They claimed two different deities- one of infinite love, wisdom, forgiveness, compassion, foresight, and power... and another, filled with jealousy, hatred, bigotry, bloodlust, and a penchant for mass-murder. The former one was too kind, enlightened, and compassionate to have created the concept of flesh-eating bacteria, plagues, life-ruining birth defects, hell, or the Devil, while claiming that he in fact did. The latter one was far too stupid, random, absurd, petty, vicious, amoral, and barbaric to be an enlightened deity worthy of worship. Then they claimed the two deities were actually the same God. Then, within the one deity, the contradictions- you shall not murder, except of course when you should murder, which is
all the time. You shouldn't be gay, but of course, I created you and you're gay, and not by choice. Then, the flip-flopping which would make Al Gore or Mitt Romney blush. I demand blood sacrifices! Except now I don't anymore. Kill your son! Except don't. I'll flood the earth and kill everything! Except now I realize I was wrong. Now I won't do it by flood anymore. I'll pick some other method. Cut the tip of your genitals off! Except now you don't need to anymore. Eating pig is forbidden! Except now it's not. You'd think an omniscient deity with 100% knowledge of right and wrong would pick a position and stick with it.
If they were an honest and loving god.
It's too sloppy a painting for it to be a masterpiece. This obviously is not the clear and correct portrait of any deity worth worshiping. In fact, if such a deity exists, we are trapped in an eternal prison, for a crime we didn't commit, and we are judged not by a jury, based on laws, but by an evil dictator whose ideas about morality change on a whim. And if the picture isn't correct, then the Bible isn't worth the paper it's printed on, and a whole, whole, whole lot of people have lived and died for a pointless stack of lies. Therefore, there's either bad news or worse news. The bad news is, it's probably all a bunch of bogus bull. The worse news is if its true, we are all condemned by an amoral mad being who has apparently no other purpose but to act as voyeur, warden, judge, jury, and executioner. To create and make to suffer, and then to destroy, all on a whim.
The good news is that it's probably the bad news, and not the worse news.
But, if the former is true, then you still have a whole lot of people defending what is essentially Grimm's fairy tales as being the inerrant word of God, who are grossly intolerant of folks who don't "respect" its "meaning", and wish to force the moral lessons of ancient sun-baked storytellers onto nonbelievers, by changing laws to match the Bible.
Nobody is stopping a person from reading the Bible and believing its every word and living according to its principles, save the ones that involve stoning and murder, for example. However, forcing nonbelievers to adhere to religions they don't believe in is morally unacceptable. To even state that fact is to attack religion, or so I've been told.
Legislating the Bible, and forcing people to live according to it, is wrong. It's not just wrong, it's an abhorrent violation of the rights and freedoms of people who should have the same legal rights as everyone else, and have committed no crime. Legally, none of this has any leg to stand on, and it keeps being thrown out of courtrooms in the saner parts of America. The places where it continues, are places where a Bible-thumping majority tramples on the body of law which is the Constitution, by putting a person's private life to a vote, and saying they can't do what others can do, and for no legal reason; no rational reason; no ethical reason.
Essentially, it's for spite. The religious majority is waning, church pews are slowly emptying, and people are becoming less rigid about religion. Generation after generation grows less attached to myth and mysticism, less attached to the idea of it's wrong because invisible authoritarian regime says so, and more and more concerned with what is fundamentally right and wrong, based on the facts, based on reasoning, based on evidence in the real world.
More and more people are irreligious, not particularly religious, agnostic, or atheist. Even what values define the religious are becoming ever more secular. This march of progress is a good thing. After all, strict and literal following of the Bible would sanction slavery, murder, holy wars, and genocide. A less literal "symbolic" following does not, and is more grounded in reality.
But the admission that this stuff is just fables with a moral meaning to live your life by places it squarely in the fiction section of the library, and then the question must be asked; is this book written by ancient racist, sexist, homophobic people, before the dark ages, before freedom and justice could even begin to flower, is this book really the greatest source of morality that can be found? In my view, the answer is a resounding "no". It doesn't even rank any better than a tragedy written by Shakespeare. It doesn't particularly outshine Grimm's tales. It's not much better than a ghost story told around the campfire. Really, it's some of the shoddiest fiction ever conceived. The characters are unsympathetic, the situations are unrealistic, the moral lessons are convoluted and not particularly insightful, and the point of the story is that you're worthless scum unless you have an invisible friend that you talk to and spend the better part of your life focusing on. And if you say that it's fiction, badly written at that, you deserve to be tormented forever and ever.
To be honest, it's more harmful and dishonest than the egregious lies printed in tabloids. It's farcical that in such an age of information, such vast swaths of the population are more interested in the nonsense rants of barely evolved cavemen who believe that women deserve all the rights of cattle, and men deserve the same or lesser treatment if they're slaves, which is also a perfectly equitable situation to be in. The nonsense that cutting your own beard is evil, but cutting your son's penis with a sharp rock is good.
Those parts are the foundation of scripture, conveniently ignored by the men wearing dresses who wish to peddle a more family-friendly version of 'the ultimate inerrant truth', because it sells better than true fundamentalism. That said, the censored, cleaned-up version is still garbage which promotes as much ignorant thought as a Klan meeting. Remember, "gay" is threatening the good and proper marriage somehow. We're not sure how; but we do know that it is evil and will destroy good and proper marriage. And this is the cause we must fight; wife-beating, for example, something that really does destroy marriage, and harms millions of actual people, is not particularly the cause that needs fighting. Infidelity and divorce are practically sports at this point, but there's no righteous crusade against that. None that measures up to the vitriol aimed at gay and bisexual people. Not nearly a fraction of the blame.
It's perhaps that kind of hypocrisy that completely undermines all the credibility of the "pro-family" hatemongers. The ultimate point of this crusade against homosexuality is not
really the preservation of marriage. In truth, the religious right could give a steaming log of poo about the
health or
sanctity of marriage, because the things actually threatening it are not under attack by these crusaders. There's no particularly large movement pushing to make divorce illegal. Or how about alcohol? Alcoholism ruins marriages by the millions. Yet there's no peep out of the religious right to make coming home to your wife drunk as a skunk illegal. No, that's a perfectly healthy way to live married life. I'm sure it's quite romantic. Perhaps a push to make cheating on your wife punishable by years of jail time? No?
So what can the morally righteous defenders of marriage fight against? Why, the gays of course. Because they're a minority that threatens nobody, therefore, they're easy to blame for all our woes, and easy to paint as immoral, perverse people who are undermining society. Sort of like how the Germans blamed the Jews for their woes. Why, blaming a policy of imperialism and warfare and blaming oneself is hard. Disenfranchising, tarring and feathering the minority is easy, especially if you're a coward.
When I take a long, hard look at the "morality" fanatics, I see nothing particularly moral or brave about them. They'll crusade against using naughty language on prime time television, but sex and violence are on just about every network. Why? Because it's easy to fight against a word. People can behave in appallingly immoral fashion, as long as they don't drop the f-bomb. These are our priorities? Look at the crusade against sex education and the use of condoms. Is it really better for young women to know nothing about their bodies, or how to prevent diseases or unwanted pregnancies from their male counterparts? To know that there are serious consequences in the real world for casual sex, or is spooking them with ghost stories about Hell really the better option? To tell them they're not allowed to explore intimacy with another person until they're in a legally binding lifelong contract which is supposed to be unbreakable, and that once they get there, they're just supposed to have as many children as are produced from steady marital sex, whether they're financially ready for such children, whether they want them, or not?
Who came up with such strict moral laws? Men who were in a position of absolute authority, who saw women as nothing more than broodmares for their offspring. There's nothing particularly compassionate, loving, or moral about it. If the idea behind morality is to keep people uneducated, frightened of ghosts, bound in legal chains, and forced to care for offspring they don't want
and cannot prevent, then the idea behind morality is to keep women as property, and as servants.
The morality police will then tell gay people that they're not pure enough to make the same sorts of property and legal arrangements as other couples; that their form of coupling is lesser, inferior, and wrong. That they 'strongly believe in the sanctity of marriage' but they won't lift a finger to stop anything that actually threatens heterosexual marriage. The only thing they actually will do is
declare it sacred and untouchable and too good for those gays. Meanwhile they'll go out and vote for the same pro-family conservative Senators and Congressmen who got caught cheating on their wives. After all, it's only natural that men will abuse their wedding vows for casual sex. But what those gays want to do...
declaring a lifelong partnership with the person they love the most... that is unnatural and must be condemned.
I sit in awe of the profound ignorance that is required to hold such a belief, and am dismayed by the sheer numbers of the profoundly ignorant in this supposedly well-educated and progressive first world country in the 21st century. But I am never surprised that the source of this profound ignorance often lies within the pages of a racist, sexist, bigoted book of lies written by cavemen, revered as the word of God. It's the same story told every century- the morally righteous pro-religious will never waste a single moment treating every non-religious or other-religious person like garbage.
I presume that's how the petty, jealous, hate-filled God really wants them to act. But I'd also assume that's not how a morally righteous one would. Which one of these Gods a person chooses to worship says a lot about their moral character, and I'm just glad that the
moral God is winning out, because it means people are taking a whole lot of stupid scripture, and saying that it's not particularly divine or worth following.
Hallelujah to that... it's about frickin' time.
