I have a complicated relationship with religion.

I don't believe in magic. I don't believe in the supernatural. Despite my love for angels, demons, werewolves, vampires, and all the other lovely beasts that go bump in the night, none of them are real in any tangible or significant way. Ghosts do not exist in the way movies portray, nor can silly equipment detect them. We don't have a soul in the Christian sense. There's no hellfire awaiting the sinners among us nor is there paradise above for our pious.

But I want there to be.

Despite being atheist for much of my childhood and teenage years, I have reached a point in my life where I want to believe in the quiet machinations of forces unseen. I want structure and ritual and fanciful tales that I can believe in wholeheartedly with others; I want community and inspiration and acceptance that cannot be taken away. But I can't believe. I'm not capable of faith. I'm not capable of looking past the abuses enacted in the name of gods, the hypocrisy and judgement and rejection that has killed so many like me. And so many unlike me.

Christianity has been used to hurt me and alienate me from my community. Black Americans in the South are some of the most religious and it has poisoned them socially. I've been accused of devil worship more than once for questioning religious stories or simply reading books with 'devil' in the title (context: it was about serial killers in America). My peers had no qualms with their casual comments of eternal damnation for LGBT people, or public discussions of lesbians being "OK" but if a man likes a man that's disgusting and he needs to be "set straight". There are many who still believe today that homosexuality is a white man's disease or a white man's problem, and black people like me don't exist.

I am ashamed for wanting to believe in the things that inspire people to be so hateful.

Should I ever visit the country of my family with the man I love, I'd risk my life or corrective rape. I've stood in the hallway of my college and watched a man stand at the street corner every day with a six foot tall sign detailing how I will burn in Hell along with the Jews and the Muslims and women who don't submit to their husbands. I've listened to my father talk about dropping bombs on Pride parades as I sat at the table with him.

Yet I can't stop falling in love with stunning statues carved with religious inspiration, paintings depicting myths that bring me joy, fantastical stories that captive and motive me. Learning about ritual and tenets and history and the people who live and have lived them is more interesting to me than anything else in this world, but the beauty is marred by the ugliness of their misguided passions.

I'm disgusted with organised religion because of the pain it has caused but I can't stay away. It's masochistic.