u/SouthernTraderX

When the priest makes the sign of the cross at you, the expected response is for you to cross yourself.

Has anyone ever felt the urge to make the sign of the cross right back at him, to see what would happen?

If that happened in your church, what do you suppose would happen?

I've often said that "Christianity is worse than false; it's boring."

I can't think of any times where I've been more bored than when I was forced, for two decades, to attend Eastern Orthodox Church services and stand in place for multiple hours.

Looking back, I view my experience with my church growing up as a cultural one, primarily rooted in shared ethnic identity. That is, it was mostly a social venue with weird cosplay (the church services) and endless standing in place thrown in.

There's no way that outsiders would have been accepted. Anyone who didn't speak our native language would have been viewed with suspicion. Outside guests might have been reluctantly tolerated at a particular social event, but they had better be white.

I wonder how much of my estrangement from the religion that I was born into comes from the inconvenient and shocking at the time (but, on my part, completely hidden) truth that I'm gay. That was a big-time no-no in a muscular, patriarchal, proto-Identitarian religion of working class immigrants in various Exodus waves after WW II obliterated Europe.

Estrangement is one thing, but veracity is quite another. I simply didn't buy any of the metaphysical or epistemic claims. Over time, I went from a state of feeling embraced (through the plausible deniability of my gayness) to alienated because, for me, there would never be a wife and children.

With the passage of time, once close friends would move away. Some even died young. And with each subsequent college degree (one, two, three, four), eventually, what little residue of religion remained for me became no more. Now, I view it from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist or social psychologist. I see it as a purely cultural phenomenon.

And with each stepwise displacement from my cultural origins, I lost something more of my social identity, until now, I find myself estranged from non-academics, yet wary of academics because their outlook is so bleak. We find ourselves precisely in the state that the true prophet of modernity, David Bowie, foresaw and wrote about on his masterpiece album, Heathen: post-religious, drowning in despair, enslaved by corporations, and exhausted.

Cultural templates are the easy fallback, if you fit in. If you're "white and delightsome," try Mormonism. Black? Southern Baptist. Gay and Eastern Orthodox? Let me translate into English from my native language the screaming from the second-floor apartment of a 60-some-year-old protester as people marched below him in a gay pride parade in the capital city of an Eastern European country: "Kill, kill, kill the fags!!" (Translating literally, he screamed "pederasts;" for this man, the two are identical.) Ironically, the anti-gay response was led by an Orthodox priest, who was surrounded by a sea of supporters holding Orthodox icons and crosses.

Oh, the irony!

There is no hate like Christian love.

(And if you happen to be gay, stay far away from sports Orthobro gangs in Eastern Europe.)