Entry tags:
I would laugh, but...
It'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)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
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)
Many Christians have come to believe that the official teachings on same-sex pleasure are inadequate both to their own experience and to the Gospel... This is not the first time that the body of believers has reached an impasse in moral reflection. Something very similar happened with the question of chattel slavery just over a century ago--as it happened with the doctrine of justifiable war in the 1960s. In every case the question has been the same: How does one honor the tradition while being faithful to the Gospel and to the impulses of God in the present? In ever case, the beginning of an answer was the same. Believers had to free themselves from fundamental misunderstandings about the character of Christian moral tradition. Part of freedom is to remember how fragile our relation to that tradition is, so far as it is a relation dependent on the reading of inherited texts. (Jordan, Invention 170)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
no subject
I've always been supportive of the idea of a separation between church and state, simply because a) it's the right thing and b) as a religious minority I don't particularly feel like being forced into a baptism, thank you very much.
But when faced with stuff like this...I'm almost at a loss at how to start talking to people about something that seems so blatantly sensible to me. Even if you fully believed that homosexuality was a sin, you DO NOT have the right to force that belief upon me or anyone else. How is this so hard to understand?
no subject
How is this so hard to understand?
I seriously don't know. It's like... No, I really don't have the words for it, Mar. Like, it is an issue that can be explained logically, in small and easily understandable words, and they don't get it. In more cynical moments, I think that the sort of attitudes inherent in religious conservatism like the kind that howls against gay marriage is incompatible with the idea of a democratic society in which individuals are free to make their own moral/ethical choices and the people who want to ban gay marriage and have a wonderful aren't-we-all-happy-and-free democracy do not see that there is a problem with this.
Grah.
no subject
And that's what I'm talking about. Like, if you want to be convinced that being gay is sinful, then fine, I can't stop you. It's when you start trying to put your beliefs into the FREAKIN' CONSTITUTION that I want to slap you silly.
no subject
What a great tenet, regardless of religion (although I agree, your instructor probably had your safety in mind when he offered it). I remember, when I went to this awful Baptist private school, we were advised--very strongly--to go out and witness to friends who were members of non-Baptist denominations, as well as to friends who weren't Christian at all. Like, for example, my best friend who was Jewish.
Looking back on it, I'm horrified and revolted by what I was asked to do. I mean, I was thirteen years old, what the hell business do I have advising anyone on their salvation, and what the hell business did my teachers have suggesting I save my best friend from her own heritage and faith? Thinking about it makes me so angry, I wish I could find my old teachers and somehow make them understand how wrong this was.
no subject
I mean, I was thirteen years old, what the hell business do I have advising anyone on their salvation, and what the hell business did my teachers have suggesting I save my best friend from her own heritage and faith?
Exactly.
no subject