Tag Archives: Christian

Being gay is like being left-handed. Some people are, most people aren’t and nobody really knows why. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the way things are. — Unknown

I watched a documentary in the 1990s. It was about the investigation into the molestation and murder of a prepubescent boy in England in the 1970s. It was in the 1970s, so suspicion immediately fell on gay men. The police opened an investigation and right away approached known homosexuals and entered gay bars, asking men to come to the station for questioning. The men were photographed, and detailed notes were taken of the interviews. At one point, a gay man was accused by another of the crime. Once the accused realized that he was under suspicion, he told the detectives interviewing him that he was saying nothing without his solicitor present. It turned out that the accusation was wrongful and levelled against him by another man who had a grudge. Eventually, the culprit was found and confessed when presented with evidence against him. He was not a gay man and had no previous suspicion of sexual interference with boys. He said that the boy struggled during and after the assault and that he had not meant to kill him. The man was convicted of the crimes of manslaughter and sexually assaulting the boy. He was imprisoned for his crimes. With the case closed, the police destroyed the evidence they collected in their investigation: the photos and notes from the interviews of the gay men.

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Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles. — George Bernard Shaw

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A miracle is a form of religious experience, essentially an event without a rational explanation attributed to the divine. I first remember learning about miracles as a boy in grade school. Religious instruction, Christian, was part of the public school curriculum in Ontario in the mid-1960s when I started school. My first-grade teacher, Miss Boss, read bible stories to the class every morning before we started the day’s lessons. If memory serves, I was most impressed by the story of the loaves and fishes. A year later, at junior school in England, one of the teachers, Mrs. Checketts, told us the story of Jesus raising a girl from the dead. As Mrs. Checketts related the story to us, “He called to her spirit “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”) and she was returned to life.” Again, I was duly impressed, but as I grew older, I began to wonder about the veracity of these accounts and of miracles in general. I started to wonder, also, just how common it is for people to continue to believe in miracles and how a miracle is identified in the present. Continue reading