Hemant Mehta shares an email that’s heart-breaking: a woman who has lost faith but finds herself guilty about her sexuality, asking for advice. I wish I had advice, other than what some commenters have already said: get therapy, so she can work through these issues and find self-acceptance.
Skeptics often get asked, when dealing with issues like astrology, UFOs, alternative medicine and the like, “What’s the harm?” And it can get asked about religion, too. What’s the harm?
Well, look at this one issue. Why do so many LGBT people struggle with their sexual identity? Why do so many struggle with feelings of being sinful, of doing something wrong? Why do LGBT teens struggle and hurt in ways that other teens don’t? Homophobia, yes, but ask yourself this: where does that homophobia come from?
The answer, of course, is that for two thousand years the Christian churches have largely been condemning homosexuality. The answer, of course, is that the only times the Bible mentions anything like sex between people of the same gender, it is condemned. The answer, of course, is that it’s plain, old, ugly bigotry, born of acceptance of so-called Revelation. These beliefs exist because people turn off their minds and blindly accept dogma and tradition.
Sure, some will say, many Christians are more accepting of LGBT people nowadays. They do question dogma and tradition. There’s even a denomination, The Metropolitan Community Churches, that openly embraces them. But that covers up a critical point, one that Dawkins and others have made: Faith is the problem. As long as we have institutions that encourage Faith over Reason, cover is provided for these kinds of ugly, hateful beliefs. The liberal religious people don’t get off scott free on this one. They’re part of the problem, because they help legitimize the sources of “knowledge” that ugly hearts use to justify their hate. Only when we abandon Revelation and Faith as legitimate sources of knowledge will shit like this end.
5 Comments
5 August 2008 at 10:28 am
I suggest you read “the radical reformission” by mark drisoll. It’s a wonderful read even if your not a believer.
small group survey
[EDIT: link deleted by the owner of this blog, partly because my blog is not the place for people to post their surveys, and partly because I strongly suspect this comment may be spam, anyway]
and If you really want to challenge your atheist beliefs read mere christianity by C.S Lewis
5 August 2008 at 10:46 am
My blog is not a place for you to post surveys, and I’m editing out the link. If you have a survey you want people to take, get your own damn blog.
And it’s considered polite to actually constrain your comments to the topic at hand. If you have something to say about this post, feel free to. Otherwise, get your own blog.
By the way, I’ve read Mere Christianity, which I found to be an utterly tedious and silly.
6 August 2008 at 12:11 pm
I’m just trying to get a better understanding of what the worlds thinks of small group… so sorry for the… spam… I guess you could call collecting information for the greater good that.
6 August 2008 at 3:01 pm
As I said — get your own blog. It’s not polite to use other people’s places as a platform for yourself. You also, I might add, just dropped that link in without any explanation. So there wasn’t even context to understand its relevance to the post topic. Which, looking at the survey, had no relevance to the post topic. So yes, I would call it spam, posting an off-topic link just to generate hits to your survey.
6 August 2008 at 6:16 pm
hi greg-I’m the person the blog is about. thank you for posting about me and being sympathetic. I think you make a lot of good points-would love to talk with you sometime-feel free to email me (I hope my email shows up). thanks!
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