ratboy's anvil

The House The JW's Avoid

the original post which drew the comment:

Comments for:Study: Opposition to Gay Marriage Declining

Here's the comment that got me going on the long-winded retort that follows it :

"The fact that America as a whole has taken God out of everything is scary. We don't know where to draw the line anymore, because there is no line. The line is a dot to us. What we learn is Sunday school is not crap, it is the TRUTH! The ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH. People who say there are no absolute truths are contradicting themselves bata even making that statement. Gay marriage is wrong. That's all there is to it. I'm not a homophobe, I'm a Christian who believes in God and the infallible word in God. What else is there that we can truly put our faith in? Prayer works..God works...give it a try sometime. I fear the world that attempts to wipe out God. God's wrath is stronger than any simple-minded idea we could have on any topic, being gay marriage, adoption, sodomy, whatever. GOD WILL WIN OUT. END OF STORY." - Posted by Robin at August 26, 2003 08:44 PM

The bile frothed as it rose and the spittle flew thus:

yeah.... well, my thought is that just like the American public in general, who may be iconic and religious to the point of obsessiveness, but really are a rather spiritually decimated group that likely wouldn't know a moment of spiritual transcendence from a George W Bush speech on the importance on being consistent with the lies you tell...

...you are trapped into supporting rules and ideas that were stuffed into your little cabbage brain by various adults and institutions and the culture at large and left to steam for years before you before you even had a chance to understand what had been done to you or even that the rules you were stuffed with were stale local rules made up by semi-clever humans to control less clever human behaviors and not universal and immutable laws of nature like how the moon's gravity affects the tides on earth or even the fact that a lost thing will always appear in the last place you would look for it.

Proof of the non-universal aspect of all these religious rules and gods that humans have made up for themselves time to time over the course of history is the fact that as cultures change and as one population or social group overthrows or succeeds another, the rules and gods change suddenly to suit the victor's sense of what is truth and what is decent behavior and how people should conduct their lives and what might be important to do on this or that day of the week depending on which sex you are or whether you do or not have the appropriate status, wealth, looks or willingness to do great violence at the drop of a hat.

I doubt you have done much study on the origins or reason for most of the rules you follow ever having been adopted by the original cultures that introduced them. And let's face it, most people don't care in the least where the rules come from or even if they make any sense as long as they can abide by them with no loss or punishment of some sort to themselves. Let's listen to what you said:

"Gay marriage is wrong. That's all there is to it. I'm not a homophobe, I'm a Christian who believes in God and the infallible word in God. What else is there that we can truly put our faith in?"

To the latter question...I'd say, "almost anything"...but more importantly--What? Not a homophobe? Sure you are!

I say both you and your god your god are homophobes given His penchant for smoking queers in one small village or another as portrayed in the Bible and your adamant refusal to accept any idea about gays that doesn't concur with the ones already bouncing around in your head like a drunken hobo in a boxcar looking for a place he hasn't already pissed.

But just because you're a homophobe doesn't make you a bad person...neither does being gullible enough to believe the Bible is true because the Bible says its true... nor the fact that you were given the name Robin and have even after all these years failed to rectify the situation. (Though I suppose using the name Robin could be a ruse)

No what makes you a bad person is that you have stopped looking for the truth.

But given that you might be able to change just a little... maybe....Tell me this:
Why is gay marriage wrong? Because the Bible tells you so? Why does the Bible say that? Who in the Bible says that? Does the Bible ever say anything about gays marrying one another? I don't think so.

So tell me this then, without resorting to the Bible as a proof of the why you think gay marriage is wrong, why do you YOU think gay marriages would be wrong.

How would two people who through a public witness of their vows to one another of lifelong dedication and declarations of endearment and promises of support no matter how dire the circumstances get...possibly affect you in a way that might be harmful? How does the idea of two homosexuals being granted social recognition, which is to say having their relationship of their commitment to a married lifestyle sanctioned by the community, in any manner infer that heterosexual marriages suddenly will have less sanctity than the day before?

I mean just because my Muslim friend thinks alcohol should never be consumed and always refuses to drink it when offered, he is not so self-centered as an individual to assume that I should not drink in front him in order to show respect for his religious beliefs. I would respect his religious beliefs insofar as not to constantly offer him alcoholic drinks once I had learned of his position.

Neither of us has to submit to the rule set of the other ...all that is needed is common respect for the differences between individuals. As long as their behavior does not cause literal harm to anyone, then simply respecting the preferences of the other is all that should be required.

The problem occurs with sort of thing when exclusionary religions like Christianity and Islam make their adherents so throroughly stunned by mindless repetitive speech and action and by the intensity of the demands of their creed to prove their absolute dedication, that blind faith is all that they need to back up what are basically just knee jerk and irrational fears.

Nothing is quite so ugly and dangerous as a religious zealot of any stripe. After all to be most clearly aware of the presence of God and His Angels and in a constant contact state of awareness of the Nature of God's Will ...to know what God wants... is pretty easily described as a psychotic episode. So anyone I meet who claims to have ongoing intimate relations with their creator is going to get more than a few pertinent derisive comments from this corner.

Therefore, for you to make declarations like 'gay marriage is just wrong and that's all there is to it' just pegs you immediately as one of the brighter Christians I have had to weather like a flu over the last while, now don'it?

I consider most people who are adamant that any belief system can be even remotely paralleled with a concept like absolute truth is a victim of child abuse at a really young age where religious propaganda was the tool of abuse, say when a kid is willing to believe that a huge fat guy in a bright red weird outfit that no one else would ever consider pulling off the rack, actually comes and goes in and out of people's homes by way of chimney no less...and does this all over the world in a single night.

That's no more flipped out than the idea that the maker of the entire universe decided at a specific point of time over the whole billions of years of history, to revisit a completely unremarkable piece rock whirling through space in order to secretly impregnate another man's wife so that he could make up for all the really shitty things he had done earlier to the people when they had the nerve to actually use the free will they been given rather than just denying their own will and following His will no matter how irrational it might appear to them not to eat some fruit when they were hungry. Cheese and mice/apples and humans?

From the get go He had to know that it was a shitty deal, but hey, He's the Jealous Type and the One who can and does shake the Etch-a-Sketch at leisure and so there's not a lot He can do to stop all the crushing and burning of sinners without looking like He was going back on His Word... except, He thought, if He were to make it look like He suffered too when He made Himself a human and then had Himself killed as well. He figured that would make the people love Him again cos He would be young and cute and not a bully or Mean Step Dad in the Sky and they would watch Him get crunched in the Worst Way and their hearts would go out to Him and while they were all caught up in the passion of this play He had the minion Angels who had drawn short straws waft through the weeping crowds sucking up the tears which, as everyone since Walt Disney let loose his propaganda knows, is what the Denizens of Heaven must drink everyday or they will disappear back to the rift of silly and bad thoughts from which they were accidently evoked so long ago...but that is another story.

So you see, once you let religious freaks out of the watch of the king or asylum or mad desert sun god keepers for even a short while, in no time people are either being bored to death with stupid and improbable tales of what God wants done in His name (or Fawell's)... or more likely, they are being accused of being evil and have giant stones laid on them until they suffocate or are (clap clap) hung or burned alive as "witches"...as Sunday entertainment at family picnics no less.

C'mon lets face it... religion has always been an asshole endeavor of fascist arrogants gone psycho and really stupidly transparent superstitions used as a weapon to control and suppress gullible humans by making them fear themselves and the sooner humans find a way to let go of it all and move on to a more adult and comprehensive spiritual interaction with their fellow men and the rest of the place, the better chance any of us will have of doing the "pursuit of happiness" bit without the constant post-hypnotic urge to guiltily back away from whatever's pleasurable or good about the world chanting "I'm not worthy...I'm not worthy".

And another thing, aside from the fact that you seem somewhat forlorn about the inevitability of God winning in the end, ("winning what?" I might ask if i thought the notion of your creator somehow being in competition with that which was created made any sense whatsoever)...I don't think you have given much thought any of the premises you have about the existence of the God-person which you've internalized as uniquely and singularly objective and absolute truth incarnate.

However, allowing that you consider yourself a Christian as you say, how would you feel if it were proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus was indeed gay and in fact came from an entire line of gay gods who created the universe for the sole purpose of having a great space to hold their fabulous and star studded parties? And here's a really deep question. If Jesus were to give God a blow job, would it be incest or masturbation?

No... I mean seriously...how would we define it?

I suppose that would depend on where we stood relative to the tenets of the Nicene Creed, wouldn't it? Gol dang them gnosis folk, trying to make Jesus more man than god , gol dang...I sez we jest kill em all outright and settle the argument once and for all.

Cool? Worf would like it not.

But these were holy men you see, and it was vital that they protect their ideas of truth from the lies and heretical insinuations that there can be more than one way to look at a thing. Gol dang...

Some say that to claim absolute truth simply raises the possibility that any truth may have its contradiction or strictness capable of being suddenly altered at some future point by a confluence of unforeseeable contexts, turning what had been for millennia the very foundation of what is meant when we utter the word "truth". Of course, others might not say that at all. Just as some might say there are two sorts of people in the world...those that say there are two sorts of people in the world and then there's those that don't. Settlin' that could take a whole lotta holy war...gol dang.

Because uncertainty can be equal in strength and substance to that which we regard as certainty, there is really no manner of predicting the nature of the universe, the nature of truths, or for that matter the future\nature of even ourselves.

Bah... words... prayers

...trying to fix what's unknown with a spray of words, hoping to show the invisible shapes that underlay everything, like the iron filings on a sheet of paper covering a magnet expose the presence of lines of force.

Its really no more than mutable speech we wield as relative terms pretending as though they were fixed in a non-mutable substance of some sort that cannot be impinged upon by any new fact or event or even the perspective-altering transcendent ravings of a recently discovered domino stacking genius who's true purpose in life is to draw attention to the fact that no matter how extremely impossible something may appear to be that it takes no more than the energy of a thought to make any other thought larger or smaller, redder or bluer, than we thought the thought was it before the new thought occurred to us.

Such is the transparent feat of transcendence, when the thingness of a thing evaporates from itself until no thing is left but the potential for creation of another thing...this is how the universe breathes...catch the wave daddio...OM FM...

You have those thoughts about the nature of God being infallible and unchanging, and the skanky level of immorality you seem to assume for the average modern person who thinks other phrases than Praise the Lord or Prays to Whatever 24/7 and the feelings of dread you express about that idea.

Its because if two men or two women can be "married" then you feel like the person who for the first time realizes during a heavy earthquake that the earth is fluid and not the dependable and predictable, unchanging and trustworthy solid we had assumed it be...the compass spins insanely, the sun rises or sets from any direction without warning, there is no arrow, no beginning no reason no way to tell who is who and what is what and why is anything at all.

BWA HA HA HA HA

Well, my precious little petulant pretty!...THAT's our gay agenda for you...and your little dog too! Loose the flying monkeys of chaos upon their white picket fenced villages!

See.....I don't really put much stock in looking for things that either claim to be or appear to be more real or more important than the beings like me and you that produce the reality through we become aware of them to begin with.

I personally don't assume there to be a over arching creator of this and every other possible perception or manner of being, nor do I ascribe to nature of the universe some desperate need to be created in the first place by a personage like what I imagine you see your God as... what, may I ask, is the purpose of creating a universe?...well... that's just a question caught up in its own importance.

That's the sort of crap the keep you occupied with in your cell between Sundays, when you will be brought back before the altar and asked repeated how many angels did you see dancing on that pin head..hmmmm?

And of course no matter what you say, it will never suffice...because your religion is not so much a faith in a creator of a universe, that gave up the ghost not very long after Rome decided to make it their new mode of dispensing law and turned the tables so that those poor persecuted Christians could start persecuting back with a vengence that's been going on for 1800 years or something. Nope, its more like that what's left of the whole Christian thing is pretty much just judgmental bony fingers pointing out sinners to the drivers of a rather ancient and creaky political machine aimed at controlling all mankind by crushing out all independent thought along with notions of and possibility of love and joy here on earth.

"Oh Come All Ye Patsies"

Its just all in the way you see it. There doesn't have to be any reason to create a universe and who says that the universe we know is created? What does that really mean anyway?

Perhaps our universe just appears for a few moments whenever there's a lull in whatever else might be going on, maybe in some moments that seem at times "longer" than others, that there are pensive and quiet gentle beings who wonder at their own terrific and subtle cravings for reciting poems which are lovingly lip-synched to a drifting image of Bob Barker's long dead face...as "The Price Is Right" reruns, (which it is said are more felt than seen near the gates of dawn),

THIS is the damage done by religious zealots whose lack of faith requires them to reduce the instructive powers of myth by asserting the allegories are literal fact.

They find it so necessary to show that King Lear was a real person and not just some playwrite's instructive invention, so that all of their energy is consumed by the argument and the entire meaning of the play itself is completely missed and they cannot after the tulmut, standing victorious, red dripping sword held now loose, explain then the hollowness and vacancy their eyes still project aross the smoking landscape as their black winged fears screech outward desperate for escape ...

Well, my fine-feathered Robin, by any other name, Horatio, it is more than likely true that to paraphrase to pith that tho there perhaps be more things in heaven and hell than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophy, we are the beholders of the tool by which we are inventing ourselves:

The primary rule by which this invention proceeds is: YOU GET WHAT YOU SEE.

In other words, the world you live in is precisely how you perceive it.

If gays being allowed marriage status come to you as a problem, then you live in a world with a problem.

And the thing is, its not the world's problem...its your problem...it will be you who feels uncomfortable with the idea a homosexual relationship could ever be considered equal to a heterosexual relationship.

The circumstances and personalities that comprise either relationship are irrelevant to what makes you uncomfortable about it, aren't they? And, honestly, though you feel squeamish, perhaps even disgust at the sexual imagery that homosexuality evokes in your mind, you still have the ability to pray for the strength to dismiss such repulsion in favor of an outward profession of Christian charity and humility that it is better "to live and let live" and to refrain from "casting the first stone"...or "begetting the first clone"...take your pick.

But now you find your Temple of Rectitude, your Shrine of Stability, Peter's Pulpit and Rock, the Hearth of Goodness and Shield Against Evil under assault by the ungrateful creatures you have tried so hard to show understanding and tried so hard to ignore the affliction and burden they endure and to "love the sinner while hating the sin"...

But now you are shaken and deeply disturbed to turn from your kneeling prayers and find them only inches from the altar itself, appearing like skeletal figures dressed in mock wedding garb, hanging on one another and grasping at the Relics just out reach before them, clawing the air and hissing their frustration at any who appear to impede them. Suddenly, you are aware of the true evil nature of these...kind.

Well, Robin, I certainly hope that isn't the world you see...but I have little doubt that as melodramatic and over the top that description was, some profess to be Chrisitans will prefer to make their world look not enough unlike that.

no... I am not a religious man, its true.

I am however a spiritual man I suppose insofar as I have always admired and desired to lead a life examined and, given a naturally curious personality which respects considered thought about the nature of being to be its own reward, I have spent much time internalizing and discerning the better and lesser parts of myself and of the universe at large. At first I thought the important thing was find the Truth about it all. It didn't long to see the folly in that.

I was to eschew what became to me restrictive philosophies which tended to define themselves by adopting notions of being exclusively the true and only path to their idea of what achieving perfection might entail. Its the world of the blind believer who is determined to make absolute and unassailable truth of what he thinks he knows:

There's a book with a map and people who explain it and the basic idea is that where we are sucks the big one but where we are going will be better...so we are told and so we are to hope.

Entire lives are spent on that plateau, waiting for the the proof of their Truth to be revealed immediately after their last breath. Sad and unnecessary.

The stillness which can accompany waiting can be used to one's advantage as long as one remains OPEN to new meaning and doesn't cling to that which no longer serves creation. The ability to let go of old beliefs, especially those most prized, is the essential talent which bears our being from one moment to the next. You cannot reach the next moment without letting the last moment go. There is a mastery of that mystery which leads one to the realization that there are in reality, no individual moments through which one has to move and so the tiny death fears of moving from one moment to the next evaporate and you stop being afraid of being and possibly not being, because when you can achieve the truth for yourself and experience only a single moment "now", it will come to you that you have always and will always be. What reason then will you have for seeking eternity somewhere else?

So you see, harboring that sort of thought puts me in a place where I just can't abide by the need for people to find reality by consensus of belief and not see the error in then supposing it to automatically be absolute and unquestionable for no other reason than the fact that everyone believes it to be true.

Aside from obviously circular and self-defining axioms this sort of mangled and clankityclank thinking produce as it pathetically hobbles from one painfully crippled and errant position to the next, it is truly indicative of every basic reason to be frightened that people capable of entertaining such thought forms as a good ways of reasoned argument, and in public no less, are also equally capable reproducing themselves in great quantity with no increase in quality whatsoever. I guess in some small way this is proof that miracles do occur.

All religions that claim this "We're-gonna-live-forever" carrot as a fundamental instrument of purpose for faith in their creed exclusively are basically egoistic and are weak and self defeating attempts to insure the eternal survival of every single leaf that has ever lived a season on the great tree be able to enjoy the sun uninterrupted for ever more.

Not often do you discover leaves so obsessed with staying precisely the leaf they are certain is the true them... its... a fairly childish sentiment...like really hating to have to go bed earlier than anyone else because you just know that as soon as you're gone, the real neat stuff will happen. I mean who cares... if you don't know about it and apparently its held that "the dead know not"...what possible difference could it make?

Seems as likely as not that the dead are not among the strongest potential candidates for pondering as perfect pastime for the post-putrid peerage.

Besides, religion is just a substitute for those who are afraid to be alone and have yet to realize that when we die we go to exactly the same condition and place we were before being conceived as being here.

I mean did you miss anything before you were here? Did it feel weird? No? The fact you never came from anywhere and there is no where to go. Here and now is where you are and where you have always been and always will be. The only thing that changes is your quality of experience.

OK now I wanna whine a bit more...I don't know...people can and will believe whatever they want. I just think consensus based religions generally cause more human pain and confusion than they remedy. I mean just look at the crap that the fundamentalist types across the globe and especially the morons in the States pull off seemingly without any effort.

Take the Alabama judge who wants to block court order removal of the giant stone tablet of the ten commandments sculpture... I mean what is it about the idea of separation of church and state that as a supposedly educated man, trained for years to make informed and balanced judgments, not understand or grasp about the situation?

He is provoking a situation which, ironically, is a demonstration of precisely why the sculpture could not ever be allowed to stay and that is because of nothing more than his inability to restrain his personal religious sentiments when acting as a high level public servant.

He is proving that his judgments are being swayed by his religious convictions. In a culture of many faiths and where even atheism is granted respect as a viable philosophical position to proclaim and one which is rightfully guaranteed all the constitution's freedom of religion protections, a man of this mindset must not be allowed to hijack an institution in the name of any religion irrespective of whether that religion is the dominant one at present or was the religion held in common by the framers of the constitution.

That judge behaving as he is could not be doing a better job of demonstrating how religion can make an otherwise reasonable person patently irrational and unfit for discharging civic responsibilities.

And there is very strong parallel here between the need for a unbiased government claiming to be constitutionally structured such that any right of any individual to follow the dictates of their conscience is deserving of the utmost protection from interference by others and the fact that you believe that you and your fellow christians and muslims (or whichever other exclusionary and patriarchal social subset) to whom, it is obvious, felt majorly threatened by the mere abstract notion of people who are living together as homosexuals would be afforded the right to steal the "magic" from the word "marriage" for themselves, thereby degrading its, [now get this], exclusive ownershipby heterosexuals...so dear to their hearts because it is so commonly used and used as a definitive measure by many heterosexuals of just who they are and where they stand in relation to creation.

But the thing is, these arguments are really a ruse which deflects attention away from the real issue.

These the heteroseuxals who have been blustering and by themselves with the theft of abstract titles and contractual semantics drawing lines in the sand and roughly painting the word Alamo at an angle across the front of their two door garages are desperate not have to face the central issue... and that is:

Whether or not religion in American has lost its authority to dictate moral rectitude in accordance with the exclusionary principles of the majority religions.

The only possible course of action for the government and for the people themselves will eventually be to recognize homosexuals as a protected and equal sexual nature inherent to the indivdual and that no other person has the right by way of personal philosophy or conviction, nor by weight of the tenets of religious institututions, nor even by simple plea to the consensus opinion of the majority to interfer in their peaceful pursuit of making for themselves and happy and healthy life.

As it is, you claim it all wrong no matter what. And then proceed to whine that when we take God muscle out of the human day to day then nobody can really say what an "inch" is anymore.

If we can't believe in the idea that a God could be infalliable and should trusted and followed no matter what the consequences because it is that very strength of dedication to the faith that permanent and fixed ideas of truth and goodness and the "American Way" can be made to appear just like on TV, then we are doomed.

As i mentioned before...that's a ruse... a pretense that things ever are permanent and solid when in fact everything in the universal changes over time and and acquires a position for itself relative to everything else there is and that even the most solid of matter such as an iron bar or a granite boulder are literally made up of mostly space.

The real issue is that heterosexuals simply can't imagine not being top dog anymore....or even top missionary, hah!

It is this same patriarchal paranoia of a future powerlessness and not being able to call the shots that the neocons who are mostly old fat white men who never fought in a war themselves are trying so desperately to construct a future America that is so testosteroned and patriarchal that no one will ever be able to take away its right to run the show the way Daddy Knows Best.

What these wealthy and fearful men are doing and intend to do the population of the United States as well as in the rest of the world is simply to scare and bully in whatever degree necessary to effect a genuine police state and coordinated control of individuals and countries on an order of magnitude we cannot even yet imagine. They wish to be the new priests of a new world order where Economy is the sacred principle and Capital the name of god.

These are men to be seized and dragged from their office and taken to the streets and thrown to the ground be locked out forever from out from the houses and machinery of State and declared terrorists at war with the people and government of the United States and charged as traitors to the constitutional and democratic principles that define the United States as Republic which exists only by the will of the people by whom and for whom it is constructed to serve.

If you want to blame someone for the loss of decency and integrity in the fabric and character of American society, you don't have to assume it is because radical and atheistic people are plotting to take away freedom of religion or trying reduce the moral or ethical standards of American society by stressing the importance of separation between church and state...you needn't look further than King George W and his Round of the Neo-cons. These are the most ruthlessly unprincipled and unethical men ever to have gained entry to the executive offices of the US Government.

Trust me. Your worry about gay people wanting to steal the meaning of your precious word "marriage" is going to be the least of what you willing be praying to survive in the next few years should this cadre of men escape their due.

Ok... so I may not be the one you feel to invite to the church picnic next week end but I do try to understand the reasons or lack of them behind the beliefs of others. I try to see the world myself according to a simple distillation of the better parts of man nature and those principles which seem to be most enduring over time as well as universally aspired to by all cultures... here then is the rude rudder by which I navigate:

"If one desires that there be a purpose to life, then I assume that purpose to be to strive to make life have meaning; and it seems to me that the most innocent and least harmful ways to approach that goal is to begin by recognizing and respecting that there are differences between all individuals which make us unique and then learning to cherish the otherness between us."

How was that, Robin? Matthew? Luke? John? Mark?