Ron's Log

Keep It Up, Pastor Bob

Pastor Bob is hilariously wrong on so many levels.

First, encouraging people to go into Starbucks and buy venti anything only to pour it into a sewer totally misses his own goal. But I'm going to back him on this. Please, all people opposed to equal rights, go into your nearest Starbucks and spend ALL of your money (all if it) on coffee to take outside and dump. Then do it again the next day. Something will change eventually.

Second, he's going to go buy his coffee at McDonald's. Really, if you are going to get into this, you've got to keep track of the dwindling list of corporations who agree with your homophobic position. The American Family Association has been boycotting McDonald's since 2008 when the retailer of the Big Mac joined the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. I was going to suggest that instant Sanka was the only coffee fit for rightwing consumption, but the American Family Association is boycotting Maxwell House, too. Here's a website where you can buy Ugandan coffee. That ought to do it.

Pastor Bob says "Jesus Christ said that 'God made us male and female at the beginning of the creation.'" This is laughably out of context. It comes from Matthew 19 which is an admonition against divorce:

When Jesus had finished this talk, he left Galilee. He went away to the part of Judea that is on the other side of the Jordan River.

2 Many people followed him. He healed them there.

3 The Pharisees came to Jesus to test him. They asked, 'Is it right for a man to send his wife away from him for any reason?'

4 Jesus answered, 'Have you not read this? From the time God first made people, he made them a man and a woman.

5 God said, "A man must leave his father and mother and must stay with his wife. The two of them will be like one person."

6 So they are not two people any more, but they are one person. Man must not separate what God has joined together.'

7 They said to Jesus, 'Then why did Moses make this law? He said that a man may give his wife a paper to show that he does not want her any more. Then he may send her away.'

8 Jesus said to them, 'Moses wrote that law because your hearts are so hard. That is why he let you send your wives away. But in the beginning it was not that way.

9 But I tell you this. No man may send his wife away unless she has committed adultery. If he does, and if he marries another woman, he commits adultery. And if a man marries a woman who has been sent away by her husband, he commits adultery.'

One cannot overlook what else Jesus has to say:

11 Jesus said, 'Not everyone can agree to that. But God has chosen some not to be married.

12 Some men cannot marry because they were born that way. Some were made that way by men. Others said, "I will not marry, for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." 'Anyone who can do this, should do it.'

We might as well keep going to get the real homophobic content:

17 Jesus said, 'Why do you ask me about what is good? Only God is good. If you want to live for ever, you must keep God's laws.'

18 The man said, 'Which laws?' Jesus said, 'Do not kill. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not tell lies.

19 Respect your father and your mother. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.'

20 The young man said, 'I have kept all those laws. What more must I do?'

21 Jesus said, 'If you want to be all right, go and sell everything you have. Give the money to poor people. For this you will be rich in heaven. Then come and go with me.'

And then he must have said "keep hating gay people and spend your money and energy to keep them from getting married," but somebody dropped it from the translation. At least I can't find it now. Damn sloppy translators.

Our Lady Of Sorrows: Baseball is for boys only

The second baseman for Mesa Preparatory in Mesa, Arizona, is Paige Sultzbach, a girl. The baseball team for Our Lady Of Sorrows in Phoenix won't play against a girl. The first two times the teams met, Ms. Sultzbach voluntarily stepped aside. Our Lady Of Sorrows lost anyway. But when their third match, a championship game, came along, Ms. Sultzbach stood her ground. Our Lady Of Sorrows responded by forfeiting the game.

"This isn't the first time the issue has come up. Our Lady of Sorrows pulled out of a flag football tournament before it began last October because some teams had female members."

The History Of Christian Same-Sex Marriage

An anthropologist says that Christian churches performed same-sex unions from the 8th to 18th century. This is based on the research of John Boswell which he published in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

United Methodists Cling To Bigotry

"Saying that a homosexual person was created by God was like saying 'that God created me to live with animals.'" That's what a delegate from Africa said at the United Methodist General Conference in Tampa, Florida, last week. By a vote of 61% to 39%, the delegates affirmed that view by refusing to change the Book of Discipline which calls homosexuality "incompatible with Christian teaching." A proposal "which said that Methodists could acknowledge their differences on homosexuality while still living together as a church" was defeated by a similar margin. That proposal had been made by the Rev. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kan., and the Rev. Mike Slaughter, pastor of Ginghamsburg Church, Tipp City, Ohio. Leawood, Kansas, and Tipp City, Ohio! Not exactly hotbeds of liberalism.

"Hamilton reminded delegates to the 2012 United Methodist General Conference that John Wesley once said, 'Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may.'"

40% of the delegates at the conference came from outside the United States.

When protesters gathered around a central communion table and began singing Let us Break Bread Together, the session was recessed and re-opened with attendance limited to delegates, authorized personnel and authorized guests. Church laws "prohibit the ordination of self-avowed practicing homosexuals and limit ministry to same-gender couples."

The protestors celebrating communion and singing. Photo by United Methodist News Service.

Here, retired Methodist clergyman, Rev. Gil Caldwell writes about the church's racist past and his views on the church's current policy on gay members.

For those delegates who claim they are maintaining "tradition" as they vote to sustain current United Methodist language and legislation, I remind them that at one time some persons maintained and/or tolerated, colonialism, slavery, the oppression of women, racial segregation, prohibitions against the ordination of women and resistance to interracial marriage, because they represented long-held "traditions." The breaking of tradition is what established Christianity, Protestantism and the United States.

Dan Savage On Biblical Slavery

And other parts of the Bible that we ignore and should ignore.

Sweet Jesus

Lawrence Welk calls it a "modern spiritual."

Rational Thought

Frank Bruni at the N.Y. Times writes about a former college dorm-mate's journey from unquestioned Roman Catholicism to a world view based in reality.

He grew up in the South, in a setting so homogenous and a family so untroubled that, he said, he had no cause to question his parents' religious convictions, which became his. He said that college gave him cause, starting with me. Sometime during freshman year, he figured out that I was gay, and yet I didn’t conform to his prior belief that homosexuals were "deserving of pity for their mental illness." I seemed to him sane and sound.

[H]e added to his teaching duties in Africa a weekly, extracurricular Bible study for the schoolchildren. But the miseries he witnessed made him second-guess the point of that, partly because they made him second-guess any god who permitted them.

He saw cruelties born of the kind of bigotry that religion and false righteousness sometimes abet. A teenage girl he met was dying of sepsis from a female circumcision performed with a kitchen knife. He asked the male medical worker attending to her why such crude mutilation was condoned, and was told that women otherwise were overly sexual and "prone to prostitution."

"Isn't it just possible," he pushed back, "that women are prone to poverty, and men are prone to prostitution?"

Despite Their Detriments, Kirk Cameron Claims To Have Gay Friends

Oh, he's got gay friends all right. People like this always have gay friends. But they just always seem to be those invisible gay friends.

"One who does not remember history is bound to live through it again" - George Santayana

In the 1960 presidential campaign, those who could not offer better ideas on the real issues of the day resorted to religious bigotry to distract the voters. John Kennedy in a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 12, 1960:

While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that I believe that we have far more critical issues in the 1960 campaign; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers only 90 miles from the coast of Florida -- the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice President by those who no longer respect our power -- the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the old people who cannot pay their doctors bills, the families forced to give up their farms -- an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious issues -- for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier.

Today, when the real issues are wars, unemployment, wars, a failing educational system, and more wars, those who have no real solutions to offer continue to attempt to distract the voters with religious bigotry:

More of Santorum's remarks here.

OTOH:

The complete text of Kennedy's address.

Atheist Turns Street Preacher

Seen on Reddit:

I was with some close work-mates at a place to interview folks for a technical position we're hiring for. Almost all of them were from China and India and I was annoyed and grumbling when we left to go get coffee and take a break. There was a guy there handing out literature with a sign that says "Darwin was a liar".

Being in already a pissy mood I took his literature. It was the same ID nonsense that has been discredited a million times but yet is still perpetuated by fanatics that refuse to hear or accept anything other than what they believe.

He asked me "Are you familiar with this?"

I said "Yes, I am, very much so." He thought he had a believer and started to talk to me.

"Okay, I'll talk with you but I need to ask you. Do you actually care what I think?"

"Oh yes, of course I do!"

"Okay, then I need a promise, you will listen to me and not interrupt me."

He promised and so I began.

"This," I held up the paper, "denies the Grandeur of God."

His face turned to what? I think he had begun to suspect he had someone that was going to argue evolution to him and he was prepared with this litany of nonsense. But instead he just said "no, it extolls it."

"Nope, it denies it. What it says it says is that man can know and understand God's Magnificence."

His face was blank. What I hadn't noticed, and what my work-friends (guys I have known for more than 15 years, one for 25) is that I now had an audience.

"This paper says that mankind can understand God's Mysterious Works and how God developed the Universe."

"No," he said. "It says that scientists cannot understand how God works. Evolution says they are better than God."

"You promised to listen to me," I said. "I'm not talking about evolution or what you believe scientists think. I'm talking about this (I held up the paper)."

He shut up. I know he did because he thought I was a fellow believer. But he let me go on.

"When you say the Earth is 6,000 years old you are saying that you know how God did it. This is one of the most egregious insults to God I have ever heard. It is basically saying that God is a technician and you can understand his work. You can understand how people, inspired by God thousands of years ago to write the Bible, fully understood what God was trying to tell them. That they had the ability to know God, to know God's thoughts, desires and wishes."

"No," he said. "It follows the trail God left us in the Bible."

"Nope," I said. The trail you think you are following is one man created. God already gave us the tools to explore and study His Handiwork. We cannot understand His reasons but we can study what he did."

"Yes," he was excited "That's what this does."

"No, it doesn't. It says 'this is how God did it'. I'll tell you, there was the void, there was nothing," his face changed he thought I was about to go into scripture "and God reached out a finger and touched the void and from that touch erupted all of Creation. The Universe and all the worlds in it. From that point God created everything, the heavens, the earth, the animals, and man."

"Yes," he said, "in His image."

"This paper says you know how God did it. That says you are on an equal plane with God."

"It doesn't say that." He was getting pissed.

"Of course it does." I grabbed a few lines (I don't actually have it anymore as I tossed it.. but I should have kept it, but it talked about the ear, the eye, and the perfect alignment of the world and how it's just for us.

We went on like this for a few minutes, basically going over his little paper until he finally acquiesced and said "okay, yeah, this paper can come across that way but it's not what the message means."

"Of course it does," I said. "It denies God's Handiwork. It denies how God really created us and the universe and instead takes a bunch of crap people made up and said here, this is how God did it.

"No, you don't understand."

"Actually, I do. You are the one that has been misled. Didn't Matthew say " whoever receives a child in My name receives Me; but whoever causes a child who believe in Me to stumble should have a millstone hung around his neck and drowned?

He pulled out his Bible, looked it up and read the quote. And, okay, I wasn't verbatim of his translation, but I said "see, you my friend have been led astray. You see, God works in Mysterious ways. God's Grandeur and His Handiwork know no bounds.

"God created everything yes?" I said. He nodded. "Well God created Chemistry, Physics, Electronics," I looked for acknowledgment. He wasn't sure. "That cell phone on your hip, it's because of God yes?" He said yes of course. "Well, chemistry, electronics, physics, all made the cell phone. Astronomy, Physiology, Geology, all from God. These are the tools God used to craft the world. God gave us the ability to learn and study and make use of His Gifts, did he not?"

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"The car, the cellphone, the computer, all use physics, electronics, chemistry, mechanics, are you saying none of these come from God?"

"No, of course not. But I don't see what you're getting at."

"How can you not see it?" I waved my hands all around. "God gave man the gift of Free Will and Intelligence did He not? God created the sciences so that man could create cities, and medicine, and advanced Agriculture techniques so that the planet could hold more in His Name. This too, Evolution. That was how God created man. God doesn't care about human time, to think God does is insulting to God. Trillions of years to us is nothing to God. "

"I didn't come from a monkey, that's a lie."

"Could God come down and make a monkey into a person if He so desired?"

"That's stupid. God wouldn't do that."

"Are you saying God's Power is stupid?"

"What? No?!?"

"Well, that's good. First, God already told us people did not come from monkeys. You know how? Evolution. Evolution was created by God. The science of Evolution never said people came from Monkeys."

My friends were trying to pull me away.

"Okay, here, think on this," I said. "God created everything. That means God created the science you abhor. Those were the tools that God created and then used to craft His universe. Why would you then deny them?"

We went back into the building and I sat through more asinine interviews. The guys started ribbing me about being a street preacher and I was the butt of many a good joke.

Then on our way out the guy came up to me. He asked me flat out "Are you a pastor?"

I smiled at him. "I am of a sorts, yes," I said.

"You got me thinking. Can I ask you some questions?"

So he and I had a chat right then and there. He really did think about what I said. He found it really easy to accept that God created all the sciences and that we could study "how" He did things, but could never see 'behind the veil" to know the Why. And that, I emphasized to him, was "God's Gift" to us. That we could see how He worked and understand His Gift. We could deny it or accept it, but it was Our choice.

While we were talking a few more people came up to me and said I made sense and the more they thought about it the more it made the marriage of their belief in God and science fit better. They had issues and the way I explained it all made perfect sense. They thanked me!

TL;DR -- I apparently started preaching in the street and convinced a fundie young earther that God created all the sciences so he could use them as tools to create the Universe; even evolution. And, yes, I am an atheist.