I'll admit it: I enjoy dropping by Breitbart occasionally, seeking perhaps the same vaguely disturbing titillation that bewigged and powdered grandees of the 1600s found in public tours of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Like a train wreck, it's just so darn hard to look away from the horror, even when you know you really should for the sake of your own sanity.
Close followers of the Duck Dynasty Debacle may know that tonsorially-challenged Phil Robertson had a wee(wee) tantrum the other day, which witnessed this media figure railing against the media for railing against his railing against The Gayz in the media (a parsing diagram of the preceding clause is available for the low, low price of just $1.99 on my profile page). Naturally enough, Breitbart's ironically named Christian Toto jumped eagerly into the fray to cover this stop-the-presses story...because this is just the kind of raw meat teabaggage that drives them pageviewz, dontcha know. And drive it did, racking up over 1,000 unhinged comments (AKA 'spittle flecks') in less than 24 hours. Most were, of course, the usual pedestrian tripe...'the gays are going to Hell,' 'GOD BLESS good ole Phil, a True Christian Warrior,' 'something-something-something-Gay Mafia-something,' 'Benghazibenghazibenghazi!!!!,' and the like. But the article drew an unusually large number of progressive trolls, as well (if one can call speaking truth to lunacy 'trolling'...I lack a better term), including myself. In a moment of unusual (for me) clarity I managed to post one of the more lucid and, I think, unanswerable responses I've ever managed to offer against the despised 'because God said so!' defense of religiously sanctioned bigotry. Join me below the fold, and let us pray.
Yesterday in this thread I was assured by an earnest professed Christian that God's Law is perfect in every detail, despite the fact that it includes many commands that would be impossible for any person of goodwill to obey, such as its commandment that we must stone to death our disobedient children. Indeed, he explained to me, the Law includes such impossible commands specifically to teach us that we are all sinners in need of God's loving salvation.
I spent much of the night prayerfully reflecting on this, and by morning I had, indeed, seen the Light, and knew with a penetrating certainty what God required me to do. So I gave my five-year-old son a baby bunny and commanded him, repeatedly and in an ever more threatening tone, to bite its head off with his bare teeth. After he was done screaming and crying and had curled up into a quivering ball on the floor I comforted him, assuring him everything was OK, that I had merely done this to teach him that he is disobedient, which was why I must stone him to death...because God loves him.
The doctors assure me my son should be eligible for release from the institution any year now.
What a sick brand of 'religion' is this cruel and psychotic perversion of Christ's love. The only thing sicker is its sufferers' insistence that all the rest of us must fall to our knees and gratefully submit to this disease, too.
At the end of our exchange, my correspondent asked me what I would say if I met God at the Pearly Gates and He demanded of me what I had done in my life to merit admission to His Heaven. What I should have said was: "Probably about the same thing you would say if the Flying Spaghetti Monster accosted you at the Gates of Heaven and demanded, 'What part of "love one another" didn't you get, dummy?'"
To wit: "Uh-oh...."
My many Christian friends, including fellow members of my congregation, will, I hope, recognize that this is hardly a screed against Christianity, but rather against pseudo-Christianity in the service of mindless 'because God said so!' bigotry.