The Ultimate Cop Out
I was just thinking about the legalization of marijuana and its relation to a quote by Seth Godin: "It's easy to be against something that you're afraid of. ..and it's easy to be afraid of something that you don't understand."
I wondered if this were one of the reasons we're having so much trouble convincing religious folk that so many personal freedoms are (largely) harmless. Gay marriage, for example.
Religion gives you the ultimate cop-out: you don't need to understand something any further than what's in your religious dogma.
...Thankfully, not everyone stops inquiry at the sodomites intending to rape an angel*... But it does seem to be common.
* Paying no attention to the fact that Lot tries to avert the rape by offering up his two virgin daughters to be raped instead...
I wondered if this were one of the reasons we're having so much trouble convincing religious folk that so many personal freedoms are (largely) harmless. Gay marriage, for example.
Religion gives you the ultimate cop-out: you don't need to understand something any further than what's in your religious dogma.
...Thankfully, not everyone stops inquiry at the sodomites intending to rape an angel*... But it does seem to be common.
* Paying no attention to the fact that Lot tries to avert the rape by offering up his two virgin daughters to be raped instead...
3 comments:
Or that it's a freakin' Angel they were trying to attack. Point being, sexual assault on anyone is sick and perverse. But sexual assault on a messenger of God in an era when people believed God (or the Gods) actively punished crimes.
It always astounds me that people use that to mean "God hates gays" when it could mean "God hates sexual assault", "God hates anonymous sex", or "God hates it when some uppity human presumes to make one of God's holy messengers into their own personal sex slave." Any of those would be just as valid interpretations of that passage, but freakin homophobes decide to use it to justify their irrational fears instead.
Man, that pisses me off.
Or the Onan story, which is the crux of the theological argument against birth control.
So, God visits Onan, and tells him to have sex with his brother's widow. Onan refuses to ejaculate inside her, so God kills him.
Somehow this means God is against Condoms, the Pill, Vasectomies, and Tubal Ligation.
Couldn't it just mean that if God himself tells you to impregnate your brother's widow, you'd best not disobey his precise order in that specific event?
Nothing in that section of the bible supports the interpretation that God doesn't want even one sperm wasted. Instead, it just supports the notion that if God himself shows up in your tent and tells you to do something, you'd best do it.
Alternately, you could spuriously argue that it means God wants us all to impregnate our sibling's widows. Or God is just a sick sick bastard. But the Religious Right never chooses to interpret it in those directions.
Point being, sexual assault on anyone is sick and perverse. But sexual assault on a messenger of God in an era when people believed God (or the Gods) actively punished crimes.
I typed too slowly, and couldn't keep up with my thought process. Please pretend it said:
"Sexual assault on anyone is sick and perverse, but sexual assault on a messenger of God in an era when people believed God (or the Gods) actively punished crimes, would be not just sick but also suicidally stupid" or something to the effect thereof.
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