You Haven't Got A Clue, Dear Detractors

A sort of post script to that post last Sunday could be that was one of the things I learned from reading and interacting with lots of atheists online was the shallowness and banality in their skepticism.   Things on the level of challenging my disbelief in Zeus, the most banal level of thinking of the "problem of evil" those along with the litany of lies about history, the insistence that religious people MUST! believe this or that other thing which I've never believed and was never taught.  That is the substance of just about all of the atheism I've seen in the great and putrid corpse lily of the new atheism of the past fifteen or so years.

It's one of the points of pride among so many atheists that they figured it all out when they were nine or eleven or seventeen and that set them in their areligious faith for life.  Well, settling in your thinking at that age isn't a sign of intelligence, it's a sign of superficiality and banality as well as snobbery.   Just a look around at what people have done on the basis of their religious belief, the martyrs and those who didn't die but who were imprisoned and oppressed for their role in the Civil Rights movement is just one example of the kind of thing that is a result of religious belief.   If I had no one else to shake up the kind of agnostic skepticism that settled over me in adolescence, the Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and so many others such as Diane Nash would have forced me to consider the possibility there was more to Christianity than what people like George Carlin, Ricky Gervaise, and on upward to propagandists against it as Thomas Huxley and Bertrand Russell presented it as being.   I mean, look at the great moral examples of atheism and compare them to the great moral examples of Christianity - I mean those who actually either risked or were given martyrdom for justice for the least among us, not people who held high office in some denomination or got paid a lot.

The idea that Christians have a total or even a near complete achievement of the teachings and commandments of Jesus and the other prophets and that it is in possession of the final word of wisdom on doing that is absurd and I don't, personally, know anyone who would assert anything like that has been done.   Christianity, as many other religious traditions, contain aspects that should keep anyone from really believing that they or some leader had achieved that level of enlightenment and, even more so, goodness.   Even the worst of modern Popes who might have wished they could say that would have balked at declaring it, only the most mentally disturbed of Catholics or those in complete and utterly unthinking ignorance would believe it.  But you'll find atheists, some of them the most eminent of scientists among them who make far more outlandish claims for the state of the knowledge of materialism, the material universe being what most atheists use for God,  something they imagine as "science" being its only prophet.   I would bet you anything if there were a way to quantify such a thing, more atheists would have the kind of blind, naive faith in something like that than a similar percentage of Christians would buy the equivalent for their religion or even The Bible.

Which gets us to the snarky piece of hate mail that prompted this.   No, I don't believe The Bible is the literal "word of God" it was written by people of varying degrees of inspiration and for various reasons and purposes.   It is a record of some of the most profound thinking on these issues ever recorded by human beings.  Some of it is the most exacting and most subtle commentary on human experience most of us will ever encounter - if we choose to encounter it.  It is so vast, so varied, so inclusive of varying points of view and such variable inspiration that you can find lots of stuff in it to mock, scorn and reject.  But the attitude you believe I would have for it is something entirely foreign to the tradition I started out in, became skeptical of, gradually made peace with and which I can see the wisdom in, now.   Catholics never treated The Bible in the way your atheist bigotry needs to have be universal among Christians.   I was never taught to read it in a literal manner or even in a uniform manner.  The differences in the different book and even within books were always acknowledged.  I have to say that many of those which I've had the most trouble with were troublesome because I failed to apply those distinctions to them, I didn't ask who wrote what they contained and why they would have said what they did.   I didn't use enough imagination of what the author would have been doing to be able to understand and, quite often, benefit from what was said.

In the passages you say deal with gay people, first, there doesn't seem to have been the idea in the minds of the writers that there are people who don't feel sexually attracted to the members of the other gender.   The assumption is that all of that behavior is behavior by otherwise straight people, in every case I can recall, men.  So there's that lapse in their thinking and what I know from experience. Second, it would seem to me what is actually condemned is a. anal sex, b. sex with children or people in the low social-political position to have to tolerate being prostituted, c. men who break their vows of fidelity, d. people who participate in the pagan-religious-political system that included the rape of children.

Well, none of those apply to me or my late partner.  The fact is that even the first of those, anal sex, is probably more often done heterosexually than among gay men and the fact is it is an act that carries some of the highest risks to the health and well being of both of the participants but, especially, to the one who is penetrated.   I will never stop pointing out that it was when gay men were talked into considering anal sex as "the real gay sex" in the 1970s. mostly through porn, that we became especially vulnerable to STDs, and that we were among the groups most vulnerable to infection with HIV and, so, dying of AIDS.   I wouldn't be at all surprised if the ancient Hebrews didn't witness some similar effects of anal sex and so they knew it was immoral to risk the health and well being of those who engaged in it, especially those forced into it through temple prostitution.   I strongly suspect that the same thing was known to the ancient Greeks who had rather harsh rules against that one class they cared about, men who had the means or connections to be citizens of the polis being the passive recipient of anal penetration.  They didn't care about women, slaves, foreigners, so there was no prohibition on them being used.  The Hebrew Law was far more universal in its concern and far more egalitarian in it edicts.  And we've learned a lot about the radical egalitarian justice that develops in that tradition, especially with the witness of the horrific modern period when scientific and industrial methods of killing people with sociological record keeping have forced us to face that potential in us all.  Looking into the often inspired record of human experience and thought in The Bible is far more helpful than reading Russell or Freud or the other materialists.  Materialism, atheism, is a dead end.  It is no way to attain freedom, it's a guarantee to deny that freedom, even free thought are possible.  It can't tell some straight guy why my rights matter.  I've never been attacked or threatened by someone who took the Gospel seriously, the guys who do that are seriously irreligious if not anti-religious.  You can tell from their language and the way they act.

I am not the person you want me to be.  My experience and thinking aren't what you want them to be. Those stereotypes are invented by you guys for your edification and convenience so you won't have to deal with other people as they really are.   Everything's more complicated than you like it being. That's what makes materialist reductionism so attractive to you.  It's easy, like the way you wanted the world to be when you were nine or eleven.   But that's not what life is really like. Religion is too complicated for your pleasure.  Religious thinking is too hard, not too simplistic.