Blah Blah More of the Same

• My whole railing on the alleged sinfulness of homosexuality is prefaced on what I really believe to be a strong hate of gay people. If left to my own devices, I'd think, "Hey, Gay is OK." But for some reason, a lot of Christians *assume* that being is gay is So Gay. Faggoty, even.
• Pastor Gary in last week's sermon made a comment, I believe in reference to gays (correct me if I'm wrong), that it's proper to "hate the sin, but love the sinner." OK. If homosexuality is a sin, then that's proper. But I think what works me up is that we reserve this idiom for gays... But do we apply it to materialists? Do we apply it to people who buy clothes made by child labor? Or blood diamonds? Or who buy gas in support of terrorist countries? Or who feed the rich by blocking the poor from economic viability?
• Do we apply "hate the sin, but love the sinner" to racists? To the KKK? To domestic and foreign terrorists? To executioners?
• The reason the KKK is morally bad is because they rob non-white people of their freedom by trying to take away their rights--the right to live free from physical and emotional fear, the right to vote, the right to benefit from government resources as citizens.
  
• Does this also mean that anti-gay people are similar because they seek to do the same to gay marriage? Black people "look" enough like humans, and genetically they are of the same species, so we choose to respect their rights. Gay marriages "look" enough like straight marriages, and they act like straight marriages and there is love and all the structures of marriage, so must we choose to respect their rights?
• On another topic:
• As Christians, our first and foremost love must be for God. But if we are in a relationship is it possible to love God below our partners?
• I think that those who truly put God above their spouses are those crazies who form cults. I look at my Everyday, and I think it's pretty much impossible to put God above the love of my wife. I think it's easy to say I do, but honestly I don't. I don't think you do either.
• And if you do, is that love? And if that's love, I think that, practically speaking, as uneducated, un-enlightened as we are, it's hard not to read into the scripture and find megalomaniacial methods of abusing the other in subversion of your own needs... This is a big jump, but see all the cultic fanaticists. God gives you the power to abuse the ones you love.
  
• What is love? Baby, don't hurt me no more!
• Let's talk about birth control.
  
• OK, I'm not ready. But it has something to do with equating female mens with male nocturnal emission, and the Human Body ridding itself of the reagents of life. And why that's similar or different from reproductive prophylaxis, or chemically controlling hormonal cycles, or pre-fetal abortion.
  
• How about vegetarianism! That's a safe topic!
  
• God gave man dominion over the earth--the plants and the animals. We eat to live. We die when we don't.
• But red meat is bad. It's bad because society has driven us to gluttony--the hunger for read meat puts us in constant survival mode, where we gorge ourselves in the flesh until our deaths.
• So God made red meat available to us, but did not give us the ability to consume in moderation, alongside vegetables and dairy, so that we can live properly.
• Or maybe God created us to gorge on red meat so that we will die at the proper time. The food pyramid is a man-made creation, recent (the new one is maybe 2 years old now?), and we are subverting God's plan by prolonging our lives beyond what He had planned!
• I wear glasses. If I didn't, in the wild, I would die. Did God bide his time to allow humanity to develop the technology of the lens so that before then natural selection would take care of the functionally blind?
  
• Technology allows those who wouldn't be able to live 20 years ago, now live.
  
• I need to think about this some more.
• I love Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and the way they've allowed people to write the way I write right now.
  

Slavery, Ted Haggart, and Other Sexual Topics

• More on this whole slavery thing. So, again, the Bible clearly condones slavery. The enlightened argument regarding this is that slavery during the New Testament was radically different than the slavery we are most familiar with. The slavery in the New Testament may not have been as racially charged as the slavery we experienced in the New World, Europe, and Africa, and therefore the Bible condones "soft" slavery and not the violent slavery only Europeans can impose upon the uncivilized.
  
• Which to me sounds like a load of horse shit. The institution of slavery is such that an inherent social power dynamic is abused such that you can rob someone else of their rights to freedom--they may work for you with no compensation and with no guarantees for future freedom. Throughout history, that power dynamic laid across lines of social class--and social class is always ethnically based. And, if it's not, then people create new ethnicities to create inherent differences between the classes. (Oh, you're poor. Well, that's because... Hm, you're white. And you're from the UK. Oh, man, you're Irish, aren't you? Dirty Irish mongrels! Sub-human wretches!)
  
• So while there may be evidence that people in the Christian era did not view slavery as the plantation owners in America... Well, I don't buy this either. I highly doubt that there was no widespread slave abuse in Biblical times. It's just the nature of the situation. While there may be some Thomas Jefferson-like slave owners, I would doubt that all of them were. (And it's even questionable how great Jefferson was with his slaves. Anyways, Jefferson probably wasn't the Christian kind of guy everyone makes him out to be--more a deist than a born-again.)
• Another way of approaching this issue is to look past this Biblical condoning of slavery. OK, that's how slavery was viewed back then, but in the end if God changes your heart into one that loves then you'll realize that the type of heart that God wants us to have is one that allows science to change our understanding of humanity and show us that the subjugation of another human's rights under our own is not Godly love.
  
• How about for gays?
• I was thinking about Ted Haggart after watching the movie, Jesus Camp. He's in there, and he's held up as this amazing preacher, which I suppose in that mid-west kind of way, he might be. He struck me as a little too much superstar, a tad bit arrogant, but that's what it takes, I suppose.
• But, OK, he's gay. Or he's so power-riddled that he needs the thrill of "getting away with things" and having an alter ego through which he can express things he can't express being under constant public scrutiny. But for the sake of this argument, let's just say he's gay.
• Why should being gay stop him from being such an amazing preacher and Christian leader? What an amazing gift it could be if someone with his intellect and charisma could become a gay, Christian leader? What if he could just let go, love the fact that he loves men, accept *himself* as he is, and release himself in that way to the world? People always talk about how liberating coming out is, and how it allowed them to do so much more with their lives...
• On the other hand, if it was a power trip for him to do drugs with a male prostitute, then that's not so hot. Then that's the kind of abuse that's more like the immorality of slavery than an acceptance of love.
• Love is about understanding fairness. Accepting people as human. Protecting peoples' rights. Not satisfying your needs at the expense of another's--not abusing locally-inherent power dynamics.
• When you say, "I love you" to another person, you should instead say, "I choose not to abuse the local, socially-created power dynamics between us."
• OK, on a slightly different topic. My puppy loves me. I can tell. But my puppy's not human. Does God create that kind of love between a puppy and a person? I think so. God creates love. The Devil can't operate with the tools of love to subvert God's purpose. The love my puppy has for me is a gift from God.
• There are gay couples who are truly, madly in love. The same as there are some straight couples who are truly, madly in love. If the gay relationship is one of the Devil and not one of God, if it's one of sin and not one of... the opposite of sin is love, right? But it is love. It's undeniable. It's not just drug-addled, rapid fornication in the face of all that is clean and good. It's love. How can that not be a gift from God?
• But yet Paul lists men lying with men, men treating other men like women, etc., as being a bad thing. Maybe, as I've said before, this is more akin to an abuse of power, where straight men abuse other straight men in one of the most violent acts of oppression available. Or where the orgiastic lust is so without bounds that it becomes sin. Not love between a man and another man, but brute violence or unbridled lust.
• Hey, have I forgotten about the pedophiles? Or bestiality or necrophilia? I almost did! The Bible says nothing about pedophilia. Does that mean it's not a sin? Maybe... But yet if you look at the power dynamic abuse inherent in the pedophilic "relationship," it becomes obvious that it is not love. (Though compare this to the loving and mature relationship confessed by a once-famous anthropologist (forgot his name, but read parts of his books) who adopted boys from Papua New Guinea and claimed to have supportive yet sexual relationships with them.) I think that people sexually abuse children because they feel powerless, either sexual or otherwise, in the world and learn to use their maturity, strength, experience, and social power to "convince" or force children (or wives or other random people) to fulfill their needs and fantasies. But that's just my little theory.
  
• I also think the Bible is pretty silent on bestiality or necrophilia. (Update: Leviticus says that bestiality is wrong, but the NT is still silent on this. But it can't positively condone everything wrong, right?) Though they're both just shocking examples of the weird and bizarre, are they sinful? OK, maybe they point to other psychological, emotional, and social problems in the individual and the world at large--what kind of world ostracizes people and forces them to search for love and sexual release from animals and corpses?--but maybe some people are born that way!
• OK, for now, I take that back about necrophilia. I feel that's probably a weird power relationship as well. If you can't have sex with living people, go for their corpses.
• Yeah, this is getting bizarre. But the world is a beautifully bizarre place.
  

Some Ramblings from a Few Mornings Ago

• The Bible *clearly* says that slavery is acceptable. Yet within the past century or so we decided that we can ignore those passages or re-interpret them to allow for more modern norms to say that slavery is now bad. Why, then, do we cling to the few passages that say that homosexuality is wrong?
• The same line of reasoning may be used for the subordination of women, or the cultural non-recognition of them. (For example, when we count numbers of people in the Bible, we may double or triple those numbers because they don't count women and children. Should we also account for the 4% who were not counted because they were gay?)
• If homosexuality is bad because its activity contradicts with the human imperative to pro-create, isn't chastity then bad as well? If homosexuality is an immoral activity because it isn't pro-creative sexual activity, isn't masturbation sinful? Let's burn the masturbators! No masturbators in the church!
• They suppose that it's all about love... That love comes first. Yet the delimitor between the saved and banished is whether one truly repents from the thin line of sin in one's life. So, therefore, we must know what is sin and what isn't, so that we can repent from one and praise the other. But don't we all sin so greatly so "all tht time?" We can never be free of sin. No sin is greater than any other. So long as we don't betray the search for God, and the search for God's love, isn't that where we need to be? And the rest is all circumstantial?
• But, yet, that concedes that homosexuality is a sin. But isn't the sexual drive--bordering if not constantly passing lust, as Paul describes that chastity creating ultimate and whole passion for God is the only love that is wholly acceptable--inherently disinheriting everyone from sinlessness? Therefore, much sin is actually non-sin. The only through-and-through sin is that of not accepting God, not loving Him, and not seeking after Him.

Evangelicals and Global Warming

Planning a Bible Study

1. Requirement of being "born again."
2. The Bible as the ultimate source of religious authority.
3. Evangelism.
4. Christ as the ultimate source of salvation.