I count my blessings.  I could have easily grown up to be a biblical literalist considering the household I grew up in, and ended up…I dunno…in and out of Ex-Gay programs maybe, and generally hating myself and who knows what else.  But somehow I didn’t.  I fell in love with the stars at an early age and began devouring books on astronomy and from there to nature and science and ever since my thinking about God and my relationship to my creator has always been grounded in what I saw in nature and my theology such as it is, goes along the lines of "When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird."  I never took the bible literally and have always felt free in conscience and spirit to embrace the wisdom I see in it and discard what makes no sense.  Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live…right…whatever… 

But I can’t point to any moment in my life where I made a conscious decision to reject the idea that the bible is the Literal word of God.  I had this gut level understanding ever since I can remember walking outside at night and looking up at the stars that the literal word is up there in the dazzling night sky and there on the ground under my feet and the birds in the trees and the scent of the blossoms and there in the light of the rising sun.  So whenever I read the bible I always had this sense that I was reading how people understood God to be, but not necessarily how God was, and whenever I read anything that was ugly or stupid or mean I just reckoned that had nothing do to with God and just glossed over it.  God made the bird.  Humans write the bird books and humans are not infallible.

Maybe there is a life after death…I have no idea.  But the idea of Hell, like the idea of original sin, is cheap and petty and ugly and completely unworthy of that which could create space and time, let alone the birds and the bees out of nothing.  Humans have an almost bottomless capacity to hate.  I simply cannot believe that of anything capable of creating a soul.  So I don’t believe in hell.  But I have seen a small portion of the hell humans can make for each other and that has convinced me that Jesus was absolutely right about this: We have to love one another.

This is a heterosexual Christian who openly admits that, on the basis of scripture, he considers homosexuality to be sinful -and yet he’d rather spend eternity in Hell with us than eternity in Heaven without us.