As I have aged so has my understanding of stuff...

Like why the hell do adults use religion in an argument? and stranger still why do different religions argue that theirs is right and everyone else's is either the work of their unseen but very powerful head evil being or just crazy talk.

I was thinking aloud the other day with a religious person and questioned what was the difference between aliens and angels..after a few attempts at starting to answer the question then stopping the person said, 'angles don't age and do not have offspring'.

It is answers like these that make me wonder why so many billions of people on this world pour so much of their energy int these faith based systems.

I get the need for community, as humans we are hard wired for community and we will create them regardless of weather we are in a desert or a metropolis, we have an innate need to be part of a tribe, be that a footy club, a nation, and ethnic group or a follower of a pop sensation.Religionalso caters to this need to be part of a special group. But what really mystifies me is when being part of a group means that you need to hate people who do not sing from the same song sheet.

Any brief look on a news site which talks about marriage equality you will be bombarded with people who use religion and other texts 'written' by imaginary friends, aliens, unseen but awesomely powerful beings and the children or communicators with these unseen but awesomely powerful beings as reasoning for hateful abuse.

The most common line being either 'get over it what you do is abhorrent and condemned by the lord', to this I simply say..yeah and so is eating shell fish (lev 11:10), cutting a mans hair around his temples (lev 19:27), , working on Saturday (ex 35:2) double seeding, wearing poly-cotton blends, breeding mules (lev 19:19), and whereas having multiple wives and girls on the side is fine and of course slavery is permitted and spoken of in the bible 148 times.

However as every good person of religion knows it is all about 'picking and choosing' your beliefs from the scriptures to suit your personal set of beliefs. So whilst a person may think that slavery is abhorrent and wrong (and therefore ignore the almost 150 times it is mentioned in the bible...from everything to who can be enslaved and how they are treated to their price) they will extol the 'true' abhorrence of homosexuality which is condemned about the same number of times as  is the planting of two different crops together.

A few days ago my fiance and I were part of a wonderful campaign organised by AME, I felt so privileged to be one of over 350 gathered in Sydney's Town Hall to celebrate the decay of hate in intolerance in Australia. A human pie chart formed statistics that seemed all most inconceivable only a few years ago, such as 53% of coalition supporters and 60% of rural and regional voters support marriage equality as do 80% of people under 25.

Figures like these show that day by day Australians are losing not just their fear of two people like Michael and myself joining together in a legally recognised life long bond, but their reasoning for condemning the two of us from sharing our lives together.

At the end of the day what is there to condemn really? who do we really hurt? what relationships do we denigrate? how does our relationship affect anyone else? Marriage equality means so much to us, soon enough i hope that it means nothing to those currently doing everything they can to ensure we remain second class citizens without the rights and recognition as other couples who wish to share their lives in a monogamous relationship.