"why are you a christian when they hate queer people?"
well 1) your experiences are not universal and 2)
i do actually believe this stuff. i do believe that God created the universe. i do believe he spoke to the jewish people and made an eternal covenant with them, and i do believe he incarnated himself as a human and was born of a human woman. i do believe he became a religious teacher, traveling around the land we now call the levant. i do believe he was murdered but then came back to life three days later. i do believe that the descendants of his students have more or less kept the faith of their elders since then, and i believe that god still guides them in spirit today. i do believe that the dead will be raised to eternal life to live with God.
some of these things i believe more or less depending on the day, but it's the story i cling to, and i didn't get to choose that that's what gives my life meaning. i don't get to just drop it because sometimes it's socio-culturally inconvenient. because it's what i believe. some of us really do believe in things
my faith has been described perfectly. im reminded of what john neville figgis wrote.
Christianity may be true or false, but it makes claims subversive of all the rationalist projections of life. It rests on presuppositions which cannot by any ingenuity be reconciled with any view which denies the miraculous, the unique, the individual. Its whole meaning comes from a faith in a life of spirits behind the veil. It cannot without hopeless error be confused with those systems which deny such a life or treat it as impersonal.
and
[The written account of Jesus] is incomplete, unchronological, unscientific, if you will; but the impression is always the same, the weird mingling of the homely and the far-off, the strange romantic tenderness for things human and little, the passion of faith; and the unbroken calm all intertwined with that power to do things, to make wonders, leaves us, as it left his earliest friends, in suspense. "What manner of man is this?" Stranger [...] to our age. He was strange to His own, so strange that men were driven either to crucify Him or else to take up the Cross themselves.
