Dave Silverman was on Fox News yesterday and he made an interesting argument. He said that “bigotry against gays is not a precept of Christianity.” He continued to claim that there are a lot of bigots who use Christianity as a shield against criticism for their bigotry. I disagree with Silverman on this one.
While Silverman is correct that there are many churches and many Christians who are in fact supportive of gay rights and gay people, Christianity as a religion is not supportive of gay rights or gay people. Those who rightfully support the gay community do so in spite of their religion. While those bigoted individuals and church leaders who consider homosexuality a sin do in fact have the biblical high ground.
I want to make it clear here that the biblical high ground is the moral low ground. I applaud those Christians who support the gay community because they are putting human morality above the twisted morality of their holy book. For the record, Christians do this with regard to many issues including (but not limited to) slavery.
Whenever I point out examples of the immorality in the Bible, I get to journey down the road of excuses. The first excuse is always that the Old Testament no longer applies to Christianity… except for the creation myth, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, The Ten Commandments, Job, this, that, and that other thing there, and oh, that one too. But all the stuff that modern society now considers immoral, God totally changed his mind about even though God never changes his mind and is always perfect all the time.
In other words, the stuff that doesn’t count is all that genocide, rape, stonings, killing of disobedient children, treating women as property, slavery, and killing/hating on gays… oh, that last one might be in the exception pile for many Christians. How convenient.
The sad fact is that the Paul has a lot of immoral stuff to say too. He too wasn’t a fan of gays and considered homosexuality to be a sin. He also wasn’t a fan of women either. All that stuff is in the New Testament. So the next leg on the excuse journey then becomes, “Well Jesus didn’t mention it.” Apparently, the only parts of the Bible that mean anything at all are the parts that Jesus said. So I guess this means that Christians can ignore every other aspect of the Bible. Forget everything that Paul said and everything that anyone else said in the Bible too. Because if you are going to cut Paul out than why bother including anyone else?
So where does that leave us? What exactly does Jesus mention in the Bible? Well, nothing. Jesus doesn’t mention a damn thing in the Bible because 1. He probably didn’t even exist and 2. If he did he was probably illiterate. All we know from Jesus is what has been attributed to him in the Gospels and we have no idea who wrote them, if they were present when Jesus was alleged to have said these things, or if they just made up a bunch of stuff and put his name to it to give their ideas some weight.
But leaving all that behind, what about the stuff that Jesus was alleged to have said? According to the Gospels, he said some pretty mean stuff too. How many family values Christians are keen on his advice to hate your family? Oh and all that stuff about eternal torture in Hell, it was allegedly all Jesus’s idea. More than anything else, Jesus talked about people being tortured for all eternity in Hell fire. He even said that it is better to cut off your hand or pluck out your eye if you think these things might cause you to sin because it is better to lose a body part (or several) than it is to lose your soul for all eternity.
Christianity is an immoral religion, period! People don’t hide behind the Bible to support their bigotry toward gays; they are bigoted toward gays BECAUSE of the Bible. Now it is true that they pick and choose which parts of the Bible they are going to follow, but I attribute this to the need to create an “out group” or several “out groups” as the case may be. Out of the closet gays and atheists are great targets.
Christianity is all about the scapegoats. Jesus was a scapegoat in which all of humanities sins could be placed on him so that his sacrifice would solve all the world’s problems. So why should we be surprised that Christians want to blame the obvious problems that still do exist in the world (despite Jesus’s sacrifice) on some other scapegoat or goats.
The problems in the world aren’t because of a particular group of people; they are because of irrational beliefs that some people still cling to. Christians aren’t the problem here; Christianity is. I am glad that there are Christians who do put human empathy and compassion ahead of Biblical teachings. But that doesn’t mean that those who put Biblical teachings first are naturally evil people. They aren’t. They just believe evil things because the religious system of belief has infected their minds to such an extent that they don’t realize that they are being bigoted assclowns.
Here is Dave Silverman’s Fox News appearance:
http://youtu.be/j3UKNSN2mMw
