Mark Morford - Is Your Religion Unsanitary?

[Dover]

Is Your Religion Unsanitary?
Is God telling you to love war? Loathe gays? Restrict women? Join the godless throngs now!

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 20, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

Is your god really, really angry right now?

Is your god telling you, like it tells G.W. Bush every night, that your unwanted unprovoked ultraviolent war against a nearly defenseless nation is not only justified and righteous, but is His deepest wish?

And does your religion tell you, like it tells so many of the Christian Right, that homosexuals are a dire threat to humankind and should be stopped at all costs before the so-called gay agenda sneaks into the playground and the drinking water and the "Spongebob" scripts and starts covertly converting our blessed innocent hetero children to a life of sin?

Or maybe it instructs that gay people are simply misled, morally derailed by a hunky leather-clad Satan with great hair and Prada sandals, and, despite that sad fact, they are still all God's children and should therefore be pitied and patronized and helped over their "sickness?"

Is your religion telling you that women who dare to control their own bodies and sexual reproductive powers should be shut down and restricted by legislation and deep guilt and electroshock therapy, and the doctors who treat them imprisoned if not beaten with sticks and set on fire?

Or maybe you say no, it's not like that at all, it's much milder and nicer than that. Maybe your religion, like the carefully spoon-fed religion of millions of Americans, is quieter, calmer, a little more numbly sinister. Maybe your religion, like so many modern incarnations of dogma, is telling you simply to have faith. Does this sound familiar?

Maybe it's telling you to not think too much about the horrors and complexities and odd sexual orientations of the world, that they are simply too ugly and debauched and convoluted to really understand for mere mortals, and if you just leave it up to God and let Him sort it all out, everything will be fine. This is the church line. It has worked for centuries. It is still working today.

God has a plan, after all. This is what they say. He has an incredibly obtuse and impossibly dense master blueprint that explains all the war and death and burned babies in Iraq, all the cancer and animal cruelty and Lynne Cheney, and you are just too small and unevolved to possibly understand, or do anything about it. Right? Well, no.

Because if it is, if your religion is telling you any of these things, you might want to reconsider your options. You might want to consider dumping the whole thing and becoming one of the outcasts, one among the godless throngs, one of the spiritually inquisitive, one of the sacredly self-defined......cont'd

URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/02/20/notes022004.DTL






http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/

[Skittles]

1. love it

proud outcast here

[dweller]

2. Sacredly self-defined

and transfiguring along the way...

dp

[newyawker99]

3. Dover

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
news source.

Thank you.


DU Moderator