Fat is a social issue

There was an excellent article in The Guardian yesterday on obesity by Rae Earl.

» Obesity epidemic: as a lifelong comfort eater, I understand the emotional pull of food

Some of the comments on it were idiotic. People said things like losing weight is just a matter of willpower, and all you have to do is to eat less and exercise more. If that were the case, there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic.

My weight loss

At the beginning of 2009, I was 18 stone, and lost four stone on Slimming World, which focuses on eating healthy and filling food, and still losing weight. It worked well for me until I became a vegetarian. I then maintained more or less the same weight for two years, but wanted to lose more.

I have recently lost another four stone on Lighter Life, which is a very low calorie diet. This works by switching the body into ketosis, which means that after the first 3 days, you are just not hungry; and weight loss is rapid. The programme includes counselling and techniques to help overcome the issues which caused you to overeat. It also switches you to food packs, which provide the right nutrition and are different to normal food, and on the Total programme, you abstain from normal food altogether and just eat packs. I found this really helpful for breaking the cycle of food addiction.

I find it almost impossible to lose weight without being on some kind of programme where there is an expectation that you will turn up every week and have lost some weight. Paying for the group sessions is also a big motivator. Also, Lighter Life and Slimming World were developed by former fat people, who actually understand what it's like to be overweight or obese.

Many weight-loss programmes don't offer support or techniques for maintaining your weight when you have finished your diet; Lighter Life offers maintenance help, continued access to packs when you need them, and continued counselling sessions.

Food addiction

Fattening food is addictive, but unlike other addictive substances, you can't just stop eating. We need food to keep us alive - you don't need alcohol, drugs, or nicotine (though of course they can be really hard to give up, too).

Eating food with a high glycaemic index (which means that the calories in it are released rapidly and used rapidly) produces a spike in the level of blood sugar, followed by a trough. Most people respond to the drop in blood sugar by eating again, probably something else that is high-GI. This is addictive behaviour.

This diagram from St John's Ambulance advice page on optimal nutrition for runners explains why:

If you are going for a run, then a high-GI spike may be good to give you the energy to get going; but it is not good if you are sitting at your desk. The aim of someone with a sedentary lifestyle should be to keep their blood sugar levels within the dotted lines on the graph, so as not to experience a trough which leads to eating high-GI food.

If you are addicted to tobacco, alcohol, drugs, etc., it is easier to remove yourself from environments where those things are available; and they are not necessary to life, unlike eating. Yes, one can switch to healthier eating, but that will probably only allow you to maintain weight; it is hard to lose weight by healthy eating alone.

The Weight Loss Resources site has a list of low GI foods.

Emotional stress

Most overeating is in response to emotional stress. I made a chart of my weight gains and losses over the years, and all of my overeating and subsequent weight gains were due to some trauma in my life. It is only by dealing with the underlying issues that I think I may have cracked it this time. (Only time will tell - but I am determined not to get so overweight again.)

Also, it can be a vicious circle - high weight leads to low self-esteem, so people self-medicate by eating more to make themselves feel better. That is not logical, but human emotions rarely are. This comment by Rickylicious on the Guardian article describes the vicious cycle of overeating and low self-esteem really well. Here's an excerpt; please do read the whole comment:

I hate being fat. I can't stop eating. I can't pull myself up by my bootstraps. I keep trying. I'm sick of being told by everyone I meet that I need to diet or exercise more. That much is self evident. Even to a stupid, ignorant fatty like me. I just get through each day as it comes as best I can. Then at the end of it all I eat, and eat again. Then I feel disgusted with myself. Worthless.

The Lighter Life programme includes techniques from transactional analysis and cognitive behavioural therapy to help people to understand why they overeat, and develop other coping mechanisms for emotional trauma, feelings of emptiness, and unhappiness. Even so, I still struggle with the temptation to respond to any little feeling of stress with a binge. I am still learning to manage my new lower weight, as I have only recently finished Lighter Life.

Social pressure

Just about every social occasion involves some pressure to eat fattening foods, or drink highly calorific alcoholic drinks. "Oh go on, have another one, it can't hurt". We call these people "feeders". Often they are people who have never had an issue with weight themselves, and so just don't understand which foods are fattening and which are not. The pressure to eat fattening foods is immense, especially at weddings and family gatherings, Christmas, work outings, coffee with colleagues, and so on. And it's hard to go to the pub and have soda water, especially if there are people who insist on offering you alcohol and think you are some kind of Puritan if you decline (fortunately my friends don't do this).

Car culture

I now live in Oxford, one of the most cycling-friendly cities in the UK (and even then it's sometimes scary) which also has excellent public transport, and is small enough to walk from one place to another. However, if you live in London, which is downright dangerous to cycle in, then that's just not going to be a good place to get exercise, or if you live somewhere hilly, it's difficult to cycle up those hills when you first start trying to get fit. The culture of driving everywhere (and constructing roads and other infrastructure so you have to drive to out-of-town shopping centres) is surely a major contributor to the rise in obesity.

Unhealthy food

Healthy food is harder to obtain, and more expensive. So many foods are packed full of processed starch, sugar, and fat; vegetables are more expensive. When I was doing the candida diet, which cuts out sugar and yeast completely, I had to visit three different supermarkets to get the products I needed. Most products are full of sugar. Loads of things are labelled "low-fat" but hardly any are sugar-free. Unhealthy food is widely available.  Restaurants have now started offering calorie-counted meals, which is helpful, but it is hard not to indulge in fattening things when everyone around you is doing so.

Other health issues

Many people are overweight or obese due to other conditions such as diabetes, thyroid conditions and so on. It is not well-understood how some people stay thin despite eating all sorts of fattening foods, whereas others only have to look at a biscuit to put on several pounds.

I am not diabetic or anything, but being obese caused me considerable joint pain, and my legs are still not straight as a result of this. Walking long distances is really painful when you are obese. Cycling and swimming are good because they do not put stress on the joints, but they are not available to everyone.

Exercise

Why are there more food shops than swimming pools? Why are gyms so expensive to join? Why do they play awful pounding music? What overweight or obese person would want to go to a gym full of skinny athletic people, when we are convinced they are looking down on us for being fat?

And the sheer awfulness of physical education in this country must be a major contributor to the lack of exercise of many overweight people. I hated PE at school - I have no hand-eye co-ordination so could not play ball games, I hated the picking of teams because I was always left till last (how humiliating), I was not very fit and already slightly podgy according to some (though I now know that I actually had a healthy BMI). I hated the competitive atmosphere, and the gendering of sport, and the way the bullies picked on me and my friends for being crap at sport, and were allowed to get away with it. Nowadays, I am told, there is the ritual humiliation of the bleep test, which is inflicted on pupils of PE, and sounds like a cruel and unusual punishment. I can honestly say that my experience of PE put me off all sport for decades. Nowadays I do yoga, cycling and swimming, but I do not see any of these as "sport". 

Unhelpful comments

The self-righteous, unsympathetic and generally unhelpful comments from others, such as "Should you be eating that?" or "Every time I see you, you are eating" (yes, because it's lunchtime!) or suggestions on how to lose weight, or comments that obese people die earlier and have heart conditions and diabetes and stressed joints, or that losing weight is just a matter of will-power, or eating less and exercising more, are really really unhelpful. 

Do the people making these comments not think that the obese person spends a considerable portion of their day mentally beating themselves up for being obese? They do not need you to add to the chorus of internal self-criticism. It just makes avoidance of the issue more likely, because the response of the obese person is to think, sod you, you don't know how it feels to be me, you don't understand nutrition or diet or metabolism, and so avoid the issue by creating a defense mechanism around the whole issue.

People don't feel they have the right to comment on other behaviour or appearance issues, so why do they think they have a right to comment on people's weight? You should never comment on someone's weight unless they themselves ask your opinion. If you have never been overweight, you can't understand the vicious cycles involved.

On the  other hand, when I was losing weight, it was nice to get positive feedback from people in the form of compliments on my new slim appearance. And many people approached it tactfully by saying, "You're looking well". As some people prefer not to get comments on their weight loss, this is probably a good idea if you don't know the person very well.

Personal choice

Nothing in this article is intended to be detrimental to people who are happy with their shape and size. If you are big and happy with it, good for you. It's completely rubbish that societal norms are geared towards being a stick-insect, and it's a fact that being underweight is more unhealthy than being obese.

I chose to lose weight because I found it physically painful carrying around the extra weight, and because I am genderqueer, I didn't like being curvy and buxom.

An interesting conversation

I had an interesting conversation the other day. I got chatting to a woman in a shop, and the conversation ranged over a number of topics, until it settled on same-sex marriage.

So this woman had loads of gay friends (so she said), and she was OK with civil partnerships, and yet she was opposed to same-sex marriage. Her reason was "but it says in the Bible..."

So I said, "But what about David and Jonathan? The Bible says that David's love for Jonathan surpassed his love for women". Oh yes, said the woman.

Then I said, "And what about Ruth and Naomi? The vow that Ruth made to Naomi is used in wedding ceremonies." And I talked about how amazing Ruth's love for Naomi was, that she was prepared to go to another country and risk being sold into slavery because she loved her so much. (Thanks to Kittredge Cherry for wising me up to the story of Ruth and Naomi.)

And then I said, "God is Love, right? And LGBT people love each other, so that must be godly."

And it seemed that I had succeeded in changing her mind.

Now, if I had called her a "bigot" at the outset of the conversation, that would have been it - end of conversation. And I don't think she was a bigot; she wanted to understand, and she seemed genuinely pleased to be offered a different interpretation of the Bible.

So, be careful before you jump to calling someone a bigot before you have found out what their real views are, under a possibly very thin veneer of religious conformity.

Also, it helps if you know how to do liberal Biblical interpretation.

Adjectives, not nouns

The trans* community are not the only ones to point out that "transsexual" is not a noun, it's an adjective. There are many other groups who have made the same point. It's rude to refer to someone as "a dyslexic", "a spastic", "a gay", "a black", "a Chinese", "a Malay", "a ginger".

Why is that? Well, for one thing, the characteristic being referred to is not the only significant thing about them; it's not a defining characteristic. They may also write poetry, drive a vehicle, tap-dance, sing, be a great lover, and so on.

There are plenty of alternatives to using these adjectives as nouns. A transsexual person (who could be male or female - the term transsexual does not signify gender); a gay person; a person with ginger hair / a ginger-haired person; a person with dyslexia / a dyslexic person; a person with cerebral palsy; a Black person; a person of colour; a Chinese person; a Malaysian person. Of course, their ethnicity is only relevant in the context of a conversation about ethnicity. (Though several Black people have pointed out recently that the whole colour-blindness trope is actually really unhelpful and assimilationist.)

Structural inequality of an invisible minority

I am part of a persecuted minority. OK, we are not very persecuted (people don't refuse us mortgages, or call for us to be executed, and we are allowed to get married), but we are persecuted, and our inequality is built into the environment - especially in America. Like people with ginger hair, we are regarded as legitimate targets for abuse.

What group am I referring to? Left-handed people.

In America, there's an epidemic of right-handed desk-chairs. Whenever I have had to sit at one of these, I either get two and flip the desk of the other one over so I can have it on my left, or just use it as a normal chair, because it is completely useless as a desk. However, right-handed desks are only the most extreme example of the environment being structured for right-handed people. Cameras are right-handed, scissors are right-handed (and are really painful for a left-handed person to use because the grips are sculpted for right-handed use, and the blades are the wrong way round), musical instruments and sporting bats, clubs etc are made for right-handed use. Computer mice are set by default for right-handed use, and often sculpted to cup nicely into the palm of your right hand. Bread knives, cake forks, kitchen knives - they are all made for optimum use by right-handed people (because the blades are sharp only on one side). When I was at school (admittedly over 30 years ago; things may have got better now), a teacher gave up trying to teach me to sew because I started a seam at the "wrong" end.

If you are right-handed, you are probably completely unaware of these issues. The world is quite literally structured to fit your grasp. You're probably thinking right now that I am just whingeing, and I could adapt to the right-handed environment (after all, it's not that hard), or buy left-handed implements (which, incidentally, are more expensive because they are produced in smaller numbers - and once you've learnt to compensate for the blades being the wrong way round on right-handed scissors, it's hard to cut straight with left-handed ones). Well folks, that's privilege, and being completely unaware of your privilege.

I bet you use words like "cack-handed", "gauche", "sinister" (or if you are Spanish, zurdo, which means clumsy or left-handed) -- all of which are insults meaning "left-handed". Even the word "left" means "surplus to requirements". in English, there are no less than seventeen different dialect words for left-handed, all of which mean "the hand you wipe your arse with" (including "cack-handed", which is regarded as a synonym for clumsy). People used to say stuff like "oh it looks weird when you do stuff with your left hand - it's all cack-handed".

I am raising this issue, not to claim equality with other forms of persecution and exclusion (after all, left-handed people are not in danger of our lives), but to point out that, unless you bump up against it every day of your life (as disabled people, minority ethnic people, LGBT people do every day), structural inequality in largely invisible - because you take the way the world fits your hand like a glove completely and utterly for granted.

We are rising!

No-one outside Paganism seems to have noticed that the number of out and proud Pagans has doubled since the last census.

Census 2011
Animism 541
Occult 502
Druid 4,189
Heathen 1,958
Pagan 56,620
Pantheism 2,216
Reconstructionist 251
Shamanism 650
Thelemite 184
Wicca 11,766
Witchcraft 1,276
______________________
Total = 80,153

Not included in the above total: Traditional African Religion 588, Vodun 208, Taoism 4144, Shinto, 1075, New Age 698, Native American Church 127, Chinese Religion 182, Satanists 1,893.

Here's the Office of National Statistics page with the spreadsheets if you want to download a copy and play with the numbers yourself.

Census 2001
Pagan 30,569
Wiccan 7,227
Druid 1,657
Pantheist 1,603
Heathen 278
Asatru 92
Animism 401
Ancestor Worship 101
Celtic Pagan 508
______________________
Total 42,436

The complexity of marriage law - update

Legal (permitted by law and recognised by the state):

• Opposite-sex church weddings (couple legally married and registered)
• Same-sex civil partnerships in a register office / registered premises for weddings
• Opposite-sex marriages in a register office / registered premises for weddings
• Religious civil partnerships (civil partnership ceremonies in a religious building)

Being made legal soon:

• Same-sex weddings in register offices and those churches & synagogues that want to do them (couple legally married and registered)
• A transsexual person married to a person of the opposite sex to their original sex wanting to change their birth certificate to reflect their new sex will no longer have to divorce their partner (because when same sex marriage is legal, they can stay married).
• A transsexual person civilly partnered to a person of the same sex will be able to change / "upgrade" to a marriage (8.5 on page 27 of the consultation outcome document)
• Pagan same-sex handfastings in Scotland

The new arrangements for trans people are still not very satisfactory, as the conversion from one type of legal recognition to another will cost them money. This is particularly annoying for people who have already had to change their relationship status under the previous arrangements.

Not forbidden by law, but not recognised by the state

• same-sex blessings in a church / synagogue
• Pagan handfastings (weddings) in England & Wales
• Blessings of polyamorous relationships
• Humanist weddings - both same and opposite sex

Illegal (not permitted by law):

• Opposite-sex civil partnerships in a register office / registered premises for weddings
• Marrying more than one person

Legal (permitted by law and recognised by the state) in Scotland only:

• Pagan opposite-sex handfastings where the celebrant says the required form of words (the same as for all other legal weddings)

Gerald Gardner and homophobia

Was Gerald Gardner homophobic?

— Very probably, yes. (See Lois Bourne's memoirs.)

Does this matter for practitioners of modern Wicca?

— No.

Why not?

— Because whilst Gardner is respected as the founder of modern Wicca, his views on many issues are seen as a product of his time. in the 1950s and 60s, not being homophobic was the exception, not the rule. I can remember as recently as 25 years ago, it was rare to find a heterosexual man who was not homophobic. Now, thankfully, it is regarded as abnormal to be homophobic (at least in the circles that I move in).

Gardner does not have the same status in Wicca as Jesus does in Christianity. He is not believed to be some kind of messiah figure. Wiccan practice and tradition is not about Gardner, it's about magic and Nature.

There are some practices in Wicca that are heterocentric, but people are changing these to be more inclusive of LGBT people. If the coven you are in is not changing to include you, there are other covens that might be more flexible. There's also the option to start your own coven.

These heterocentric practices may have been started because of Gardner's homophobia, so in that sense it is still relevant, but for heavens' sake, Wicca is less than a  century old, so it's perfectly possible to change things. Tradition is not set in stone; it evolves.

A good place to start is the excellent book, Cassell's Encyclopaedia of queer myth, symbol and spirit.

Further reading on LGBT sexuality and Paganism.

Liberal Christianity made me a better Wiccan

I am not a Christian, but I highly value the liberal Christian strand in Unitarianism, as its alternative interpretations of the new testament in particular have helped to liberate me from the oppressive and painful interpretations I received from my fundamentalist and evangelical upbringing. People who do not have that particular painful experience perhaps can't know the fear - and actual physical pain - that it induces. I am very grateful to liberal Christianity for liberating me from that fear. Despite being a Pagan since the age of 17, I still had that fear (of hell, basically) lurking at the bottom of my psyche, encased in a volcano of anger. Once the anger had gone, the fear was still there, and it is liberal Christian interpretations of the Bible that have liberated me from that fear.

On a more positive note, I also value the fact that I can find a lot of common ground with liberal Christians, on values, shared appreciation of the beauty of Nature, and frequently shared understandings of the nature of the Divine as immanent and loving and including both genders as well as transcending gender.

If we have travelled by very different paths and still arrived at a similar understanding, that suggests we might be onto something. I met an ex-Franciscan who has a remarkably similar apophatic understanding of the Divine. I have met Unitarian Christians with a deep appreciation of the Divine immanence in Nature.

As a dear liberal Christian friend remarked approvingly, "Ah, so liberal Christianity made you a better Wiccan?" To which I replied, "Yes."

Liberal Christianity liberated me from my fear so that I could concentrate on my spiritual path of joyous communion with the Divine in Nature, with spirits of place, and with the land.

Tackling homophobic bullying

I have just written to my old school to ask them how they are tackling homophobic bullying.

To: info@bitterneparkschool.org.uk

Dear Ms Trigger,

As a former student at Bitterne Park Comprehensive School, I’d like to raise an issue that’s very important to me. This will be the third time I have written to the school to ask about this. I was very disappointed that I did not receive a reply to my previous emails, but perhaps this time it will be different.

I recently read Stonewall’s School Report, research conducted by the University of Cambridge into the experience of 1,600 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people in Britain’s schools. I was concerned to discover that more than half of LGBT young people are still experiencing homophobic bullying in schools, and almost all of them regularly hear the use of homophobic language. The study also found that this bullying not only negatively impacts on young people’s happiness and attainment at school, but can also have severe consequences for their mental health and well-being.

I remember that when I was a student at Bitterne Park, Section 28 was still in force, and a close friend was on the receiving end of homophobic bullying, and the teachers could not do anything to stop it. I myself was also on the receiving end of homophobic bullying, and found it demoralising.

Thankfully, the University of Cambridge research showed that in those schools that take simple steps to tackle homophobia, for instance by challenging homophobic language, levels of homophobic bullying decrease markedly and young people report feeling happier and more welcome in their schools.

In light of Anti-Bullying Week, which is coming up on 19-23 November, I thought you might like to know about Stonewall’s School Champions programme, which has been specifically designed to help schools develop strategies for tackling homophobic bullying. The programme is already working with schools across Britain and if you’d like to find out how to become one of them just visit: www.stonewall.org.uk/schoolchampions. Stonewall also has a wide range of education resources available on their website to help teachers reduce and tackle homophobic bullying – available at www.stonewall.org.uk/resources.

Thank you for taking my concerns into consideration and I look forward to hearing back from you. If you’d like more details about what Stonewall is doing during Anti-Bullying Week, you can visit www.stonewall.org.uk/antibullying


http://www.stonewall.org.uk/at_school/antibullying_week/default.asp

Charitable giving

I think we need to move away from a human-centric view of the world towards a deep ecology view, that is what has got our species into so much trouble. Social and environmental justice are part and parcel of the same thing. If you care for the environment, you are also caring for its inhabitants, which include people. And animals are people, in my book. They are sentient, they feel compassion and love, they have distinct personalities.  Yet another reason why I am a Pagan. 

I know some people who only give to charities that help people in the UK, because they seem unable to see that we are all part of the same world, and that if people in other countries are suffering, then it will eventually have an impact on us - indeed, already is, what with the number of asylum seekers (who are very welcome as far as I am concerned).

Other species' suffering, because it impacts the ecosystem, will eventually have an impact on humans anyway. Not that I think giving to animal and environment charities needs justifying on the grounds of the effect on humans, any more than I think giving to non-UK-helping charities needs justifying on the grounds of how it will help people in the UK.

My regular charitable giving goes to Survival International, RSPCA, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Stonewall, and Sight Savers. I also buy the Big Issue and shop in charity shops. I used to give to Greenpeace but recently I have become concerned about their campaigning methods.

I need to do a charity audit and decide which charities I will donate to, and why. I think I need to increase my giving to animal and environmental ones.

What is a Christian?

Unitarian Christians (and others) have been trying to broaden the definition of Christianity since the 1830s, when the publication of Rammohun Roy's The Precepts of Jesus caused a furore among conventional Christians of the day. Rammohun Roy could not accept the doctrines of mainstream Christianity. He also called into question what is meant by Christianity in his writings, which were published in England by the Unitarian Society. Roy's story also raises the issue of what religion is – is it the original form or impulse, or the "accretions" which subsequently accumulate, or a combination of these? Is it about values, beliefs, or practices, or a combination of these? All of these issues were raised by Roy and his contemporaries over his views and those of the Unitarians, and the issues are still being debated today in many contexts. There was considerable dispute (between the Baptist missionaries of Serampore and the Unitarian Thomas Aspland) over whether Unitarians were Christians, and whether Roy himself was one; this depended on whether Christianity was defined according to values and monotheism, or by belief in the divinity of Christ. In declaring Roy to be a Christian, early nineteenth century Unitarians perhaps sought to broaden the definition of Christianity to include themselves. Roy used the same techniques and sources as the Unitarians to answer his critics: German biblical criticism, the history of the Arian controversy, the discourse of radical dissenters, and rational scepticism.

In the 1950s, apparently, it looked for a while as if Christianity was going to be defined as a broad movement of people who subscribe to the values of Jesus - but then two things happened: an upsurge of secularism, and an upsurge of evangelicalism. After that, it became increasingly difficult to define Christianity as anything other than conservative evangelical fundamentalism, belief in Jeeesus as your Personal Savior^TM, and belief in penal substitution theology (the idea that he died for your sins).

James Martineau once famously wrote that he didn't want to describe himself as a Unitarian, because that was the name of a doctrine; instead, he wanted to be called a Free Christian.

This is at the root of the reason why the full name of the Unitarian tradition in the UK is the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches. A bit of a mouthful, isn't it?

But what is a Free Christian, or a liberal Christian? They are usually people who are working out their theology for themselves, and consider Jesus' moral example, and his teachings, to be more important than doctrines about him as a Saviour who died for people's sins. (I am sure there are more complicated explanations than that, but that will suffice.) They are also usually inclusive of LGBT people and tolerant of other religions, seeing them as equally valid paths to God / the Divine.

A Unitarian Christian is a slightly different critter, as this is someone who is both Unitarian and Christian. Again, they are working out their own theology, inclusive towards LGBTs and consider other religions equally valid; but they are also likely to hold Unitarian views of God, meaning that Jesus is not viewed as the second person of the Trinity.

But the name "Christian" does encapsulate a doctrine: it expresses the view that Jesus was Christ.

But it depends what you think a "Christ" is, and whether you think he was the only Christ, or whether there are more of them. The word Christ just means "Anointed One" and is a Greek translation of the Jewish word Messiah, also meaning "Anointed One". Some Jewish thinkers have suggested that there may be a messiah in every generation.

James Martineau also famously said:

“The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there; and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine”

 Buddhism is a project to make more Buddhas. Buddhism does not claim that Buddha was the incarnation of a deity.

What if Christianity was a project to make more Christs? Well, funnily enough, there is a very ancient form of Christianity that is exactly that. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the rite of baptism is called chrismation (anointing), and the aim of the Christian life is theosis (becoming divine).

Many, if not most, liberal Christians, Unitarian Christians, and Free Christians reject the notion that Jesus was "Very God of very God" and emphasise the human Jesus, his moral example, and his teachings.

But what if, as Martineau said, the Incarnation was true of humans universally? In Judaism, Isaac Luria taught that we all contain a divine spark; and Judaism has always taught that people are made in the image of God.

If the Incarnation is true of humans universally, then we must all develop our inner Christ (or Buddha, or Aradia).

If Christianity was a project to make more Christs, that might be interesting.

Further reading on liberal Christianity:

• Caute 
• The Herald 
• The Man they called the Christ by David Doel
• The Progressive Christianity Network
• Inclusive Church
• Changing Attitude 
• Atheist Christians 

I am not a Christian and I never will be one (Wicca is my dharma, my sangha, and my tribe), but I am delighted that there is a strong liberal movement within Christianity. It provides an alternative to those who don't embrace exclusivism, homophobia, and intolerance of other faiths, and shows that another way is possible.

it would make a lot more sense if people talked about Christianities instead of Christianity. (And what about all those Christian churches that dissented at the Council of Chalcedon?)

Science fiction religions

There have been several new religious movements based on science fictional religions. Wikipedia has a list of fictional religions, not all of which come from science fiction. The most famous example of a real-world recreation of a science fiction religion is the Jedi from Star Wars, but there is also the Church of All Worlds from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Cullenism, based on Twilight. Recently I came across a recreation of the Bene Gesserit from Dune with its own training manual (PDF). I have no idea how serious this actually is but it looks as if it is an attempt to create a serious BG order. I think what all these new religious movements have in common (apart from the Church of All Worlds) is that they try to be too prescriptive about what people should practice and/or believe. On the other hand, the Bene Gesserit manual admonishes its readers:

“Beware of manuals! Manuals create habits!”

Except for the preliminary teachings tailored to the acolytes and postulants, we try to avoid admonitory sayings, but since this is our first edition and we must break the virgin soil, you will forgive the many errors inherent in this work. Someone had to do the plowing. Do not argue over the possible meanings of the contents of this manual. Words are dead things. Truth changes. Facts are fragile. Be Warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary. We realize, however, that a foundation is necessary, no matter how impermanent it may be. This is a real manual for real Bene Gesserit. It is not a guide book for children and their role-playing games. This is a guidebook for strong women to do great things.

Why do we have manuals? Answer: To disprove them.

Yes indeed - but then why write a manual at all?