Arguing With Xians About The Bible Is EXACTLY Like

...Arguing with fucking FAIRIES about the relative effectiveness of different admixtures of pixie dust.

It is an exercise in utter, meaningless futility. Because, in both situations, there are no intelligible truth conditions, no standards of performance by which to judge the validity of assertions against empirical results. One eye of newt, or two? Leviticus? Mattheus?

Though why anyone today would attach themselves 'spiritually' to a bunch of religious myths, propaganda, and genealogical codswallop invented by a bunch of apparently pretty lame, late neolithic-early bronze-age shepherds to explain their pretty much universal bad fortune I cannot fathom. It is the sort of thing which offers me an a priori reason NOT to take seriously any 'scholarly' claims they might undertake.

But, in the spirit of 'fair play,' today Thom Hartmann conducted about a 20 minute colloquy with one of those smarmy, oleaginous preacher types, the ones who have a "doctorate of divinity" from some Xian "university" in the Appalachians somewhere, and it was just a waste of time...it did stir up several flurries of calls from other 'believers' who called in to rebuke Thom for his agnosticism. When one of their number is in the media somewhere, these folks have seemingly infallible antennae, and track the movements of their hive queens assiduously.

Hartmann's main--or at least his first--point was to take the Xian dude--"Dr." Bell, I think the guy's name is--to task on EXACTLY WHY claims of the theistically inspired injunctions against one "abomination" in one book, consisting of nothing but lists of "abominations" and their ultimate rewards, by some delusional, desperate, illiterate, psychotic late-neolithic/early bronze age 'prophet' against homosexuality, should be taken more seriously than that SAME prophet's raving invectives against shellfish and mixing cotton and wool in a garment. The remedy is always the same in this book: death. The malefactors ALL must die.

And, after 20 or so to me laboriously painful minutes of this, the long and the short of it is/was that, for Thom and me and anyone with the functioning equivalent of the brain of an amoeba, such claims are not suitable for the governance of a secular society.

But "Dr." Bell, when he signed off, was of course undaunted. He couldn't see any inconsistency in insisting he and his co-religionists 'really loved' gay people, but could not endure gays expressing their "lesser' love for members of the same gender (as it were). The message, all too frequently with these folks, is you can BE gay, but you cannot ACT gay. Or God (who coincidentally acts through us) will hurt you. And his followers and apologists were legion, insistent, and dead certain. I'm sure he's praying for Thom and me right this minute.

I am not a gay man. Hell, I'm not even very happy, most of the time. But the purblind injustice embedded in that kind of stark, stupid hypocrisy is outrageous, and indefensible. You cannot negotiate with people who want, and have the means, to kill you.