And people are being wounded by the world.
My spiritual journey has led from membership in a conservative, evangelical church to an awakening realization that I had read about Jesus, but not truly studied his lessons. It was an awakening realization that any religious tradition that focuses on personal salvation after death, rather than how we love the world while living, is not listening to the
incredible wisdom shared by ancestral teachers like Jesus.
Jesus said we were to love. It is a simple phrase, but living in love has been bogged down by the very thing Jesus told us to avoid - judgement of one another. Nowhere is this more evident than in how churches and denominations, have judged, condemned, and driven out le***an, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other people who are not cisgender and heterosexual; and in the centuries of religious complicity in the establishment and perpetuation of white supremacy, colonization, and slavery. Watching the continuing trauma being inflicted on my communities, I realized that I was no longer interested in redeeming something that had deviated so far into a system of harm. In that instant, I committed to humanism and quit focusing on the wisdom of a single teacher. As a humanist, I believe that humans have a moral and ethical responsibility to care for this planet and one another. My focus is not on personal salvation and getting into heaven, but on how we transform our human world. I believe Jesus hoped to transform the world. That means we have a lot of work to do.
