I would laugh, but...
Nov. 17th, 2008 09:59 pmIt's really just too sad.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
( more behind the cut )
I think that it [the evil secular gay fascists] is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
( more behind the cut )
