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Text of the page (random words):
forcefully ripped away from me in an act of mourning i boxed up my jesus and the victory of god my word biblical commentaries all ten volumes of my theological dictionary of the new testament and hundreds of others and finally i found peace but what would take its place once covid hit i found community again in tabletop roleplaying games we met online once a week to tell stories about fantasy worlds together in place of a vast theological library i began to accumulate volumes about imaginary places that my friends and i could imagine inhabiting my sunday night group thwarted the great dragon tiamat from taking over the known world my tuesday night group traveled to the first layer of hell to rescue a fallen city that had been claimed by devils it was a new mythology this time unburdened by the demand to be true it provided the community i desperately needed so okay i confess i am a nerd i enjoy pursuing fandoms i know on the map where the planet hoth is in the star wars galaxy i collected a couple dozen wonder woman graphic novel after the first movie made me fall in love with the character i accumulated nearly every volume wotc has published about the forgotten realms from fifth edition d d so here s a question what if i come back to the bible with that same sense of wonder what if i strip away my expectation that the bible can only be relevant if it provides a metaphysical map of reality what if instead i just come back to the text and appreciate it for what it is what if i nurture my love for the narrative world it creates or in other words if i approach the bible simply as fandom suddenly the whole project is fun again i can appreciate paul simply for his brilliance as a thinker i can follow the academic arguments about the historical jesus without needing to predetermine the answer and my years studying greek and hebrew have to be at least as valuable as if i had studied klingon right lets face it there s something fascinating about anyone who has learned a made up language thus begins my reentry to biblical studies i have started unboxing the books that have been patiently waiting to be loved again i need to find shelving for them all in my current office yesterday i upgraded my logos bible software to version 10 the new version has a cool feature that lets me catalog my print books making them searchable and my upgrade package finally gives me access to the bdag greek lexicon without having to schlep around a giant print volume so it seemed like a good time to fire up this old blog again glad to have you along for the journey leave a comment about your own journey categories uncategorized chivalry september 28 2015 rya n t jones leave a comment so far chivalry has been the scariest thing i have dealt with as a transgender woman it is scarier than coming out to my entire facebook friend list scarier than the first time i used the lady s room scarier than giving a speech as a woman to a room of hundreds of people and all those things were scary but chivalry worse than those things yes let me explain tonight i took two of my children to a traveling magic show my parents had two free children s tickets i only had to buy one adult ticket for myself we sat near the back the performer thanked the local masonic lodge who organized the event he pointed out the row of half a dozen masons sitting in the row directly behind us we all clapped to thank them the show began at one point they paused the show to give parents an opportunity to buy their children an overpriced candy bar some of the wrappers had red dots inside them which meant you won a free glow stick magic wand i didn t have much cash on me but i was going to buy one for the three of us and we could split it one of the masons behind us says do you kids want candy bars i ll get them for you do both of you want one they said yes we politely thanked him and the two kids went up with him to the back of the line at the stage he proceeded to buy seven candy bars two for my kids one i saw him give to someone else on the other side of the room and i don t know about the other four something about it felt weird then it dawned on me there i sat with my son and daughter and no wedding ring now someone could say well that could have happened to you as a married woman or as a single man you don t know that s why no you re right i don t but i ve lived a lot of years as a man and no man ever came up and offered to buy something for my kids no men do not typically offer gifts to other men or to children of other men it would be perceived as what i don t know it s hard to say because it s all non verbal but if i had to try to put it into words it would be perceived as attacking his masculinity you re implicitly saying that he cannot provide for his kids and that s why it s scary for me i just benefited or rather my kids did because i was presenting female instead of male but what if he finds out i m transgender what if he finds out that he just crossed this unspoken man boundary because i tricked him would it hurt his pride would he want to retaliate would he want to hurt me moreover having lived most of my life according to the man rules i actually did feel like he was attacking my well not masculinity but competency i guess i may be a woman but i still have that old knee jerk reaction to defend my masculinity what if i had unintentionally acted non verbally a flash of the eyes a facial expression a body posture would i have given myself away probably not but it s a very scary space for me to occupy as a recently transitioned woman then after the event one of the other masons came up to me and told me how much my son was getting into the music my son has musical ability he said and i might want to look into enrolling him in some musical program i told him i d consider it and we quickly left again i could be reading into it it is possible that he may have said the same thing if i was presenting as a man but i highly doubt it men don t give advice to other men on how to raise their children well not to strangers anyway but to a single mom who s lousy husband left her alone to raise the kids well maybe he thinks she needs that masculine input actually it felt more like maybe he was looking for an excuse to strike up a conversation with the single mom without a wedding ring what would he do if he found out that this average looking soccer mom he was considering hitting on actually used to be the lousy husband i m not saying yet that i think chivalry is necessarily bad though a lot of people i respect would say exactly that at this point though i m more concerned about making sure i present well enough that i m not scared for my safety image god speed by edmund blair leighton 1900 categories uncategorized bet you didn t see this one coming september 10 2015 rya n t jones 2 comments 2015 has been a year of huge changes for me i left my old church and joined the episcopal church i withdrew from my program at seminary as an m div student let s see what else oh yeah i transitioned my gender i am no longer presenting as male i had my name legally changed from ryan to rya i started on hrt hormones my drivers license now says i m female i pretty much did the whole thing no it s not a joke and yes that s really me in the picture it was quite a whirlwind and it all happened so fast in the moment though it seemed like it couldn t happen fast enough of course i didn t make this decision lightly my wake up call came in mid spring when in a moment of intense emotion i took an action that i intended to result in suicide at that moment i preferred to die than to either go on living as a man or transition to be a woman with the help of my family i realized that even though the negative effects of transitioning were enormous the cost of not transitioning was even higher it s been three months to the day that i publicly transitioned looking back on it i can say without a doubt that transitioning has been the worst decision of my life i can also say that transitioning has been the best decision of my life but the best outweighs the worst by at least 2 to 1 so i m glad i did it i m happier than i ve ever been now i begin the long process of working out the details for me a lot of that means sorting out my beliefs which are pretty much up in the air right now i m not sure where i ll end up but the ride just got a lot more interesting categories gender tags transgender why reason must stand above scripture september 20 2014 ryan t jones leave a comment i was walking down the street with a homeless gay man my college roommates and i had been letting him crash on our couch for a few weeks while he put his life together we left my apartment and headed for the coffee shop down the street he walked with a limp it bothered me how slowly i had to walk in order for him to keep up with me finally i couldn t take it any more i was irritated sit down right here on the curb i m going to pray for you i put my hand on his leg and commanded it to be healed in the name of jesus get up how does it feel i asked it feels better he exclaimed he started jumping up and down he was immediately able to walk at regular speed completely without a limp he couldn t believe what had just happened for me this was just normal christianity we proceeded to walk to the coffee shop where we sipped our flavored coffees and inhaled the perfect aromas that wafted over to us from behind the counter i counseled him that he needed to yield his life completely to god give up homosexuality and follow the bible the bible as foundation through my 20s my faith was grounded my personal experience that the power of the bible is real i saw miracles received amazingly answered prayers and had god reveal things to me that i couldn t have known any other way experientially i knew the power of christian faith was real if i encountered something in the bible i disagreed with i would yield my belief and conform to the bible but i began to ask myself how did i know that it was true these simple questions devastated my world couldn t it be that lots of what we believe about god is wrong but that god meets us where we are at anyway and couldn t god meet other people in other religions where they were at too how did i know they were wrong just because i had seen miracles those questions started to bother me a lot i couldn t seem to find any answers that satisfied me if experience alone can t prove the truth of the bible then there must be other good reasons for believing the bible but none of the reasons on offer seemed very compelling to me you can look at fulfilled prophecy but most of the prophecies in their original contexts seemed to be talking about something else you can look at the historical accuracy of the bible but being historically accurate does not make something the word of god we have lots of history books which are historically accurate you can look to the resurrection of jesus but i found that the evidence for the resurrection was not nearly as strong if i didn t already have a reason for believing in it and since belief in the bible was the very question on the table my previous reasons for believing were quickly evaporating i almost lost my faith how my faith was saved then i encountered george lindbeck s the nature of doctrine it reoriented my entire understanding of faith drawing on the work of modern religious anthropologists like clifford geertz lindbeck observes that religions are social constructs which provide religious rules for the members of the community he compares doctrine to the grammatical rules of a language members of a religious community must be taught the language of the religion in order to function within the community he calls this a cultural linguistic understanding of doctrine what struck me about lindbeck s proposal was that it was grounded in our best anthropological insights in other words it is very difficult to disagree with him without also completely ignoring a vast body of anthropological evidence religion may well be more than just a cultural linguistic system but it is certainly not less when i combined this insight with my experience of god i came to see the bible as a cultural linguistic system that regardless of whether it was true it presented us with a covenant between god and humanity that god appears to honor instead of functioning like a science or philosophy book i began to see the bible functioning more like the constitution for the church whether it is true is much less important than whether we live by it but what if the bible is wrong this new understanding of the bible potentially placed every other religious community s holy book on par with the bible after all the book of mormon functions as the constitution for mormons the qu ran functions as the constitution for the muslim community and even anton levey s satanic bible functions as the constitution for a group of occultists what sets the bible apart as i thought about it i had two realizations first you don t have to have all knowledge of every religious system in order to follow your own you don t have to know why another holy book is wrong or even assume that it must be wrong in order to follow your own holy book second a reasonable requirement of any holy book whether theirs mine or someone else s was that it must not require its followers to do anything that is morally wrong it can t violate your conscience a trial case terrorism the terrorists who flew the planes into the world trade center should have known better it is self evident they knew in their hearts that it was wrong if they had quieted themselves before god instead of submitting uncritically to their interpretation of their holy book and drowning out the voice of god they would have had to acknowledge that what they were about to do was evil i will be the first to admit that placing conscience above scripture is far from being comprehensive or perfect our consciences are not always reliable guides just because our conscience isn t warning us doesn t mean that something is okay but the opposite is usually true if your conscience is going off it is a good bet that the thing in question is probably wrong so our conscience is the only internal guide we can have if we don t submit our scriptures to our consciences what would prevent us from flying airplanes into buildings if we really believed our holy book said to do it the man with a limp so finally i came to a place of peace with my faith regardless of whether the bible is true i came to believe that at the very least god honors the covenant it offers so long as it does not require me to do anything that is morally wrong i can follow it with all my heart i think it would be fair to challenge a mormon muslim or occultist to submit to this simple rule therefore i ought to be willing to submit to it also this whole ordeal had been the most difficult time i had ever gone through in my life until then and i didn t come throu...
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