Organized Religion: The Worse Bully of LGBT People

Now, in the midst of the Christmas holiday season, many LGBT individuals across America and so-called Christian areas of the world find themselves disconnected from any religious aspect of the season.  Why?  Very simple: through out much of its history - at least since the 1100's - Christianity has been one of the worse tormentors and enemies of LGBT people. Much of this mistreatment of LGBT individuals traces back to the ignorant writings of the Hebrew Old Testament - ignorance which was sadly also picked up by Islam.  Add to the poison of a few passages in Leviticus the sick need of many to fell superior to others and to have some target for abuse as "other", and organized religion has been a toxic evil to so many LGBT people throughout history since the rise of Christianity and the dissemination of the message of hate by Christian missionaries.  A piece in The Advocate looks at this sad truth.  Here are excerpts:

As a gay youth, I attended church like I attempted suicide: half-heartedly, with a lack of conviction, and pretty sure it wasn’t for me. That makes me one of the lucky ones.

Growing up in Wilmington, Del., in the 1970s and 1980s, I had no idea how lucky I was to be brought up in a hodge-podge of faith traditions. My parents were raised in different Protestant traditions, but my mother had converted to Catholicism to marry (and shortly divorce) her first husband. They had an ethical and moral basis in the teachings of Christianity, but neither was particularly connected to the trappings of any specific tradition.  They were married in the Episcopal Church, the best option for a divorced woman in 1971. Early on, and because of that choice, they were part of a congregation that was less judgmental of difference. 

Additionally, since my parents had met onstage in community theatre, they had many friends who were gay and this was the world into which I was born. I went to Sunday school for a few years and went to services on Christmas Eve and on Easter Sunday.

It wasn’t until I came out to them in the late '80s that the subtle insidiousness of church teachings reared its head. Despite having gay friends in the theatre, in their social groups and even in our living room on a regular basis, having a gay son was not an option my mother wanted to consider. I was told I could never bring a boyfriend home, and she openly confessed to worrying what people would think of her. She worried that people would think she was a bad mother and that she’d done something wrong when they found out she had a gay son.

This was not the reaction I expected. Nowhere in her secular life was I given any clue that she would feel any differently about a gay son. Years later, as I reflected on this painful (and thankfully, brief) period, I came to understand that it must have been feelings ingrained by her own religious upbringing.

Like most LGBTQ+ youth, when I started feeling different and out of place (Steven Carrington on Dynasty was the only significant LGBTQ+ character on TV in those days), I was confused. I was depressed. I was anxious. I’d been the subject of bullying for most of my life,  . . . . In the absence of other factors and in the presence of other LGBTQ+ people in her social circles leads me to believe that the religion of her upbringing had coded these feelings deep into her subconscious, and that is where religion became an issue for me.

For too many LGBTQ+ teens, though, religion IS the issue. According to data from a 2011 study from the University of Texas at Austin’s Research Consortium , gay and lesbian youth who reported that religion was important to them were 38 percent more likely to have had recent suicidal thoughts.  . . . Only 5 percent of the heterosexual youth surveyed had considered suicide.

No person, no matter their sexual or affectional orientation, their gender, their class, their beliefs or their interests should be made to feel inferior, particularly in a community that is meant to provide support and love. Religious bullying, whether direct, or in my mother’s case, subconscious, can serve as one of the most destructive forms of bullying and more has to be done to prevent it.

Religious-based bullying of  LGBTQ+ people is insidious. It can lead to isolation, disrespect, and exclusion. According to the National LGBTQ Task Force, nearly 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+, and many of them are likely homeless because their families’ faith could not accept them for who they are. Worse, it is killing LGBTQ+ young people.

[W]e have a moral obligation to embrace each other’s differences: true faith doesn’t bully. It is about love and support. I’m proud to have recently joined the team at the Tyler Clementi Foundation, where our “True Faith Doesn’t Bully” campaign is working to provide tailored resources to help faith communities affirm the value of the lives of every single individual, no matter their identity. . . . We all deserve that.

I have more or less walked away from Christianity in any organized form.  Like many of their generation, my children are now "Nones" despite having been raised Catholic, and my grandchildren, thankfully, are being spared from Christian indoctrination and all of the self-hate and judgment of others that it sadly embodies.

Christians Need to Stop Hurting LGBT People

The bitter old men in dresses at the Vatican continue their farcical synod on the family and are making it very clear that LGBT families simply do not count under the Vatican's 13th century understanding of sexual orientation (I'd like to make them be limited to utilizing only 13th century medical treatment, if they think the 13th century provides all the answers).  Meanwhile, Sister Simone Campbell, the Executive director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby, is call on the Vatican - and other homophobic denominations - to cease the harm being done to LGBT individuals.  Here are highlights from her post at Huffington Post:

I've been described as 'radical' by the Vatican; it's pretty funny really. I have no idea what some people find so radical about accepting 100 per cent of people on this earth.

As a movement, NETWORK, America's National Catholic Social Justice Lobby relates to everyone in society and that obviously includes the LGBT community. I've witnessed the amazing courage of folks in the LGBT community, who have come out and spoken publicly and respectfully on what had been taboo subjects. Because of their bravery, all of us have discovered we know at least someone - a friend, relative, colleague, whoever - who is LGBT, and I think that's been huge in moving society towards greater acceptance. 

I wonder if the challenge for some people in dealing with anxieties around sexual definition is their own lack of working through their sexual identity. When we're comfortable in ourselves, outside things can't threaten us. I know, when I'm nervous about something, it's usually got something to do with me and my own unresolved stuff. So I wonder that when folks are angry or judgmental or prejudiced if it's a reflection of their own insecurities. And I think there are some people within the Church, some priests and bishops included, that haven't wrestled with their own sexuality and instead spend a lot of time worrying about everybody else's. I think it comes from needing to judge others to feel better about oneself, or projecting onto others the things that one fears.

[T]he Bible doesn't really say anything about LGBT people. There is that line in the book of Leviticus, but really, give me a break! That is not the LGBT community as we in the 21st century understand it. Instead, what I see over and over in the gospels is Jesus walking towards all kinds of folks. The scriptures say repeatedly that you should walk towards everybody, no exceptions. If some folks have a sexual identity that's different to mine, so what? God doesn't make mistakes and if that's how folks are created, then that's a reflection of God's love too. We need to wake up to the fact that love is a wonderful thing, building families is a wonderful thing, and there are a variety of ways to do either.  

On our last bus tour, I met a young woman who had escaped from a program to 'cure' her of being gay. She's now married to her female partner and together they have a baby - she was just radiating joy! But then she started telling me that some years before, her Christian family had sent her away to a curing program. Her father - a preacher - told her that she was possessed by the devil, and she even came to believe that herself for a while. I don't know how she had the courage to break out of it, but five months in she ran away and hasn't had contact with her family since.

I could feel her anguish in the judgement from her family, but also her relief in being true to herself and trusting that she wasn't wrong or crazy or possessed.  

When folk hate or reject LGBT people, it affects the person who is doing the hating. If you spend your energy being fearful and criticizing others, that anger erodes who you are and really limits the joy and love that Jesus calls us to. 

For me, that means we have to listen to people rather than making assumptions about them. Anyone can create their own theory and feel very sure about what LGBT people are or are not, but when you meet people it changes everything. Talk to people. Be open and accept the truth of who people are. That's all we need to do.

I love the shots she takes at the Church hierarchy.  Would that Sister Simone was the pope.

How the Bible Was Re-Written to Condemn Homosexuality

In the wake of last week's marriage ruling, we are seeing a resurgence of homophobia and bigotry justified by citations to the Bible.  Invariably, the bigots claim the Bible is the "inerrant word of God" and "God's law."  As noted in numerous previous posts, there is much that we don't know - e.g., who really authored its books - one thing that we do know is that the versions in circulation likely bear little or no resemblance to the original texts.  Over the centuries, the Bible has been revised and re-written to further the agendas of factions within the Catholic Church vying for power, control, and of course, money.  Sadly, these vying agenda were more important to the revisers than necessarily remaining true to the original texts. A piece in Gay Star News looks at some of the deliberate re-writes made in order to condemn and attack gays and same sex love.  Here are some excerpts:

We’ve a lot to celebrate this pride season. The Irish have voted to extend marriage to same-sex couples, Greenland too, and across the US anti-gay laws have been droping like popsicles in the sun – with the highlight being the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide.

Some of equality’s most vocal opponents have been Christian churches and organizations. Right-wing evangelicals, Orthodox patriarchs, African bishops maintain the Bible is intrinsically anti-homosexual.

They say it clearly condemns homosexuality as a sin, an abomination, even that Jesus hated gays. But do the Biblical sources say these things?

In the tens of thousands of verses that make up the Bible, ‘homosexuality’ is, for the sake of argument, mentioned six times.

These brief but much quoted passages are by no means clear and would have been lost amid the enormity of wider Biblical narratives were it not for a determined anti-homosexual agenda.

First up, there’s the conflation of homosexuals with ‘Sodomites’, the inhabitants of the city of Sodom destroyed by God in Genesis. Early Church commentators, such as the fourth century Patriarch of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, interpreted Sodom’s sin to be specifically homosexual acts, which, incidentally, he believed were ‘worse than murder’.

Yet whenever Sodom’s actually mentioned in the Bible it’s only in the context that the Sodomites, suspicious of strangers, sought to do violence towards them.
Passages in Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Paul’s first letter to the Romans routinely get trotted out as evidence of God’s murderous intent.

But the surprising truth is that early Christian translators of the Bible sexed up these texts. They inserted, omitted and mistranslated words and phrases in order to bulk up a case for persecution.

A recent translation of Deuteronomy reads ‘there shall be no… sodomite of the sons of Israel’. But the original Hebrew does no such thing. It referred to something like ‘sacred male prostitutes’ – men who engaged in orgiastic sex rituals with people of either sex among Israel’s non-Jewish neighbors.

Leviticus 18.22 has always been the great stumbling block for Christians.  . . . . the Hebrew reads ‘[y]ou shall not lie with a male on the bedding of a wife; it is a despised thing’. Quite right too, shagging your boyfriend on your wife’s bed would be bad form!

The only source of anti-homosexual rhetoric in the New Testament is the writings of Paul, specifically the first letter to the Corinthians and, more extensively, Romans I.

The Gospels are, crucially, silent on the matter.

The Greek text of Corinthians says that ‘the corrupt, and men who lie with men’ will not inherit the Kingdom of God.  But a version in Aramaic, a language commonly spoken among Jews and Gentiles in the Middle East, reads ‘the corrupted, and those who rape men’, a significant reversion. Most likely, Paul was condemning coercive same-sex acts not homosexuality.

Put simply, modern Christian homophobia is based on manipulations of the original Bible

But what about positive Biblical accounts of same-sex relations, like the love between David and Jonathan? And is Christ entirely silent on the issue?  What about his healing of the Centurion’s beloved servant? Or his opinion in Matthew that men ‘who were born that way’ shouldn’t marry?
Well these too were subject to textual revision in Greek and Latin translations to play down their significance or render them ‘Platonic’.

The Gospels’ silence cannot be construed as ‘being gay is a sin’. It doesn’t mean Jesus hates gays. As the Canterbury glass shows, it was anxiety over the old religions and their comfortable relationship with sex and sexuality that prompted the early church fathers.

So they turned to drafting Imperial edicts which, by the end of the fourth century, had effectively criminalized same-sex relationships, including same-sex marriage, to one of the worst crimes in history.  Stamp out same-sex love and you’ll stamp out rival cults.

For centuries this dogma has triumphed over truth, the alterations to the original Biblical texts became the word of God, and that forgery is still being used to persecute LGBTI people from Moscow to Mombasa.

Candidly, when I hear some "godly Christian" spouting off on the Bible's inerrancy, I at times find it difficult to refrain from asking them why the haven't had "I'm an idiot" tattooed on their foreheads.  Only an idiot should still believe that the Bible is the "inspired word of God."  It is a corrupt work of fallible men who had as the main objective wrenching power, control and money from rival cults.

Notre Dame to Gays: Live a Life of Celibacy

The University of Notre Dame - to some the flagship Catholic University in America -  holds itself out as a first class university of higher learning and advanced education.  But when it comes to issues of sexual orientation, the University is sadly on the same level as ignorant nomadic herders from the Bronze Age or at best the early Iron Age.  Why?  Because this supposed bastion of education subscribes to the anti-same sex physical intimacy batshitery of Leviticus which was based on (i) the ignorant belief that a male's sperm was limited in quantity and had to be saved for procreation and (ii) hostility towards the goddess worship of the Canaanites which involved ritual homosexuality.  Twenty-six hundred years or more after ignorant scribes compiled Leviticus, Notre Dame is counseling gays that they need to live a life of celibacy rather than embrace the sexuality that their creator gave them.  All so that neurotic, sexually obsessed, bitter old men in dresses in Rome and the mentally/emotionally challenged in the Catholic laity can feel superior and good about themselves.  Religion News Service reports on the idiocy and homophobia transpiring at Notre Dame.  Here are highlights:

Last weekend, The Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame hosted Gay In Christ, a day and a half colloquium intended to offer “an appropriate pastoral strategy for Catholic parishes” to “self-identified gay members.” The academic conference featured straight, gay, and lesbian speakers presenting on various topics concerning same-sex attraction and gender identity. The celibate gay and lesbian presenters were affiliated with Spiritual Friendship, a blog space started by Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill to discuss Christ-centered responses to LGBT Christians while remaining true to their beliefs in a traditional Christian sexual ethic

The presenters emphasized a significant shift in the Catholic framing of LGBT individuals. In the past, Catholicism has framed homosexuality in terms of “same-sex attractions”—refusing to acknowledge a gay identity. The queer presenters shifted that language by identifying as gay and lesbian while still upholding a traditional Catholic sexual ethic. A nod to more accurate verbiage is major progress considering that the only narrative the Catholic Church has officially sponsored has been of those who adhere to “SSA” or “same-sex attracted” language

Some tension arose when a member of Courage—who seemed to only attend the very first night specifically for Ron Belgau’s presentation—vocally pushed back at the idea that Courage’s twelve step program to help overcome homosexual desires was not effective or even “Catholic enough.” The group encourages members to avoid identifying as gay or lesbian, which is perhaps why they weren’t involved in the conference. Yet the shift in language was necessary in order for the conference to discuss LGBT people as more than just sexual acts

A concern was vocalized towards the end of the conference, which really shows how Christianity as a whole is having the LGBT conversation– that we were reducing LGBT people to sex. While the conference presenters stressed the importance of seeing LGBT people as individuals with experiences with gifts they could offer the church, the statements always seemed to come with a catch — “as long as they don’t have sex.” 

It's sad that LGBT individuals (especially the seemingly self-loathing presenters) continue to cling to the religious brainwashing of their youth.  It's even more sad that a supposed top university clings to ignorance and homophobia rather than admit that the Bible to which it clings is just flat out wrong on many issues, gay sex among them.  Again, my advice to gays who were raised Catholic: walk away and find a new church!

Apologists for Religion are the Problem

Bill Maher, Reza Aslan, Richard Dawkins (Credit: HBO/Malin Fezehai/AP/Akira Suemori)

Throughout history religion has unleashed untold hate, misery and bloodshed.   Yes, some religious groups engage in charitable works, but even then many engage in proselytizing at the same time.  It's always about winning others over to their belief systems and often punishing those who don't yield - e.g., the Salvation Army's anti-gay policies and past rejection of gays needing shelter.  Meanwhile, we see ISIS demonstrating just how evil fundamentalist religion can be even as anti-Muslim Christians forget Christianity's own ugly past that has included the Inquisition, the extermination of the Cathars in France and many other acts of genocide against those deemed to hold heretical beliefs.  Yet despite this horrible track record we still see apologist defending religion, including Reza Aslan whose book (which I read) calls into question some of the main manufactured storyline of the Christian construct of Christ.  A lengthy piece in Salon looks at the refusal of apologists to open their eyes.  Here are excerpts:

Bill Maher’s recent monologue on “Real Time” about the failure of liberals to speak out about the routine atrocities and violations of human rights carried out in the name of religion in the Muslim world has unleashed a torrent of commentary, much of it from progressives advocating more, not less, tolerance of Islam.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who sided with Ben Affleck against Maher in a follow-up segment a few days later, calls ISIS rebels, in an op-ed, “barbarians” who “give all Islam a bad name,” and asks us to take into account the religion’s diversity, lest we slip into “Islamophobic bigotry.” Fareed Zakaria, in his Washington Post column, cautions us to recall that Islam, Christianity and Judaism once peacefully coexisted, but acknowledges that Islam suffers from a “cancer” – extremism that incites acts of terrorism. This he views, though, as a problem of “Islam today.”

One pundit in particular, though, has busied himself opining on Maher and nonbelievers in general — Reza Aslan, Islam’s most prominent apologist of late. Delivered via multiple media outlets, his remarks, brimming with condescension, tinged with arrogance and laden with implicit insults to thinking people, deserve special scrutiny for one main reason: among well-intentioned liberals who don’t know much about religion, his words carry weight.

Aslan accuses the benighted critics of religion of a far more grievous misapprehension: the assumption that words mean what they actually mean. Here I’ll quote him at length.

“It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives. . . .  After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation.

 Aslan is essentially taking a postmodernist, Derrida-esque scalpel to “scripture” and eviscerating it of objective content. This might pass muster in the college classroom these days, but what of all those ISIS warriors unschooled in French semiotic analysis who take their holy book’s admonition to do violence literally? As they rampage and behead their way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves.

Moreover, the razor-happy butchers of little girls’ clitorises and labia majora, the righteous wife-beaters, the stoners of adulterers, the shariah clerics denying women’s petitions for divorce from abusive husbands and awarding sons twice the inheritance allowed for daughters, all act with sanction from Islamic holy writ. It matters not a whit to the bloodied and battered victims of such savagery which lines from the Hadith or what verses from the Koran ordain the violence and injustice perpetrated against them, but one thing they do know: texts and belief in them have real-life consequences. And we should never forget that ISIS henchmen and executioners explicitly cite their faith in Islam as their motive. Tell that to Derrida – or Aslan.

Not just belief in the Koran leads to mayhem, though. Open the Book of Leviticus (in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament) and read the prescriptions of death (often by stoning or burning) as punishment for, among other things, cursing your parents, committing adultery, practicing bestiality (with mandatory slaughter of the unwitting animal as well), engaging in prostitution or sodomy, worshipping another god or taking God’s name in vain, and being the (female) victim of rape. The New Testament is somewhat less vicious, but even gentle Jesus, meek and mild, warned in Matthew (10:34): “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and preached “unquenchable fire” and damnation for sinners.

That the faithful have always been acting on the words in their holy books may not accord with how Aslan would like us to see religion, but it is hardly news.

[I]ntentionally trying to obscure cause and effect where faith is concerned, as Aslan does, is morally reprehensible, is insensitive to the victims, and provides cover for their butchers

The problem with religion lies not with, as Aslan would have it, interpretation – postmodern or otherwise – but with, for starters, the founding texts themselves. The canonical writings of Islam, Christianity and Judaism all contain a plethora of macabre fables and explicit injunctions for vile, sadistic behavior that no civilized person would or should accept, but which far too many do take as literal truth.

The so-called “New Atheists,” including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, have tried to do the opposite: get people to examine religion and help them understand it as innately backward, obscurantist, irrational and dangerous. Their aggressive secularism has, of course, stirred controversy and resentment. It was bound to do so. For millennia, the faithful have held the high moral ground virtually unopposed.

Aslan said much more in his interview worthy of refutation, but what transpires through all the rhetorical dodges, whitewashing and clever distortions of fact he (and others defending religion) have offered us since Maher delivered his anti-Islamic monologue is not that one faith is better or less violent than another, but that religion itself is to blame. Religion, in interfering with the free exercise of our critical faculties, in setting out an outlandishly untrue history of the cosmos and humankind’s position in it, and in purporting universality that some are willing to die and kill for, is more than just what the physicist Steven Weinberg called “an insult to human dignity;” it is, in our age of weapons of mass destruction and increasing global instability, a threat to us all.

[R]eligion must be dumped, ushered out of the public arena and back into the private, personal realm for those still inclined to harbor it or too weak to do without it. No thinking person need feel pressured into condoning or excusing faith-based brutalities out of well-meaning but incorrect liberal sentiments.

Nonbelievers need to approach faith as a subject like any other, one we can talk about and criticize without fear of causing offense – or, in the case of Islam, concern for our physical safety.

This is in fact our constitutional right. The First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing an official religion and protects free speech – including speech that offends the sentiments of believers. If we disbelieve what religion’s canon tells us, we need to say so openly, and in mixed company, pointing out that no rational person could believe it or accept it as true and valid, were it not for indoctrination, immaturity, willful abandonment of reason, fear, or simple feeblemindedness.
We can also cease displaying knee-jerk respect for those who propagate faith. 

There's more, but in sum, the piece makes a case that I have tried to make often: religion deserves no deference nor do its adherents regardless of their particular faith.  Logic, reason and intellect should hold the "godly" accountable for their atrocities and daily abuse and discrimination against others. 

"Christian" Bakery Owners - You Will Know Them By Their Hate and Hypocrisy

Bigot/hypocrite Aaron Klein is one of the owners of Sweet Cakes By Melissa in Gresham, Ore., which refused to serve a lesbian couple who were planning their wedding.

In my view, one of the principal attributes of today's "godly Christian" crowd is the rank hypocrisy almost always on display.   While engaged in self-congratulatory pronouncements of their piety, these "Christians" use their claimed "deeply held religious beliefs" as an excuse for all types of hate and bigotry.   This was recently on display in the Pacific Northwest where bakeries owned by self-styled "devout Christians" refused to bake wedding cakes for same sex couples.  Not only are they facing prosecution now under the state public access/non-discrimination laws, but these bakery owners have been revealed to be hypocrites of the highest order since they seemingly will provide services for literally anyone else other than gays .   Willamette Week looks at some under cover work that showed the very selective religiosity of these bakery owners.  Here are highlights:

Sugar, flour, eggs and water are now munitions in America’s culture war. Or so you’d think from two Oregon bakeries that recently got national attention for declining to make cakes for same-sex weddings.

The first incident, in February, involved Gresham’s Sweet Cakes by Melissa, whose owner told a lesbian couple that “we don’t do same-sex marriages.” Earlier this month, Pam Regentin, who operates Fleur Cakes out of her home in the Hood River area, also refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding.

Both bakeries cited their religious beliefs as the reason they would not make the cakes. Both describe themselves as Christian.

Jesus, of course, never commented on gay people, but did tell his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Instead, the widely cited Bible verse condemning homosexuality comes from Leviticus, a book that also prohibits getting tattooed or eating rabbit.

We wondered what other requests these cakemakers would decline to honor. So last week five WW reporters called these two bakeries anonymously to get price quotes for other occasions frowned upon by some Christians. Surprisingly, the people who answered the phone at each bakery were quite willing to provide baked goods for celebrations of divorces, unmarried parents, stem-cell research, non-kosher barbecues and pagan solstice parties.

We later contacted both bakeries to ask about these inconsistencies. Regentin declined to comment beyond asking whether she had been taped (she had not).

Sweet Cakes owners Melissa and Aaron Klein were upset that we “would even try to entrap a business” and contacted conservative talk-show host Lars Larson.

Baby Out of Wedlock

WW Asks - I’m shopping around for a nice baby shower cake for my friend. It’s her second baby with her boyfriend so I’m not looking for anything too big or fancy—probably enough to serve 15 to 20 people.

Sweet Cake says - “We have a sheet cake that will feed 30, or a 10-inch cake that would feed 30 people. The 10-inch cake is $50 and the sheet cake is $52. Or we have an 8-inch cake that would feed 15 for $40.”

Fleur says - Prices vary based on decoration and frosting, but a basic cake is $3 per serving.

Divorce Party

WW Asks - My friend is getting divorced and we’d like to throw her a little party to mark the start of her new life. Do you ever write messages on those—we’d want it to say “congratulations!”—and how much would it be for a cake that could serve about eight people?

Sweet Cake says - “A 10-inch is $29.99. That should probably do it....We can definitely do something like that.”

Fleur says - “The price for a 10-inch cheesecake is $36 and up. So it’ll be between $36 and $45, but you’re going to have to call in advance because my schedule for June and July is very busy.”

Stem-Cell Success

WW Asks - I was wondering if you could do two little cakes. My friend is a researcher at OHSU and she just got a grant for cloning human stem cells, so I thought I’d get her two identical cakes—basically, two little clone cakes. How much would they cost?

Sweet Cake says - “Ha. All right. When are you looking to do it? It’ll be $25.99 each, so about $50 to start.”

Fleur says - Did not pick up phone or return messages. Acknowledged receiving requests by email but refused to comment.

Non-Kosher Barbecue

WW Asks - I’m looking to get a special cake for a barbecue we’re having next week. Our cow just died of old age and we’re planning to grill some steaks along with lobster and pulled-pork sandwiches—what size would we need for 10 people and how much would it be?

Sweet Cake says - “A 6-inch cake serves about eight to 10 people at $25.99. The apple goes really good with pork, and the caramel will complement the lobster. For a barbecue, it’s all really good.”

Fleur says - Did not pick up phone or return messages. Acknowledged receiving requests by email but refused to comment.

Pagan Solstice Party

WW Asks - I was calling to get a quote on a cake for a midsummer solstice party. My coven is celebrating on Friday, June 21. The decoration would be very simple: just a green pentagram. We’d like to pick it up sometime that afternoon, before the bonfire. It’ll be for about 30 people.

Sweet Cake says - “For 30 poeople we have a couple options... We have two kind of cakes you could have. About the diagram you want on the cake, I’m not sure how much extra that would be.”

Fleur says - Did not pick up phone or return messages. Acknowledged receiving requests by email but refused to comment.

Never fall for the  pretense that these godly folk are nice people.  They are not and the sooner the majority of the American public comes to understand that hate and bigotry are the true hallmarks of today's conservative Christians, the better off the nation and society will be.  These folks are liars, bigots and hate mongers plain and simple.

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The Bible as Justification for Hate

Click image to enlarge

My likely distant cousin, James Hamar, shared this image on Facebook which to me illustrates the utter hypocrisy of the anti-gay Christofascists who cite the Bible as inerrant and something to be taken literally - only when it's convenient, of course.  As I have said many times, if the Bible is inerrant and must be taken literally, you do not get to pick and choose which passages to follow.  You have to take all of it, no matter how batshit crazy the result.  And the "godly Christians" wonder why it is they themselves who are beginning to be stigmatized.  Their hypocrisy is truly unbelievable. 

The Ugly Face of Religious Based Homophobia

Click image to enlarge

With three children of my own, one grandchild and another one on the way, I find few things more incomprehensible that throwing away one's own child based on a few passages in a book that is selectively read for every other purpose.  Yes, I am talking about the Bible - a book I suspect has caused more harm than good over the centuries - and those who cling to the supposed condemnations of same sex relations while utterly ignoring a host of other prohibitions.  In my view, if one discards their child because they are gay, few things better demonstrate the hypocrisy of these parents and the ugliness of conservative Christianity in general  Frank Bruni has a column in the New York Times that looks at the evil still being done by those who simple mindedly cling to a handful of Bible passages and reject their children.  Here are column highlights:

Jeff Chu was married last September, on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against the backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. About 80 people came.  His mother and father weren’t among them. 

His mother sent an e-mail just beforehand, to let him know that she was thinking of him. But to be a part of the ceremony? To celebrate the day? That much she couldn’t do, because Jeff was pledging his devotion to another man. And his parents, strict Southern Baptists, have always deemed such a love sinful, and against God’s wishes. 

Against God’s wishes. That notion — that argument — is probably the most stubborn barrier to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans, a last bastion and engine of bigotry. It’s what many preachers still thunder. It’s what some politicians still maintain. 

It’s what Jeff himself once feared.  “How many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I thought I would go to hell — for being gay, for being me?” he asks.  And how often, he adds, did he pray “that God would take these feelings from me?” 

His parents came to America from Hong Kong with the conservative beliefs that Baptist missionaries had spread through that area of the world. They reared Jeff in their religion, sending him to a Christian high school in Miami. One of his vivid memories from those years was the sudden banishment of a favorite teacher after the school discovered that he was involved with another man.  Jeff knew even then that he had feelings like the teacher’s, and writes: “This was the lesson that I learned: Nobody could ever, ever find out, because if they did, I would be damned and cast out, just like he was.” 

At Princeton, he dated women. But in London for graduate school, he began to date men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when God had presumably made him the way he was.

Although his book doesn’t focus on the scattered references in the Bible to homosexuality, Jeff knows them well. And, yes, a few seem to condemn same-sex intimacy.   But have they been translated correctly? Interpreted the right way? Are they timeless verities or — more logically — reflections of an outmoded culture and obsolete mind-set? And if all of the Bible is to be taken literally, shouldn’t Christians refrain from planting multiple kinds of seed in one field or letting women speak in church or charging interest to the poor?

[H]e thinks it arrogant to insist, as the zealots who condemn gay people do, that God’s will is so easily known. And in light of that, he thinks it wrong for anyone to try to consign gays to the shame that so many of them have endured. 

The stories in Jeff’s book made me sad, and they made me angry. How much needless pain have people like him been put through, and in God’s name no less? 

The truth, as anyone educated and willing to open their mind knows is that the Bible was written by ignorant, uneducated nomads who knew nothing of science, sexual orientation and a host of other realms of knowledge and who wanted to hold themselves apart from surrounding peoples, many of whom accepted same sex relations.  The hubris of condemning others out of intellectual laziness and a refusal to use God given intelligence, now that's the sin.  Not loving same sex relationships.  My contempt and disgust for those who cling to what is little more than baseless bigotry against gays only seems to increase over time.  They, not gays, are the face of evil in the world.

Anti-Gay Preacher Bails From Inaugural Line Up

Anti-Gay pastor Louie Giglio who had - in another display of Obama staff incompetence - been slated to give the inaugural benediction has withdrawn from the inaugural event line up ostensible to avoid becoming a distraction from the ceremony.  In the process, Giglio also attempted to down play the viciousness of his past anti-gay statements.    The situation is noteworthy for two reasons.  First, how incompetent are the Obama folks that they did not do a simple Google search on Giglio?  Second, Giglio claims that he's not anti-gay, but the man is a liar based on his past statements - statements that he has never disavowed.  Andrew Sullivan sums up the incompetence of the Obama staffers and Giglio's disingenuousness very well:

So the second Inaugural benediction for Obama turns out to be another clusterfuck. First, they had the fatuous Rick Warren, whose campaign against marriage equality was deemed irrelevant to the cause of uniting the country. Now we have Louie Giglio,  .  .  .  .  who, like most evangelicals, still believes that gay relationships, let alone marriages, are anathema.

[I]t is quite clear that Giglio has never stopped believing that what he calls "the gay lifestyle" is a terrible crime against God. He also calls it one of the most important issues of the time. He proposes the horrifying abuse of "ex-gay therapy." He cites Leviticus, which mandates the death penalty for gays, and says it is the lynchpin of the teaching against homosexuality. In fact, he doesn't just cite Leviticus; he goes on for ever about it. He describes gay people as living a "lie," a term my born-again uncle accused me of doing when he found out I was gay. He calls us engaged in "depraved, lustful behavior" and being haters of God. He calls for his congregation to "firmly respond to the aggressive agenda" of gay equality.

His defense is that "clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years." But in that sermon, he described it as possibly the most important moral battle of the time. And get a load of this: "Those who practice such things are worthy of death." And this:

Homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle. Homosexuality is not just a sexual preference. Homosexuality is not gay. But homosexuality is sin.

[W]hat clueless administration official did not do due diligence on this figure? After the Rick Warren mess, could no one in the White House do the same research as Think Progress? 

There's only way forward on this and that is to choose as his replacement a minister who endorses gay unions and full gay inclusion in the Christian community. Why would Obama object to that? He has "evolved" now, hasn't he?

Why is it every time that Obama builds good feelings within the LGBT community he seems to without thinking do something stupid and cause a great deal of bad feeling? 

When Gay Marriage Gets Personal: Opening Closed Minds

Andrew Sullivan and others have argued that same sex marriage is actually a conservative value and is something that ought to be supported by anyone who truly seeks to increase societal stability and values.  As we all know, of course, the Christofascists and their allies in other fundamentalist religions care nothing about societal stability but seek only to inflict their typically fear and hate based religious dogma on all often so that they can avoid confrontation with issues and individuals who threaten their ignorance embracing, serious thought avoiding house of cards world views.  As I have said before, I believe that gays particularly terrify the Christofascists because if the Bible passages the haters so love to quote are wrong about us, then they have confront the issue of what else in the Bible is not true.  It becomes a domino effect as their whole artificial world collapses and, heaven forbid, they have to make decisions and moral judgments on their own.  A piece in Huffington Post written by a conservative Jewish writer who attended a nephew's same sex marriage ceremony shows how by being ourselves and living our lives openly we can open minds and breakdown barriers.  Here are some excerpts:

Setting out for our nephew's wedding, my wife and I weren't quite sure what to expect. Since the two grooms had met at the memorably named Cincinnati Queer Guerilla Bar, our excitement contained an undeniable undercurrent of uneasiness.

Gay marriage is once again a high-profile public issue. .  .  .  . Yet entwined though it may be in legislation and lawsuits, gay marriage, like its heterosexual counterpart, is primarily a personal issue. The union of our nephew, Benjamin, and his beloved, Jacob, in a Reform Jewish ceremony in Cincinnati satisfied only religious law, not Ohio's. But on a personal level, the ceremony and the whole weekend showcased precisely the kind of values all of us who believe in stable, monogamous relationships should want to defend.

Which, I admit, isn't how I always felt.   As a religiously serious Jew, I'm well aware of the explicit biblical condemnation of homosexual sex acts. Still, loyalty to Leviticus wasn't the only reason for my initial opposition to gay marriage. Like many others, I believed that marriage in a legal and religious context was inextricably linked to procreation.

Well, sort of. Not only don't we ban infertile couples from marrying or cast out those who don't want to have children, we have also as a society accepted surrogate birth, single parenthood and a host of other technological and social arrangements that have nothing to do with "togetherness" by the biological father and mother. When you think about it, what remains illegal for homosexuals is not parenthood, but the obligations and protections for them and their children that accompany a legally binding commitment.

That, and the ability to have the state recognize a commitment to the whole panoply of family values we as a society claim to uphold. The celebration of those values by Benjamin and Jacob is what shone though the entire weekend.

That love, and the desire to build a family around it, is what motivated Ben, 29, and Jacob, 25, to get formally married rather than live together as do so many of their gay and straight peers. And they deliberately did so in a religious ceremony in the city where they both had roots.

It's nice to believe that traditional nuclear families like the one my wife and I were raised in and in which we raised our kids are the best possible arrangement. But whether you pull out your Bible, pop on your TV or peer around the dining room table, it's impossible to escape the reality that any kind of family arrangement can be terrific or toxic. (Cain and Abel, anyone?) Gay or straight, religious or secular, some people are mensches and some are not.

It turns out my wife and I didn't go to a "gay wedding"; we went to a wedding. It was filled with "voices of joy and gladness," in the traditional Jewish phrase, "the voice of the groom and the voice of..." well, the other groom. We hope that Ben and Jacob's union will soon be legally recognized, but what we want most is what we wish for all newlyweds among friends and family. We hope they continue to reflect the values of their upbringing yet surpass in every way their parents' generation. By doing so, they'll make all of us, including their kids, very proud.

Love, commitment and honoring another human being - why do the Christianist fear this so much other than the fact that it challenges their misplaced trust and allegiance to Neolithic age writings that have been blindly handed down all too often with no questions asked.  As science and knowledge progress further the knuckle draggers are going to be increasingly confronted with the fact that their "sincerely held religious beliefs" simply are not true.  Expect more hate and nastiness from the godly set as that happens. 

Why "Sin" Needs to be Taken Out of Homosexuality

As anyone reading this blog for any time period knows, I have absolutely no use for those who hang onto a few passages from the Bible to support their ignorant and bigoted view that homosexuality is a "sin."  Especially since EVERY legitimate medical and mental health association in the country says it's something natural and not a "choice."  Thus one can selectively cling to the myths authored by ignorant, uneducated Bronze age herders (who authored all kinds of other batshitery that the pious ones now conveniently ignore) or one can accept objective fact and scientific knowledge.  Unfortunately, we know which option the Christofascists, the Catholic Church leadership and the professional Christians have chosen.  And this deliberate decision to make sinful what is not has deadly consequences.  I've known young gay men who ended their own lives because they could not deal with this "sin" which they never sought out.  In an interview, Tyler Clementi's parents seem to belatedly discovered the deadly consequences of putting religious based ignorance and prejudice ahead of knowledge and decency towards others.   Here are highlights from Rock Center with Brian Williams: 

Tyler Clementi’s parents, Jane and Joe Clementi, and his older brother James told Rock Center exclusively that Tyler was struggling with many issues before his death. But they believe Ravi’s decision to spy on Tyler during a sexual encounter with another man in his dorm room played a role in the suicide. They also say they have changed their views on homosexuality in the wake of their son’s death.

‘Whatever underlying depressions or pains that were going on with [Tyler], that was straw that broke the camel’s back and that was the thing that pushed him to the breaking point,” James Clementi told NBC’s Lester Holt in an interview scheduled to air Thursday, June 28 at 10pm/9c.

“I think it was – it was the humiliation that his roommates and his dorm mates were watching him in a very intimate act and that they were laughing behind his back,” said Jane Clementi. “The last thing that Tyler looked at before he left the dorm room for the bridge was the Twitter page, where Ravi was announcing Tyler's activities.”

Last week, Ravi walked out of a county jail after having served just 20 days. To the Clementis, the punishment was far too lenient.  “I think the judge sent a clear message to other prosecutors,” said Jane Clementi. “This isn't worthwhile. There are no consequences for these actions.”
 
But the Clementis also say they realize their son was wrestling with demons unrelated to the spying incident. Just weeks before he left home to attend Rutgers he told his mother he was gay. She says the news “shocked” her, in part because of her strong Christian faith. Since then she says she’s gone from “point A” in her beliefs “to point B.”

“Was that point A, the point of "homosexuality is a sin?" asked Holt.

“Well, yes,” Mrs. Clementi answered. “And of trying to just accept it.”

She said she also realizes that Tyler may have misread her reaction during their conversation. He later texted a friend that his mother had rejected him after he came out to her.  “It just was like a dagger,” Mrs. Clementi said. “And that took me a long time to process. Because I did not think I had rejected him.”

Now, Jane Clementi says she and her family are trying to help gay teens win greater acceptance through the foundation they’ve started in Tyler’s honor. Clementi’s parents say they hope The Tyler Clementi Foundation will discourage cyber bullying and the notion that they themselves once held that homosexuality is a sin.

“Sin needs to be taken out of homosexuality,” said Joe Clementi. “Our children need to understand – and adults need to understand – that they're not broken.”

What's truly broken are religions that seem obsessed with condemning others and Christians who make the term "Christian" a filthy word best associated with hate and bigotry.  As for parents, if your religion condemns your child, you need to immediately find a new religion.

Mississippi GOP Lawmaker Quotes Leviticus On How to Deal With Gays

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If this weeks actions by the GOP controlled Virginia House of Delegates wasn't enough to demonstrate that gay Republicans are akin to blacks joining the KKK or those of Jewish descent seeking Nazi Party membership, the remarks of a GOP state lawmaker in Mississippi ought to tip the balance.  As Towleroad is reporting Mississippi state Representative Andy Gipson attacked gays on his Facebook page following Obama's endorsement of same-sex marriage.  Note the approving reference to Leviticus 20:13 which reads as follows (NIV version):

 If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.

When confronted with this indirect reference to putting gays to death, Gipson tried to back away yet still managed to malign and denigrate LGBT citizens:

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If one is going to be a gay Republican, why not become a self-loathing "ex-gay for pay" while you're at it.  It makes just about as much sense in my book. 

The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality

Today is Easter Sunday and I find myself ambivalent about this day that many find holy? Why some might ask? The answer is so very easy: nothing and no one causes more pain and living Hell for many LGBT people than Christianity and its anti-gay adherents who ignorantly cling to a mere handful of Bible passages which they use to condemn literally millions of good people. Some, like I suspect Rick Santorum and numerous professional Christians, secretly condemn themselves for the same sex attractions they work so hard to suppress.

While I don't see myself as an atheist, I cannot embrace the version of Christianity that so willingly condemns others. As it turns out, religion need not be the enemy of LGBT people if people would but open their eyes. Or so argues Matthew Vines in a piece at Huffington Post and an hour plus long video he made after two years of studying what the Bible really says about homosexuality. The video is above and the following are highlights from his post:

[F]or some reason, a lot of people have a big problem with anyone who believes in God and is gay. As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian church in Kansas, I am all too aware of the problem of religious homophobia.

So when reality won out during my sophomore year of college and I finally had to admit to myself that I was gay, I was both relieved and crushed -- relieved because everything that hadn't made sense about my life finally did, and because love no longer seemed like an impossibility for me, but crushed because of the likelihood that I would be rejected and lose the community I had always called home.

There were just a few things standing in the way of that goal. To name them: Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1:26-27.

These are the Scripture passages that I knew many people from my home church took as the final word on this issue. These three verses in the Bible, as well as three others (Genesis 19:5, 1 Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10), have proven the end of the road for so many who have tried to gain acceptance from their Christian parents, friends, and pastors for so long.

For any of us who learned to love the Jesus who called the little children to him, whose highest law was that of love, and who was a fierce defender of the downtrodden and the outcast, this simply did not seem possible.

If it were true that God wanted to devastate the souls, psyches, and lives of gay people, then how could He be a loving God? This could no more be consistent with His loving character than if God truly wanted white people to enslave and oppress black people for centuries. For any Christian who has struggled to come to terms with their own church's persecution of gay people, this is the contradiction we have faced. Anti-gay teachings have caused an untold amount of pain and suffering in the world. They have borne very bad fruit and thus have failed Jesus' own test for good teachings (Matthew 7:15-20).

So two years ago, I took a leave of absence from college and committed myself to thousands of hours of research and study about the Bible and homosexuality. I wanted to figure it out, to resolve this contradiction.

[E]arlier this month, after having invested thousands of hours into research, I gave a presentation at a Methodist church here in Wichita, Kan. on this subject. It's a little over an hour long, and yes, it's a lot to absorb. But what I wanted more than anything when I was wrestling with coming out was a single resource that explained everything about these Bible verses, one that I could confidently ask my more conservative friends to watch and consider.

This video is the product of that. Please watch it and share it. My family and a number of our friends proved to be accepting, I am happy to report, but not everyone is so fortunate. My heart breaks for all the LGBT kids in churches around the world that do not understand or accept them, and I know firsthand how much fear and pain that causes them. The goal of this video is to reach those kids, no matter where they are, and to walk them through, step by step, these few passages in the Bible.

Yes, this video is long, but it is thorough. This is a message that everyone needs to hear, even if you aren't a Christian, and even if you don't believe in the Bible, because how Christians interpret these few verses of Scripture has a huge impact on the lives of LGBT people all over the world.

Again, please watch it and share it. But also learn these arguments: absorb them, and be able to repeat them whenever anyone, anywhere tries to make an anti-gay argument from Scripture. The Bible does not condemn loving gay relationships. It is not opposed to justice and equality for gay people, and in fact it supports their equal right to marry. Scripture can prove to be one of our greatest allies, if only we're reading it correctly.

Sadly, those who most need to watch the video and hear the message will not be the ones to watch it. God forbid that they do anything that might reduce their self-congratulatory opinions about themselves or prove that their house of cards belief system is extremely flimsy. Then of course, there are others who care nothing about the harm they do to others in their quest to enrich themselves peddling anti-gay hatred.

The Nonexistence of Adam and Eve Continues to Freak Out the Bible Beaters

I noted some time back - in a post that has seen incredible levels of traffic - that the human genome study has confirmed that the Adam and Eve of Genesis did not exist and that the consequences for the storyline of Christianity is largely destroyed by this fact. Without a historic Adam and Even, there is no Fall, no Original Sin and no need for a Messiah. This prospect terrifies the Bible beaters such as Southern Baptist wingnut Albert Mohler who writes the following:

The current debates among evangelicals have reached a vital point – the intersection of Genesis and the gospel. We must affirm that the gospel requires a clear affirmation of the historicity of Adam and Eve and the historical reality of the Fall. The Bible’s metanarrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and New Creation requires the historical reality of God’s work in every movement of the story.

The Apostle Paul makes the historicity of Adam — and his federal headship — central to our understanding of the gospel. Those who insist that evangelicals must accommodate the gospel to the prevailing evolutionary dogma are actually insisting that the gospel be denied.

Needless to say, Mohler is in the camp that wants to stick its head in the sand and not face the reality that the Christian story line and the claims that the Bible is inerrant have hit a potential brick wall. Rather than face the issue honestly, Mohler and those like him want to simply keep preaching lies and a path of self-delusion. I will admit that I don't discard the positive aspects of the Gospel message of love and kindness towards others, but the lack of a historic Adam and Eve underscores that the Old Testament - and poison in it that leached into the New Testament -is pretty much all hogwash, including the so-called holiness code in Leviticus that purportedly condemns same sex love.

The Bible Literalists Struggle to Argue that Genesis Isn't All Myth

I've written before about the huge problem facing those who support Biblical literalism now that science and the genome studies have pretty much proven that Adam and Eve never existed as historical figures. And the line of dominoes that fall as a result is that if Adam and Eve did not exist, there was no fall and banishment from the Garden of Eden and no need for a Messiah. Stated differently, the entire story line of Christianity collapses. Faced with this potentially fatal blow to the house of cards faith systems - and the monetary benefits reaped by professional Christians - some writers are endeavoring to engage in disingenuous mental and faith related contortions to avoid the inevitable conclusion: the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. And the creation story in Genesis is no more factual that the creation myths of other religions. A piece at Biologos exemplifies this losing battle to avoid the obvious. Here are some excerpts:

Genesis seems to affirm many things that the contemporary scientific consensus would disagree with, including but not limited to the following: the cause and source of creation (God versus Big Bang and random and/or natural processes), the length of time for creation (billions of years versus six days), the place of earth in reference to other celestial entities (earth is at the center according to a plain reading of Gen 1:14-17, which places the sun, moon, and starts ‘in’ the firmament, which is a solid dome, while scientists universally affirm that the earth goes around the sun.), the order of creation (day and night and vegetation come before the sun was created, according to Gen. 1:4-5, while current scientific theories would state that without light from the sun, there would be no day and no vegetation on earth), and whether or not there is or was a solid dome somewhere above the earth which is holding back the primal waters.

But, what if we read this passage of scripture differently? That is, what if think of Genesis 1 as something similar to a parable or an allegory, for instance? I do not mean to suggest that Genesis 1 is exactly a parable or allegory, but that there might be similarities between them, and that considering these similarities can help us move forward to reconsider how this passage might be read together with contemporary scientific consensus.

Parables and allegories, as we know, are stories told to convey deep and powerful truths. It is not the literal correspondence between each detail in a parable and actual reality that matters, but the central message and meaning of the parable.

And there are good reasons to take such an allegoric and contextual reading to Genesis 1. Indeed, we find many Ancient Near Eastern cultures to have held similar creation stories. . . . . This is to say that the peoples of the ancient world who were neighbors of the ancient Hebrews all believed that the world was created by divine beings who had separated and pushed back primal chaotic forces to create an orderly cosmos. Many also believed that the sky was a solid dome which held back water, which would have explained, for instance, the source of rain.

Now, just as it makes sense for God to have revealed himself in ways that first century Jews, Greeks, and Romans could understand, it also makes sense that God would have revealed himself in the time of ancient Israel in the ways that they and their neighbors could understand—that is, through the basic cosmological worldview that they would already understand. Looked at in this way, we may then begin to ask the question of what we can find that is different between the scripture and these heathen cosmogonies, and we begin, I think, to get a sense of what is truly at the heart of the biblical story of creation.

If we allow ourselves the room to see Genesis 1 as something similar to a parable or allegory, rich in symbolism and metaphor, spoken in a language and assuming a worldview that ancient Near Eastern people could understand, we are freed from having to defend the Bible against what otherwise appear to be disagreements with current scientific consensus…about the current structure of our solar system, about how the universe came into being, and even about how human beings came into the world

Nor do Christians, using scientific tools, need to buy into Satan’s lie that a universe that appears to function in an orderly, natural way came into being and functions as it does all by itself. We Christians know better. We believe and scripture affirms that God created this good world, that God created its laws, principles, and elements. We need not, therefore, fear science. It is a gift from God given to the church to understand God’s handiwork in the world, to worship God for God’s majesty and wonder as its creator, and to serve God’s purposes as caretakers for the people and the creation that God loves.

I'm sorry, but these attempts do not save the Bible from being false in the final analysis and less than authoritative on myriad issues. Indeed, if the Bible is parable or allegory, then nothing in it can be taken literally - including the supposed condemnations of homosexuality. And the result is that the Old testament of the Bible is nothing more than a competing creation myth (and subsequent tribal myths) with everything else in it built upon sand. As more people grasp this reality, expect the hysterics of the professional Christian set to increase as the make a last effort to hold on to the power and control that they have wrongfully wielded for far too long.

God vs. Gay Book Tour Coming to Norfolk

I write about religion on this blog often for the simple reason that the font of most anti-gay hate and bigotry traces directly back to religion - and in America to a foul form of Christianity in particular. The Christianists selectively pick and choose a few Bible passages from the Old Testament and Epistles from the seemingly self-loath St. Paul to make their case. In the process, however, they pervert the Gospel message and make a mockery of the Commandment against lying and bearing false witness. On Sunday, January 8, 2012, at Congregation Ohef Sholom, 530 Raleigh Avenue, Norfolk, Virginia, at 10:00 AM, author Jay Michaelson will be speaking about his book tour for God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality.

In his book, Michaelson shows that not only does the Bible not prohibit same-sex intimacy, it honors the values of love, justice, diversity, and compassion that equality for sexual minorities brings about. He also maintains that religious people should support equality for gays and lesbians not despite their religion — but because of it. A flyer for the book notes as follows:

From a scientific perspective, sexual diversity is both natural and beneficial to our species, a point Michaelson argues with examples from the animal kingdom as well as our own. Ultimately, the author feels that welcoming lesbians and gays into religious communities will create family values rather than destroy them, which he best encapsulates with a lively attack on "reform" camps that claim to cure homosexuality. But he also dissects the more troubling passages in Leviticus and Romans, deftly unraveling common mistranslations of the text and placing the scripture in historical context.

This event on January 8th will include a conversation with Michaelson about God vs. Gay and an opportunity to ask questions and share views on this important debate. I hope readers will check out this exciting event and important message.

The Biblical Necessity of Adam and Eve - The Christianists Continue to Rant

Based on the number of page views it has enjoyed, one of my more popular recent post has been "Adam and Eve - Where's Christianity Without The Fall?" that looked at the fear and angst amongst the Christianist and professional Christian set over the scientific evidence that Adam and Eve never existed. As I noted, if there was no "Fall" and exile from the Garden of Ede, then there was no need for a messiah to die and secure forgiveness for Adam and Eve's descendants. For LGBT individuals there's the added corollary issue: if Genesis is utterly wrong on the existence of Adam and Eve, aren't Leviticus' purportedly anti-homosexuality passages equally untrue? Indeed, the entire house of cards begins to collapse if one's faith requires that the Bible be inerrant ant literally true in every aspect.

Not surprisingly, the hysteria amongst the gay-haters and Christianists continues unabated. One of the latest examples of the batshitery being disseminated in an effort to uphold the literal, historical existence of Adam and Eve comes from Pastor Mark Driscoll, a fire and brimstone type from Mars Hill Church in Seattle who uses at best circular arguments relying on the same Bible that science tells us is wrong about Adam and Eve even existing. The irony to me is that it is exactly people like Driscoll who are ultimately hastening the death of Christianity. Here's a sample of Driscoll's circular argument (or should I say, circular firing squad?):

This question of the historicity of Adam and Eve is important because it’s the foundation of the biblical story. Without a real Adam and Eve, the Bible loses its basis for the fall, sin, the need for redemption, and the need for Jesus and atonement. Many scholars—including some who are professing Christians—who are rejecting the biblical account of Adam and Eve as historical recognize this fact.

It’s interesting that men and women who claim to have a high view of Scripture and affirm its inspiration, authority, and inerrancy also are ready to subvert it to new scientific evidence regarding genome sequencing and DNA, taking centuries of collected—and divinely inspired—knowledge about human existence, experience, and condition and throwing it out with the bath water by denying the historical existence of Adam and Eve.

“Nothing judges Scripture. It judges everything else. As followers of Jesus, we take the same stance he did and receive the Bible alone as infallible, inerrant truth from God with full authority in our lives.” . . . . Believers who are scientists bear the primary responsibility for affirming scriptural truths over scientific ones and figuring out how the truths of science affirm the truths of Scripture—not the other way around. It’s impossible to serve two masters.

While the issues at stake are often quite confusing, it’s apparent as we look at Scripture that it teaches the truth that Adam—and by extension Eve—were the first persons and that they were also the first persons. One of the main reasons that Christians need to affirm that Adam was the first human being to exist is the doctrine of the fall and original sin.

There are at least five scriptural arguments that affirm the truth that Adam was not only the first person but also that he was the first person—a real human being: the Genesis account, Luke’s genealogy, Paul’s theology, and Christ’s statement on Adam in Matthew and Mark.

Even if one passes over Luke and Paul, one must deal with Jesus and his teachings. In Mark 10:6 and Matthew 19:4, Jesus refers to Genesis, speaking of God’s order in creating Adam and Eve and relating that literal act to the institution of marriage. It’s difficult to think that God himself (Jesus) could be wrong about his own creative event, since he was there as the Creator when it happened (John 1:1–2; Col. 1:15­­–17).

So, what are we to do in the face of seemingly contradictory truth between science and Scripture? We have two choices: exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science and wash our hands clean (Paul is clear in Romans 1:18 and 1:22–23 that many people choose just this option), or we take the truths of science and place them within the context of the truths of Scripture as the highest authority.

The problem with Driscoll's gobbledygook is that it all falls back on scripture that wrongly considered Genesis to be true and factual. As new scientific knowledge tells us, it simply isn't true and accurate. Once Genesis is discarded as untrue, the entire argument collapses. Stripped of all else, Driscoll wants his sheep like flock to stick their heads in the sand and reject knowledge. None of it changes the ultimate fact that Genesis is wrong about Adam and Eve. Sure, Driscoll is desperate. If the Bible is not inerrant and instead very flawed, the whole basis for his lucrative gig at Mars Hill Church disintegrates. God forbid that Driscoll and those like him lose their ability to control and shake down the ignorant and those who are afraid to embrace science and objective reality. For LGBT individuals, the scientific undoing of Genesis is a first step towards dismantling the equally flawed book of Leviticus.

Oh, and for the record, I am not anti-religion. I am merely against religion based on fear, hate and the embrace of ignorance - which pretty much sums up Catholicism under the current Pope and many Protestant denominations that foolishly support biblical inerrancy even as they pick and choose passages to use as weapons against those in society they dislike.