Cesare

Via ninemoons42.

Every now and then, I think that I should be more respectful of the deeply held spiritual beliefs of the Christians who have such a huge influence on my nation’s public life. After all, they’re only doing what they genuinely think is mandated by God, right? They truly believe they’re doing the right thing. This is serious stuff to them.

Last summer I read through some autobiographical musings from a retired Christian who talked about how active he’d been in his church and how sure he was that God had intervened in his life at certain moments. He also talked about agitating against marriage equality and gay rights and lamented over people who ‘fell to the homosexual lifestyle’. Eventually in the account of his life story, he got to his retirement, and mentioned that he finally had the time to read the entire Bible for the first time in his life. Up until that point, all he’d read were “proof texts,” the scattered Bible verses that people cite to back up their arguments, aka “clobber verses.” You know, like that one Leviticus verse that says homosexuality is wrong— but not the other Leviticus verses that forbid shellfish, touching pig skin, and shaving.

So the Bible was important enough to this guy that he lived his whole life abiding by what he thought it said, judging other people by what he believed it taught and denying them rights based on what he’d been told it allowed and forbade… but it wasn’t important enough for him to ever actually… read it.

TL;DR, large numbers of these people don’t even read their own holy book, so they need to shut up and get out of the way of my birth control.