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30 January, 2006. 978 words.

Here’s my wisdom for today: People are really touchy about their religion, especially on the Internet. Provocative comments or questions about someone’s religious tenants are almost always viewed as a direct assault on the individual.

As I’ve said, I’ve been peripherally involved in a “religious debate” on the Blog of Daniel recently, which thus far has the typical liberal Christian vs. conservative Christian dynamic to it. (In this case, however, it is a handful of far-right conservatives quite vocally protesting the conclusions of a predominantly liberal discussion.. I will refer to them as far-righters from now on, though they would probably be offended by that characterization, seeing as how they seem to think that a Christian is a Christian is a Christian and there should be no diversity of opinion.)

As you may or may not know, one of the bitter pills that far-righters have to swallow with The Book of Daniel is the depiction of the gay son of an Episcopal priest. The typical far-righter views this as, well, not just impossible but blasphemous, heretical, insulting, immoral, part of the homosexual agenda, etc., etc. Mostly, they vehemently deny that a gay man can possibly be Christian, citing the same handful of Bible verses we’ve all heard a million times before. They use the most inflammatory language possible to make their point (usually, the very words of the Bible). Most of the posters-the vast majority I would say-disagree, sometimes with spectacular and entertaining results.

However, the true fireworks began over the weekend when Jack Kenny himself, creator of The Book of Daniel, popped in to politely suggest that a blog sponsored by an Episcopal church (“the Episcopal church welcomes you”), populated with predominately liberal thinkers, might not be the best place to espouse far-right conservative doctrine. He also (quite rightly, and also very politely) expressed his displeasure that his creative work had been called “trash” and worse, and then he did the unthinkable: He suggested that the kind of doctrine that far-righters believe could lead directly to a Matthew Shephard incident.

Well, that was like blood to a shark.. the far-right good ol’ boys jumped all over him, rebuked and insulted him and his show, and effectively drove him off the blog by casting verbal stones. It was quite a disgustingly un-Christian display. I and some others got a few retaliatory shots in before the moderator came along to (correctly) put everyone in timeout. But sadly, I was unable to post this little gem to a narcissistic fellow named Tom Watkins who took great delight in attacking me and everyone else personally:

“Can you respond to my points without sarcasm? If not you will only prove me right.”

What exactly IS your point? I couldn’t find it among all that slithery verbiage. The undeniable pomposity of it does not give me much incentive to look very hard, either. Your words are irrelevant anyway… your intent is what matters, and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that you are trying hard to drive Mr. Kenny off this blog for the simple pleasure of it, so that fans of The Book of Daniel are denied the opportunity to hear his insights into the show, while simultaneously trying to embarrass the Episcopal Church in the process.

Ah, the old “if you don’t respond, you prove me right” trick. (Makes me think of Stephen Colbert’s “if you don’t invite me on your show, you’re a coward” bit.) As it turns out, I didn’t respond before he slunk off in a victorious huff. Another poster responded and generally echoed my sentiments anyway.

So today, after a restless night of angry mental conservative-bashing, I’m pondering this recent nugget of wisdom by a prominent far-right poster, who always feels compelled to post the last word (and the first and middle words, too):

As for homosexuality — sigh, again — Paul himself calls it “perversion”. You cannot just dismiss Paul; He was an apostle of Christ, and therefore carried the authority of Christ. Jesus Himself said that those He called to be apostles would preach and teach in his name with his authority.

I’m not a biblical scholar by any means, in fact I freely admit that I have never read the work completely, but perusing through Wikipedia’s biblical resources gives me ample reason to wonder about Paul. Wikipedia gives the impression that Paul was not named as one of the original twelve disciples, but was declared an apostle in Acts, a work apparently credited to Paul’s friend Luke (who was also not one of the twelve).

My questions are: Assuming Wikipedia is correct (and I’d have to think there’d be quite an uproar if they were too far off-base about the Bible), where is the objective scriptural evidence to suggest that Paul really spoke for Jesus? It looks to me like Paul basically wrote the evidence himself, through his friend Luke, and then went on to establish Christianity as we know it. Again, I’m not a scholar, but that seems to cast some small glimmer of doubt on Paul’s authority in these matters. I think it’s also worth noting that Jesus himself speaks no words about homosexuality. Thus we are left to extrapolate from his example, which I think is fair to say was very inclusive of the minority groups of his day.

But in the spirit of global harmony, and to respect the wishes of the blog’s moderator, I’m not going to post this thought-provoking commentary for any of the far-righters to feast upon. It’s quite clear that they would just pounce into action and start repeating their inerrant talking points of God again, without any more substantive defense than, “because that’s what God wants.”

But it does make one think, doesn’t it? (Well, it makes some of us think, anyway.) What exactly is this Christianity thing all about, anyway?

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