of gender is but a social construct (it doesn’t actually exist), and therefore there is no difference, when we strip everything back, taking away any and all social constructs, between men and women, thus meaning that sexual orientations are invalid. Where there is no gender, there can be no straight or gay… Where we are all one and the same, there is only love, and love doesn’t (/shouldn’t) exist in a binary. Love just is…

But, unfortunately love does (and ‘SHOULD’) exist in a binary, according to religion (another contradiction).

The argument that Christians tend to haul against gay people is counter to the argument they pose in every other context: ‘God made us in his image.’ If this is true, then our sexual orientation surely encompasses that. Again, further proof to back up my claim; ‘contradiction after contradiction’, with none of it being based on fact, but on nothing more than a fairytale. Metaphors to put words to that which we cannot understand, yet which people take literally, word for word as though it is, quite literally, the gospel (which it is, apparently, the ‘revelation of Christ’).

Don’t lose yourself to someone else’ // ‘Find your other half.’ ‘God made you in his image’ // ‘Being gay is a sin.’

‘Do as I say not as I do.’

Oh, the contradiction…