No. I am too busy.

Sure.

Thanks for the resources. It’s been many years since I hosted a website, managed a website, or otherwise did those sorts of back-end things. Very interesting.

My capacity is limited, too, but I am certainly willing to help out, to the extent I’m able.

It would be nice to have a wiki somewhere other than Reddit. But I’m not up on where and how such things might be hosted these days. If I get some time, I will look into that.

As with the original question, almost every one of these follow-up questions is really just a restatement of assumptions.

“What sect of Christianity do you follow?”

None? I am not even sure how to answer the question. I am a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ, which is the local setting where I participate in the life of the church universal, which extends far beyond my local setting. But I would never say that I “follow” the UCC. To the extent being a Christian is to “follow,” it is to follow Jesus, not some “sect.”

“How long has your chosen sect been around?”

The phrasing of this question is bizarre. “Chosen sect”? My experience of the UCC is more that it found and chose me than the reverse. And I would say the same for the Christian tradition as a whole. I have never sat down to look at some menu of “religions” or “sects” and “chosen” one. That does not even make sense as an exercise to me. If you think you are “choosing” such a thing, then you are so profoundly missing the point that I am not even sure how to help you navigate to a different perspective. One’s faith tradition is not like some element of a character design that one just selects from among options.

As for my local congregation, which is part of the UCC, it is complicated. The congregation has been around for almost 150 years, but the UCC—a unification of several denominations—has only been around for about half that time. And, in any case, our practice incorporates elements from throughout the history of the church universal, extending all the way to the celebration of communion, which is traditionally understood to have been instituted by Jesus (though historically that seems unlikely).

“What book and book version does your sect follow?”

Again, this is a weird question, which assumes that to be a “sect,” one must “follow” a “book.” But that is not really how a tradition works. Certainly, we read scripture in my congregation, and our worship is steeped in scripture. I participate in several Bible study groups. But it would be incorrect to say that we “follow” the Bible, because that is not what the Bible is. The Bible (and more in a moment on what that means) is a collection of texts, written by many different people, in different times and places, for different reasons, gathered together by still other people, in still other times and places, for still other reasons, and read and maintained by yet further groups. To the extent the Bible remains a vital part of Christian life, it is because people continue to engage it through participatory actions, rather than because they “follow” it.

In my congregation, and in all the parts of the church that I regularly interact with, there is no singular, standard version. Indeed, there are multiple canon lists that mean that different people mean different things by “the Bible.” I personally study widely, and look at many different versions of both canonical and non-canonical materials. The UCC generally, and the congregation where I participate, imposes no limitations in this respect.

“How do you know that your sect is the ‘right’ one?”

Why do you assume that a “sect” must be “the ‘right’ one”? And “right” for whom? I participate in the UCC, and in my local congregation, even as I critique them. I would not say they are “right” in any sense, except to say that they are my home within the church. But that does not mean they are above or beyond reproach. Indeed, my tradition, going all the way back to the scriptures that we read, includes a strong strand of continual self-critique—it is what the “prophets” are in the Bible.

And I would never presume to say that someone else’s tradition is “wrong.” I certainly might disagree with them, or critique them. But that does not mean that their entire tradition is somehow “wrong.” They have as much right and legitimacy to their home as I do to mine.

“How do you know that your overall religion is the ‘right’ one?”

Same answer as to the previous question.

“What does your religion/sect say happens to anyone who is not a part of it?”

Nothing, because a “religion/sect” cannot speak. Only people can speak.

This isn’t a simple or an easy piece, and the paragraph that I quoted in the post isn’t fully representative of the ideas, or of my purpose in wanting to share it with others.

Until we are able to recognize that love is rooted in desire, and that our desires have been suppressed and distorted and redirected by the working of power, especially through the power of excessive wealth (in oligarchs, in media moguls, in the capturers of state authority), then we will continue to fail both prophetically and politically to be the body of the Christ in the world, as the hands and feet of transformation.

In my view, the greatest, most profound, and most dangerous ignorance within the church is not the dumb things that people affirmatively believe (although there is plenty of that), but the ways that people in the church remain ignorant about the full breadth and depth of the Christian tradition, and about the harms that Christianity has wrought. Ignorance, for example, about how European colonizers and missionaries were instrumental not just in genocide and cultural imperialism, but also in the fundamental construction of pervasive modern categories like “race” and “religion.” Likewise, ignorance of the depth of the contemplative and mystical strands in Christianity have been extremely deleterious to individual Christians and to the church as an institution.

I am not sure how to say “what Christianity means to me,” because Christianity is at the root of how I understand meaning. It is the tradition—comprising stories, ideas, words, practices, and institutions—in which I live and make sense of my life and the world. I can see that there are other traditions, which by which other people make sense of their lives and the world, but this one is mine.

Likewise, “why I believe in it” is sort of a strange question, which I cannot really answer without first addressing the problem that “believe” is a word with many complex uses. In this context, I suspect you mean “believe in it” in the sense of “expressly affirm the truth of certain propositions of fact,” or something like that. But that is not a meaning that makes sense to me in this context. As I mentioned above, Christianity is something much thicker than just a set of propositions. How could one “believe in” a practice for example? One might have certain beliefs about a practice, but those are not necessarily the reasons why one participates in it. Likewise, a story can be deeply meaningful without being “believed” in that sense. (I like to point to all the people who find the Star Wars universe deeply meaningful, for example, as manifested in the way it shapes their lives. But they know it is imaginary.)

But there is an older sense of “belief,” which we often use in other contexts, which is to have confidence in, or even—in perhaps a very old sense—to love. For example, we say to a loved one who is about to face a challenge, “I believe in you.” In that sense of “believe,” I have confidence in Christianity for the same reason that I am able to answer the first question as I did: because it grounds my sense of meaning for both my life and the world.

This sort of thing is why it is so important to participate in the church, as an in-person spiritual practice. The church is the body of the Christ in the world—we are the hands and feet of the Christ. And if we allow ourselves to be atomized into individual, spiritual-but-not-participant practitioners of feel-good faith, or limited to social media interactions, then the embodiment of the Christ in world is only receding in the face of the enormous institutional strength of governments and wealth—or “powers and principalities,” as Paul famously called them.

If you’ve been traumatized and are not yet ready to return, then keep yourself safe. But if you are hearing the call, then find a progressive congregation near you and show up. Listen and learn, and see how you can help to bring your distinctive strengths to your community of faith, so that we can work to protect the marginalized and the vulnerable against this hideous onslaught of inhumanity.

It’s not a question of blame. It does not matter to me whether gaslighting is imposed upon representatives as a method of providing “support” or whether the representatives are coming up with it themselves. Either way, the result is the same: the support experience is almost universally horrid (see my other comment on a different branch of this thread), and I see no reason to trust the representatives, and even less reason to trust their employers.

I have had too many experiences, from huge, international companies, to financial institutions, down to the IT department at my employer, where the first step of tech support appears to be "deny the reality of the experience that the user says they are having" for me to believe that there is anything dependent on the provider. On far too many occasions I have given tech support people a detailed description of the problem I am experiencing, and everything I have done to try and resolve the issue before talking to them, only to have them tell me, right out of the gate, something stupid like "that shouldn't be happening" (why the hell do you think I'm contacting you then?), or to deny that what I see on my screen is actually what I see on my screen, or to force me to do again all the things that I have already done. No, I think it is an endemic problem within the technology industry that people who provide tech support basically, fundamentally, do not want to help, and really just want to close tickets and get rid of customers.

The worst experience I had in the last couple years was with a person providing telephone support on an application that I use daily. He gave me a certain task that he needed the to do, and I did it. But apparently I did it too quickly for him, because when I said I had done it, he denied that I had done it, and then accused me of lying to him. It was some of the most egregious gaslighting I have ever experienced from tech support. Then he spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with me trying to convince me that he was trying to do his job, and to help, to persuade me to write a good review for him when I got the email for that. I absolutely did not write a good review for him.

Another bad one I had was with my financial institution a few years ago after a major change in their online system. Significant functionality disappeared. So I got on the phone with them and told them what I needed to do. They kept giving me instructions to do things that were not actually available onscreen. Several times I read back to them every single word and option I could see on my screen, left to right, top to bottom, to explain to them that the thing they were telling me to click on simply was not there. Then they got impatient and angry at me for being obstreperous! Ultimately I had to talk to somebody else, who was able to see that, in fact, I was right, and the instructions the other person was trying to give me were not applicable. And then it still took months for the missing functionality to finally be added back into the system. (Interestingly, when it finally reappeared, it did not even work in the way the first "support" person was trying to instruct me!)

The most recent was just yesterday, when I wanted to change my New York Times subscription from home delivery to all digital. On their own website, they have a help page that says you can do this on your own—just go to the "subscription overview" section and choose "change subscription." Guess what option was nowhere on my "subscription overview"? "Change subscription." I read and re-read that page again and again, and tried clicking on various other options, for way too long. Finally I just had to use their chat support, which involved working first through an obvious AI, to a possible human with a script that they refused to deviate from. They changed my subscription, but I have no idea why it needed to be that difficult, especially when their own website had contradictory instructions.

Certainly, I have occasionally had decent tech support experiences. But those tend rather to be the exceptions that prove the rule.

This sort of thing is why I simply do not, ever, trust tech support people. In my experience, most of tech support is just gaslighting users into giving up and going away, and this is just further confirmation.