Self-Righteous Seaweed

I've been pondering my outsized, outrageous, out-of-line reaction to the sweet old lady who talks at every meeting and who always brings up religion.  Not just religion - a brand of religion that irks the shit out of me.  So I puff up with justified outrage.  I want it stopped - I want it stopped bad.  And I think I'm the man to do the stopping.

I allowed a couple of other similarly outraged people to draw me into their ire.  I'm not blaming them, mind you, because I'm more than happy to get self-righteous when it suits me.  I like looking down my nose at other people.  If I can point to any small personal growth over the years it would be this: I did not act.  I waited.  I'm an ass when I act quickly.  I'm an ass most of the time but I'm a big one when I pop off.

I started to pay attention at my meetings to religious and spiritual references.  You know what?  I found a lot of them.  It's just that most of them didn't awaken lousy childhood memories in me.  I found them to be innocuous and pleasant.  Some of them were pretty religious, too.

Today we read a section in our literature where it explains why we take great pains to make our organization so welcoming.  As our organization was finding its way early on we took great pains to keep undesirable people out of our meetings, if by "undesirable" you mean "anyone who wasn't old, white, male, professional, Christian, and college educated."  The section talked about a gay man who was almost booted out and then it talked about an atheist who was not welcomed with open arms.  In fact, when he went back out for a while it seemed that his group took an almost grim satisfaction over his stumble.

So here I am: Self-Righteous Seaweed, ready to throw out someone who is too religious.

Full circle, people, full circle.