A missed point

[avevale_intelligencer]

With trepidation (and probably softening of the brain) I dip my toe into the burning petrol again...

filkertom and others have been commenting on Obama's appointment of an anti-gay-marriage pastor to speak at his inauguration, and asking, with brows furrowed in honest puzzlement, "how does someone else's marriage affect him?"

To ask this, to assume that this is the important question, is to miss the point by a hundred and thirty seven miles, as I've pointed out on a number of occasions, and to fail to understand your opponents by that much is to diminish to a serious degree your chances of ever reaching an accommodation with them, which short of killing them is the only way to end this rhubarb.

Disclaimer that no-one ever reads: I do not agree with these people nor am I opposed to gay marriage as should have been obvious to anyone who reads this journal at all regularly. I've taken my knocks for uncomplicatedly opposing Prop 8, so you could at least listen to me while I explain this about the other side to you.

Assuming for the moment, outlandish as it may seem, that this Warren person is sincere in his Christian belief...it doesn't have to affect him. There's this story, see, that the Christians tell, about a guy who got mugged and was lying in the road wounded and broke, and only one person stopped and helped him, and that was the ideal held up by Jesus to his disciples. It didn't affect the man from Samaria that this guy had got himself robbed and beaten, but he saw a fellow human being in trouble and wanted to help.

Now supporters of Prop 8, those who are sincere in their beliefs (yes, I know that phrase doesn't compute because you can't imagine how anyone could sincerely believe such nonsense, just file it somewhere and move on), they see a whole lot of people in trouble with God. God (and I've said this before as well) isn't a choice to them, he's not negotiable. He's like gravity. He's THERE and he has RULES and if you break them you will go to HELL and that's true as far as they know whether they like it or not. It really isn't any of their business who other people marry...but they wouldn't be good Christians if they did not try to save people from the pains of hell, and if that means dissolving marriages that are not made according to the rules of their God, then they'll do it. Not to interfere would, to them, make them the same as those people who stood by while Kitty Genovese was murdered.

None of that matters to the people whose marriages, legally entered into, are now threatened, of course, or to those whose view of God is more modern and flexible and New Testament, or to members of other faiths, or to atheists. And you don't have to try to get inside these people's heads, to understand that they genuinely think they're helping. But it might help to bring a good ending to this fight just a little closer.

Comments

[rozk.livejournal.com]

In the end, my anger with that sort of Christian derives, in part, from the arrogance with which they hold beliefs for which, even within their system, there is comparatively little justification. They suffer from spiritual pride, almost all of them, one of the sins which the Gospels condemn most - they are not even prepared to consider the possibility that they might be mistaken, and that unpreparedness is a sin both according to their own beliefs and a more humanist one.

There is a wilful stupidity to, say, Rick Warren's claim that, if Darwin were true, homosexuality would have been bred out of the species, a claim that is wrong on so many levels, and involves so many crass misunderstandings both of science and of human behaviour that it is hard to know where to begin. People who follow a man like that have sacrificed intellectual awareness, and spiritual rigour, for the lazy comfort of a morality which is mostly about disapproving of other people. Kierkegaard somewhere compares the behaviour of most believers to schoolkids who copy the answers out of the back of the book rather than working it out for themselves.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying they're right, or even that their good intentions are enough to excuse them. I understand and respect your anger. Wilful stupidity is one of the hardest kinds to get rid of, especially in oneself as I know only too well.

But if they merely disapproved, if that were all or even most of what their morality were about, they would happily stand by and let all the sinners go to hell, figuring that that would leave more heaven for them. Their morality does not allow them that lazy comfort. Unlike, say, Calvinists, they have to believe that everyone can be saved, and that it is their job to save them.

They are, to develop Kierkegaard's analogy, like schoolkids who see other kids getting the answers wrong, and give them the answers from the back of their book. The fact that the other kids are working from a different book, or no book at all, is not something for which they should be blamed, or at least not if that blame gets in the way of understanding and reasonable dialogue. That, at least, is what I think.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

The parable of the Pharisee and the Publican seems relevant here. Christ states explicitly that the humble uncertainty of the Publican is morally preferable to the arrogance of the Pharisee who is clear of his utter probity. Christians of this stripe believe in biblical inerrancy yet fail to apply it to themselves.

The argument that you have a duty in charity to save sinners from Hell even by killing them was of course the standby of the Inquisition. Again, Jesus said that, faced with plausible new teachers, you have to judge them by their fruits - hatred and murder are not in the end signs of charity.