Got your attention?
I AM serious.
They are two sides of the same coin
For the record: I'm gay, and I have my faith.
Now before everyone explodes -
If the tenor of the now infamous diary was this:
"I feel there is no god. These are my reasons. I'm sick of religion being used hypocritically and to keep people down."
- then I would have loved the diary.
I'm sick of religion being used hypocritically and to keep people down!
But that wasn't the diary.
The diary, simply put, was: faith is for morons and "It's Bullshit"! Religion is only for suckers to be kept down in the mud! Anyone who believes different is an idiot.
This was an extreme, intolerant, and downright tyrannical (yes!) form of a perfectly reasonable argument. That diary brooks no dissent. You are with us or you are against us. The implication is that anyone with any faith in anything other than "No God" is either an ignorant pawn or pure evil.
It sounds like a very oppressive religion of "NoGod" which cannot tolerate any other "god" before it.
(more venting follows...)
THAT'S one of the things that keeps the OTHER extremists going. The ugly Religious Right feeds on that attitude like nectar. They really believe that that diary exemplifies all of the Left.
Now THEY say, not only do we believe in God but we are making him the most violent and (IMO) non-Biblical God we can think of because OUR God is Better than YOUR no-god! And He's gonna kill all of you with REAL swords!
So now "the Left hates God" and "the Right hates Gays"
(neither of these are true for most on either side, I'd bet. But you wouldn't know it from the talk.)
I'd say both of these extremists go pick a strip of land somewhere and blow it all the hell fighting each other. The rest of us can keep watch to see who crawls out of the rubble and see if maybe they got most of their hate out of their system.
And now someone's gonna say "You're saying we aren't allowed to express our opinions?!? We should just cow down to the oppressive Radical Christo-Fascist Overlords?!?!"
No, I'm saying the view expressed in that diary were bordering on a Radical NoGod Fascist Overlord view.
I don't have a long list of things I really hate. But:
I HATE ALL FASCIST OVERLORDS!!
I couldn't give a frak what faith or belief system they have!
All of us need to take care that we don't walk into the same fascist trap that the Right has moved into. If we do, we are as doomed as they are.