Christianity claims to hold the high moral ground, and those inside the belief truly believe this idea. I should know, I once lived inside an assortment of belief bubbles and well remember thinking how morally safe and snug it was far away from all those outside who were lost and destined to attend god’s supposed little human barbecue. Luckily I’ve managed to think my way out of it all.
Much to my surprise, one of the big discoveries I’ve made along the way is that I now have a far greater compassion and understanding, and in some ways my journey away from belief was similar to a bereavement; denial, anger and eventually acceptance. If you read some of my postings from years ago, the anger and resentment towards belief manifests itself … then again the utterly abhorrent behaviour from some of those who retain a belief does not exactly help either (for example: catholic child abuse and cover-up).
So anyway, there was one small item that caught my eye today, it concerns an on-line clip by Pastor Michael Wilson on his “Preaching Politics” YouTube channel (no, I don’t tend to normally tune into that, somebody else did, and so it is now in the spotlight). What is up on stage is his proposal that there should be a US constitutional amendment making the “practice of homosexuality a felony punishable by ten years in prison at hard labor.”.
Seriously?
Yes … really, this is his proposed amendment.
So is this really going to gain any traction? Nope, not at all, he will simply be dismissed as a nut. His intolerance and bigotry is rather sadly not an isolated line of thought, but rather is in many ways still a mainstream belief, and yet thankfully is one that is fading off into the sunset.
He laments …
“While Christians are becoming increasingly tolerant of homosexuals, homosexuals are becoming increasingly intolerant of us, Whereas homosexuality used to be a felony in every state, referred to as sodomy, it has now been decriminalized, and homosexuality is allowed to be openly expressed in public.”
He claims that there is a rising intolerance towards Christianity, but to be honest, what I suspect it really happening here is that more and more people are no longer willing to tolerate blatant homophobia and discrimination. In other words, belief is no longer the get-out-of-jail-free card that it once used to be, and so those that are obnoxious twits are increasingly getting called out on that.
Slavery
We need not go back too far in history to find a time when many truly advocated slavery to be a jolly good idea, but times have indeed truly changed (thank you Mr Wilberforce). We have now learned to put that all behind us (well OK, there is still much that needs to be worked out in many hearts, but we have come a very long way), and so you would be very very hard pressed to find anybody who would truly advocate a pro-slavery stance.
So why am I banging on about slavery?
My point is this, the bible is a pro-slavery book from over to cover. It contains explicit instructions on whom you may buy and sell and also how to beat your slaves (it is just fine as long as your slave does not die). Even the new testament is pro-slavery, we have Paul’s letter to Philemon (the context there is that a slave owned by a church leader had run away and Paul was sending him back with this letter). We even have Jesus implicitly approving of the idea of slaves being beaten (Luke 12:47-48), and Paul directly instructing slaves to obey their masters many times (Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22).
Today almost every single Christian out there would quite rightly identify slavery as truly abhorrent, and so they are happily rejecting all this pro-slavery stuff contained within the bible as complete are utter bullshit. Now is the time for Christians to also toss all their anti-gay rhetoric and bigotry into the same bin and start to act like decent human beings .. in fact some are already doing that, and as more and more are coming to the same realisation, Pastor Michael Wilson and others like him are being left behind to eventually fade away as a better world takes shape around them – perhaps while they still have a chance, they should step forward and break away from the fear and insecurity that binds them to the irrational belief that being a bigot is virtuous.