Why I Hate Religion ...

Last night my son showed me the first of the 2 video clips below and told me it is going viral on Facebook. And at this moment of posting it has had 6,984,315 viewings. It is titled Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus - Spoken Word. It is quite good and I can see why it is so appealing to young people. And I gleefully cheer its raging success on the interwebs - its message is quite powerful and quite damning.

But what is a more powerful video clip in helping me explain why I, as an older person and a mom who has a gay child, hate religion with every fiber in my body is the It Gets Better video by EricJames Borges that follows the first clip. And I will explain why this second clip sends me into a seething rage filled with nothing but contempt for those who hate and bully and destroy in the name of God. So watch both clips and then join me for some final commentary afterwards - k?





Both are great clips - no? The first one has really caught fire with the younger crowd and I am glad - it has a message I think is great. And it does a stupendous job of exposing the right-wing sanctimonious frauds who claim to be Christians as the cruel, bigoted bullies many of them really are.

But it is the second clip that gets to parents like me and here is why:

Eric James Borges, 19, of Visalia, California, succumbed to suicide Wednesday, January 11, 2012. Known as EricJames to his friends, he was an intern with the Trevor Project, and a Supplemental instructor at the College of the Sequoias.

So I am going to do what I do a lot on this blog when words fail me and quote Andrew Sullivan's comments about "what fundamentalist Christianity and social ostracism can do to a human soul". As always, his words are profound:

Eric - after making this video and struggling to overcome the impact of this psychological and physical warfare against him - killed himself two days ago at the age of 19. His own mother had tried to exorcize the gayness out of him. His own mother.

You want to know why so many of us are so impassioned to change the world that effectively killed this human being, made in the image of God? To love and save the Erics of today, and to prevent the laws and culture that reduce him - and all that he is - to the word "faggot." And this is a task real Christians need to be in the vanguard of, rather than adding to the pain and torture that seeps into the lives of so many, so young, and so vulnerable.

Why is that so hard to understand? Can anyone doubt where Jesus would be in this battle?