The bible is clearly the reason for most of the controversy over homosexuality. “It is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as he would lie with a woman,” (Lev. 18:22). This quote from the old testament is often the quote thrown in the faces of many homosexuals as proof of homosexuality being a sin. After doing some research I came to the conclusion that the passage from Leviticus 18:22 and a few others are often very easy for an individual to misunderstand. There are biblical references that condemn same-sex sexual behavior, but they are all within contexts related to violence, idolatry, promiscuity and exploitation. All homosexual references have to do with things that are bad for both hetro and same sex orientations. Of course people are going to condemn homosexuals if the way they are described and written about in the bible as is prositutes and rapists. Not once is homosexuality condemned or spoken of in the bible in terms of a person who is loving and caring of someone of the same sex.
Many people do a good job of making the homosexual lifestyle look like a disgusting and immoral way to live one’s life. An exerpt from an opinion article below shows a perfect example of the way right wing Christians go about making gays and lesbians look bad:
If any aberrant behavior is normal, what is a fornicator who rapes someone’s daughter, or and idol worshiper who kills to drink that blood of the victim, the swindler who preys on the elderly, the false witness who spreads gossip, the drunk who drives a car into a group of children killing four of them? How about the thief that burglarizes a home? Will we accept the murderer who kills someone’s homosexual lover as a normal person simply living an alternate lifestyle? (Irvine 2)
Its pretty obvious that homosexuals are not out killing and drinking the blood of innocent victims, and are not all driving drunk into crowds of people killing small children. Its absurd to classify homosexuals in the groups mentioned above, but people believe these accusations and therefore develop prejudices.
Rolling Stone music magazine put out an interesting article last March. The article had information talking about ex-gays, people who where once gay, but claim to have turned themselves straight. Its a shame that people have to deny their sexuality because of the feelings of shame a homophobic society causes one to develop. “The Truth in Love campaign, a 500,000 advertising blitz in national newspapers proclaiming that homosexuals ‘can change,’ featuring ‘ex-gays’ who have walked out on homosexuality into sexual celibacy or even marriage” (Dreyfuss 39). It saddens me to know that some gays and lesbians can not live the life they were born to live.
When reading the Rolling Stone article I came upon a URL for a website entitled godhatesfags.com ran by the notorious Rev. Fred Phelps, a Baptist pastor from Kansas. I did some research of my own, and checked out his web page. It was worse than I had expected. “GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS DIE GOD LAUGHS, and THANK GOD FOR AIDS” where only a few examples of the sickening propaganda found on this website. Rev. Phelps and his followers received national attention earlier this year when they protested at the funeral of the brutally murdered openly gay college student Matthew Shepard. What disturbed me the most about his web site was the picture depicting Matthew Shepard burning in hell surrounded by flames. What kind of caring and loving Christians do these people claim to be?
In January of 1998 Christians got together to vote and reversed Maine’s Humans Rights Act, which up until the reversal, had protected gays from discrimination in the workplace For myself, and most of Americas gay community this was a shock. The fact that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in jobs and many other sorts of things would be permitted was appalling. What is a gay man or women supposed to do when they need to support oneself and can’t get a job? It makes me wonder if America really is the land of the free and the home of equal opportunity.
What my argument comes down to is the fact that homophobia and hatred towards homosexuality isn’t going to make the world any better. The world needs to accept the fact that homosexuality isn’t a choice and that gays and lesbian are born that way. To hear people say that being gay is just a phase, or the new “cool” thing is absurd. I do not know one homosexual, that if given the choice, would have been born gay. With all the hatred and controversy homosexuals endure, it is hard to believe that anyone would choose to be gay.
It is no wonder that gays have a higher percentage of alcoholism, as an escape through drugs is easier than dealing with the shame inflicted upon them by the world . Besides this statistic, however, the truth of the matter is that homosexuals are not bereft of morals. Being a homosexual is no disease, but rather an inclination. It is only fear of the unknown that drives the feelings that have been expressed in the past year’s acts of hatred. Instead of hatred, what this country needs is education, and acceptance. One’s sexual preference is such a trivial thing when compared to the greater elements of one’s life. We need to stop the constant seperation that divides the us-and-them and come together and become a cohesive and productive we.
I feel to start from the beginning, I should explain my philosophical ideas on religion. Many of which have stemmed from the writings of Rene Descartes and Bertrand Russell, which I have read in the past. Descartes was one of the founders, we might say, of the existentialist philosophy. For the sake of theory in trying to prove existence, of anything, he first made the assumption that nothing truly existed. He could say that the book on the desk before him, or the water glass he had just drank from were really just phantom images, again for the sake of proving his theory, but the one thing he couldn't assume not to exist was the actual thought he was having about nonexistence. No matter how hard he tried, the thought in his mind was still there and was not an actual tangible object, therefore couldn't be some sort of phantom. It must be real. Descarte's final proclamation in theory, proving that we do actually exist, was "I think , therefore I am."
Anyway, to sum up the reasoning behind that idea lets just say I do believe that I actually exist, which brings me to my next point on the actual technicalities behind religion, the purpose of existence and where we came from if we were not created by some omnipotent being. The Christian will tell you that we were created by God, and if you say "No actually I was created because the biological conditions were desirable when my dad's sperm met my mom's egg" they, the Christian right in particular, will often times be offended and reply with illogical rhetoric while they try to vaguely explain, without any concrete reasoning, that "God's power was ultimately the creator, and blah, blah, blah..." and if you keep them going they will finally trace human existence back to Adam and Eve. This is where I tie in the First Cause Theory. The Christian justification of an actual god uses this, but when picked apart it really holds no validity at all. The First Cause Theory contends that everything in the world has a cause, and as one goes further and further back along the chain of causes one will eventually come to a First Cause, and to that first cause is given the name God, creator of Adam and Eve. For the Christian, that usually suffices as good reason, but for myself the First Cause Theory, if taken one step further, is completely irrational. If one believes in this chain of causes then how can it come to an end? If everything is linked to a cause before it, then that means Adam and Eve were caused by God, and God was caused by... uh oh the fallacy in the First Cause Theory is revealed. What was God's cause? If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. This is one of the most profound reasons behind my atheism. The whole First Cause theory is mitigated by taking it one step further, and as a result God can't be proven to actually be real.
The other small problem with the First Cause theory is that if it were true, we would have no control over anything in the world. We would be controled by cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect... and have absolutely no free will. If we had no free will then rapists, murders, evil politicans, greedy heartless raging white power hungry capitalist men, (sorry, got carried away on that one) could not be put to blame for the crimes they commit against humanity. The chain of causes would contend that these crimes were a result of another cause before. In the Christian religion one who did such evil things would be condemned to eternal suffering in Hell. Biblical teachings say this. However, why would God not accept these people into heaven? After all, according to First Cause, they would have no control over their own actions, thus should not be held responsible and certainly not burn in eternal fire for events that were inevitable because of the chain of cause.
I guess those philosophical ideas can be applyed to almost any religion, not just Christianity, in my quest to prove the appeal to reason behind my atheism. The next topics I will discuss are more in relation to morality issues within the Christian religion, which I think biblical teachings, if interpreted on face value, exemplify ethical viewpoints that don't coincide with my own. To illustrate this idea I will use Timothy 1; chapter 2; verses 11-13 from the Bible. "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection, But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to upsurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was created first then Eve." WOW! Being a female, I find these verses extremely degrading and they make me cringe everytime I read them. I have in the past brought up these verses when conversing in some sort of religous debate, and have gotten a number of responses from the Christian, to whom I am speaking, in attempt to justify the blunt degredation of women.
One of the more common responses is "Keep in mind that the Bible is over 2000 years old and during those times the subordination of women in society was acceptable. That's the way things were during that time period." I find this argument to be extremely weak for a couple of reasons. First of all, the actual suggestion of the inferiority of women is viewed as a moral belief. I don't fucking care if it was an accepted moral stand point 2000 years ago or in present times. The whole idea can't be justified as a moral idea in any time period.
Another response I get is "Well you are only looking at a couple verses out of the entire Bible and automatically condemning it based on those couple verses, and not looking at the other biblical teachings." That is another really shitty attempt to extol bad morals. Even if the Timothy 1 verses were the only teachings within the Bible that depicted corrupt ideas (which they aren't. there are plenty more) I still couldn't gain any sort of good moral judgement after reading this. To use a comparitive example, consider the following scenario. You are sitting around reading a book by your favorite political theorist. You find yourself agreeing with all of the ideas that the author is suggesting. So far the book has presented a liberal stand point on political issues, and then you come to a chapter about the problems society faces with global overpopulation. The author advocates starting a genocidal civil war within your country in order to kill off all the minorities and make more room for whites. Most of us would be infuriated by this idea, and as a result would lose our respect for the author and his political ideas, regardless of the fact that this was the only bad remark in the entire book. Likewise, hundreds of good moral teachings in the Bible don't make up for the Timothy 1 verses.
Christianity and other religions have played a large role in world history. Several words can sum it up; Corruption, Hate, and Intolerance. If that doesn't do justice to the topic, let me elaborate. From the beginning of time wars have been fought in the name of religion. Looking back in history many atrocities have been committed in the name of God. Among them are the Crusades, the Holocaust, and the wars in the Middle East, (which continue today). All a result of some sort of religous conflict. These wars and internal conflict stem from one main problem; People are willing to die and kill in the name of their religion because they are kept submissive to higher powers (God or authority within the particular religion) and in essence become brainwashed. This is bad. Religion=submissiveness of the common people=corruption. We see right wing politicians and the Christian Right trying to push Christianity into public schools and more and more into government. This is crap! Why don't we just turn the entire country into a complete fucking theocracy. That will really solve all our problems. I'm being sarcastic ofcourse. Throughout history, theocracies have always led to corruption.
The last topic I would like to discuss is the reason behind Christian belief as opposed to other religions. The common human has the innate fear of death. Death is an extremely abstract concept for most because it can't be explained. Their is no proof of what happens after we die, and since many seek a nice sugar-coated answer to the unexplainable, they turn to Christianity. It guarentees eternal bliss to the virtuous Christian so they believe what they want without any substancial proof of realism, and instead turn to faith alone. Another reason for the acceptance of Christianity is the human tendency to want to be superior to others. The true Christian won't buy into the idea of evolution for this reason. They want to think themselves superior to other animals. The Christian refuses the fact that their distant cousin is an ape and if you go even further back their other relatives are worms and microscopic organisms. As a result they refute the logical scientific theories and rely on illogical religous concepts to justify their own being.
Finally, the last reason that I am not a Christian is this; I cannot justify living my life the way one book tells me to. I find absolutely no validity in farcical lies. If I did, I would rather live my life based on a different more entertaining book, not the Bible, perhaps Cinderella. I could pretend to be a princess. Unfortunately I'm not a princess. I am just a crusty punk and I believe in reality.
We who stoop to depths of racism, sexism, and classism.
Will we ever break free from the chains binding us to this meaningless existential subsistence?
-Susie White
by, Susie White
After being confronted several times on the ethics involved in religion, Christianity in particular, I felt the need to finally write some sort of critique justifying the reasons behind my own atheist beliefs. That is the reason for this. There are plenty of people out there, punks tend to be a big part of this group, who are self -proclaimed atheists, which is a good thing, from my perspective, but unfortunately many aren't really able to vindicate the reasons behind there spiritual/religous ideas. I guess that is what I'm trying to do with this commentary, logically explain why I am not a Christian.
"We the people hold these truths to be self evident
that all men are created equal..."
We the scapegoats of the system's false promises.
We the apathetic, wallowing knee deep in the capitalist fallacy.
We the ignorant adhering to the exploitive ideology of a raging
power hungry government.
We the believers of farcical lies.
We the sadistic, laughing at our neighbors misery.
We the doomed.
We the oppressed.
We the puppets of avoidance reaction.
We the nomads searching for answers, never to be found
in this fucking dark endless supernova.
March 8, 1999