A Parable

“A man was going from Atlanta to Albany and some gangsters held him up. When they had robbed him of his wallet and brand-new suit, they beat him up and drove off in his car, leaving him unconscious on the shoulder of the highway.

“Now it just so happened that a white preacher was going down that same highway. ‘When he saw the fellow, he stepped on the gas and went scooting by.

“Shortly afterwards a white Gospel song leader came down 
the road, and when he saw what had happened, he too stepped on the gas.

“Then a black man traveling that way came upon the fellow, 
and what he saw moved him to tears. He stopped and bound up his wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water-jug to wipe away the blood and then laid him on the back seat. He
drove on into Albany and took him to the hospital and said to the 
nurse, ‘You all take good care of this white man I found on the highway. Here’s the only two dollars I got, but you all keep account of what he owes, and if he can’t pay it, I’ll settle up with you when I make a pay-day.’

“Now if you had been the man held up by the gangsters, which of these three-the white preacher, the white song leader, or the black man – would you consider to have been your neighbor?”

The teacher of the adult Bible class said, “Why, of course, the nig – I mean, er … well, er … the one who treated me kindly.”

Jesus said, “Well, then, you get going and start living like that!”

Hypocrisy and the religious right

The fucking hypocrisy of the religious right in America is practically vomit-inducing at this point.  

Religious right households have a tendency to kick GBLT children out on the street so that they're homeless at a VASTLY higher rate than any other segment of the population.  At the same time, the people within the movement are attacking anyone who is homeless as lazy bums who need to get a job.  However, when the GBLT young adults try to get a job, the religious right is firing them from it just for being GBLT in the first place, and fighting tooth and nail against putting protections against that so that they can actually work and make a living-- all the while they're also also trying to tear down hate crime laws so that the violent criminals who attack homeless people can be as violently homophobic as they want and practically get away with it.

Jesus wept.

"I'm a good Christian"

Derpy links from the culture wars

Came across a surprising number of these today, so I figured I'd share them. They amuse me in a mildly depressing manner, so read at your own risk.

So a hate group ("American Border Patrol"), well known for being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and antisemetic, is now suing people for calling them a hate group. No one is worried.

Speaking of antisemitism, here's what my state's legislature is doing. Isn't Texas grand?

No, Todd Starnes, we're not as big of donkey-caves as you and your friends are.

Santorum came up with an idea that, for once, is good. But it's "socialism" so it won't be put in to law.

Oh no, you didn't shout "God Hates Muslims", you just organized a protest where you whipped up a mob to the such a frenzy that they said it, instead! Because that's so much better.

Apparently, it's offensive to put up a sticker at your business saying "we don't discriminate" now, because that violates the first amendment rights of businesses that do want to discriminate for religious reasons. Or something.

"Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin"

If you believe in this, you are a liar.

By saying this in response to gay marriage, you are explicitly saying you believe that the love they share between them is a sin against God and that it should be torn apart, ripped asunder.  It is unequal, it is lesser, and they are less human because of it.  Using mistranslations and re-translations (don't think that everyone has forgotten that American protestants changed the wording of the bible for the sake of politics) to justify hate is nothing but an attempt to defecate on Jesus' message.

I am not as gentle as others are about this topic-- nor do I claim to be.  Actively hurting people because you call them sinful is, itself, a sin against God.  As is preferring children to starve than to associate with "sinners"-- if there are fiery pits of hell like many such bible-thumpers believe in, then that is a sin explicitly stated in the bible that you will be thrown in to it for committing.  Lying is also a sin, ESPECIALLY lying in order to hurt people-- which is something that bible-thumpers love to do.  Reducing people to nothing but their sex drive is nothing but hate as well.

Love though, is not a sin.  Be it the gentle, playful love of a close-knit family, the passionate love of newlyweds, or the everlasting love of lifelong partners, love is the opposite of sin.  Love is, in fact, God.

There is too much pain and suffering in this world.  Stop spreading more...

Regarding forcing your religious beliefs on society as a whole

Read this, figured I'd share it.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/21004925-452/anti-gay-bias-loses-its-legal-whip.html

How can McDonald’s sell cheeseburgers, even though they’re banned in the Bible, which is fairly clear about not mixing milk and meat?  

OK, the Bible isn’t clear at all — I’m just making stuff up, a popular pastime when it comes to matters religious. There’s a pair of lines in Exodus about not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk — cruel, if you think about it — that Jewish scholars decided centuries ago means not to mix any kind of meat with any dairy, since you can never tell if any given patty is related to a certain cup of milk.  

The question remains: How can McDonald’s sell cheeseburgers, violating Jewish law? Not a toughie. Answer: Because the laws of kosher don’t matter to anyone but observant Jews. There is no health reason why you shouldn’t mix milk and meat. Jewish dietary law has no bearing on secular law. Jews, a scant minority, are uninterested in trying to force their arcane practices upon non-believers (except in parts of Israel where, alas, emboldened by numbers, observant Jews seem determined to show they can be just as bullying as any other faith). 

Anti-gay Christians are now approaching their cheeseburger moment — welcome, welcome — after the Supreme Court has tossed out much of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. The legal whip drops from the fundamentalist hand, which strikes them as oppression, forgetting they can still practice whatever private dogma they like regarding gays — never marry their own gender, disown their own gay children — but gay marriage is going up on the menu in more and more states. Society is marching — running, really — off without them, into a future of gay folk living openly without fear.  

It hurts, bubbie, I know. Here’s a Kleenex.  

You’ll get used to it. Take it from a Jew. You get used to the world not singing along with your religious peccadillos. (Not that keeping kosher and discriminating against gays are comparable, except as religiously inspired irrational acts). No harm in cleaving to your faith in the midst of a carnival of all you don’t believe. At Christmas, it isn’t like I suffer through all these foreign practices — caroling, wassailing, midnight massing. I accept them with humility — it’s not my party, but it’s someone’s party. It isn’t all about me.  

That takes practice, but you’ll get used to it. Used to more gay couples in TV commercials. Used to more same-gender pairs gazing out of the wedding announcements. My younger son and I were walking up Clinton Street last week and a pair of men coming out of the French Market paused to kiss — bye-bye honey, see you at dinner — directly in front of us. I felt the need to say something — a common reaction of mine. “We’re not in Northbrook anymore,” I said, a lame invitation to discuss the tableau, which went unheeded. The boy said nothing. Maybe he didn’t notice. Still, saying nothing is an undervalued skill. Michele Bachmann and her ilk, who clearly lost and will keep losing, announced they will re-double their efforts. 

“Time is not on the side of those seeking to create same-sex ‘marriage,’ ” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “As the American people are given time to experience the actual consequences of redefining marriage, the public debate and opposition to the redefinition of natural marriage will undoubtedly intensify.”  

Perkins says lots of dumb stuff, but you have to savor this bit of gibberish, because it is wrong in every particular. Time is not on their side. Time is conveying them onto the bench of shame with Bull Connor and Henry Ford. If you look at any opinion poll, desire to oppress gay people is directly proportional to age — older folk have the strongest anti-gay bias, younger people, less and less.  

And the “actual consequences of redefining marriage” are that fellow American citizens whose relationships were ignored or trivialized by society suddenly can get buried together in military cemeteries, make important medical decisions for each other, and hold their heads high at PTA Parent Night.  

There is a bedrock truth below all this, one that would have been unchanged no matter what the court ruled: Gay people don’t make worse spouses, or parents, or friends. If they did, chuckleheads like Perkins would wave any scrap of evidence like a flag. But there is none, so bigots have to try to twist these advances into some kind of religious oppression — that hating gays is a bedrock of Christian faith and to try to change that is persecution.  

Good luck with that one. Ask the next rabbi you see if he feels oppressed because the United States government doesn’t enforce Jewish dietary laws. He’ll take a step back — distancing himself from the crazy person — and say, “No, and believe me, we know what real oppression is.” That’s where Perkins et al. will be in 50 years, only their privately held torch will not be a harmless dietary quirk, but a shameful, refuted hatred gilded with a thin, worn and crumbling veneer of faith.

So, I've been reading Left Behind

... I honestly don't know if I've ever read a more abhorrent book, that goes so contrary against Christian beliefs.  Even satanist books offer more for the soul than this tripe-- because even most satanist books don't pray for the end times to come so that all non-believers (and most believers who aren't part of their specific denomination) can burn in hell for eternity.

Yes indeed, that's exactly what this book prays for.  It's not an uplifting book.  It is a veritable "take that" at anyone who doesn't believe in the author's skewed and hypocritical version of so-called Christianity.  And this book is an American best seller.

For those that don't know yet (IE those outside of the US and those with little exposure to evangelistic movements), Left Behind is a series of atrociously written books about a skewed and inaccurate, and often hypocritical, view of "rapture" and the end times-- oftentimes pulled from sources other than the bible.

It follows two misogynistic, homophobic, occasioanlly racist, and even biased against left-handers (What.) "heroes", a sociopathic (and occasionally psychopathic)  pilot who constantly uses and strings along women, emotionally cheating on his wife despite his constant assertions that it's okay cause his pants never came off, and a "greatest reporter of all time", who never actually does any real reporting, and conveniently ignores all of the death and destruction around, to instead go hunt Jews.

And before you forget, these are supposed to be their GOOD side.  For reference, another supposedly good character is a doctor that helps stop the pilot's head from bleeding.  Sounds nice?  But wait, there's more.  He sat there complaining about BOREDOM, while outside the window of the airport were dozens of wrecked planes, the bodies not yet pulled from their flaming carcasses, the wounded not yet cared for.  The so-called heroes are more concerned with the fact that all of this death and destruction is slowing down their travel than they are about the fact that all of the world's children vanished at once, including their own.


And this is exactly how the author says you should act.  These are not Christian books.    These are ugly, hateful, spiteful books, books that in their poor writing don't offer a hand of salvation but instead waggle a finger of "oh, just wait for the end times, because THEN you'll be sorry!".  The emotions it extols from its readers are not the Christian emotions of love, acceptance, and joy-- but instead of vindication, wrath, and juvenile jealousy and hate.

These are the kinds of books the supposed anti-Christ would write, except at least said mythological (and not necessarily biblical) anti-Christ would write a more competent and interesting book than this.

And they sell them at bookstores in colleges around the nation.

I'm scared, hold me.