Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

So this week, I'm thinking of Christianity and feminism and the Bible. But first! A story. A long time ago, my friend Amanda and I were at work and she was freaking out because she'd been asked to teach Sunday school the next morning on an emergency basis and didn't know any Bible stories, aside from the one with the Disney movie. She asked me if I knew any Bible stories and I said that I did, after which I told her a few, including the zombies and stuff that a seriously-but-rightfully pissed-off God sent between the crucifixion of His kid and the rise of Jesus, also a zombie, three days later and the least gory of which was the one with Elisha and the Good News Bears, in which some kids made fun of His prophet's bald head, after which He sends forty-two bears to rend those children into bits. She told me I was never allowed to tell her children Bible stories, haha.


This first link tries to explain away and justify the story of Elisha, but no.

Yo. The Bible has mixed messages on sexuality, but none of them says that homosexuality is a sin. Surprise!

"I don't hate gay people! But I am a good Christian!": Why You Are Wrong

What I Learned About the Gospel from Drag Queens

Jesus was a feminist and so am I.

Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

So this week, I'm thinking of Christianity and feminism and the Bible. But first! A story. A long time ago, my friend Amanda and I were at work and she was freaking out because she'd been asked to teach Sunday school the next morning on an emergency basis and didn't know any Bible stories, aside from the one with the Disney movie. She asked me if I knew any Bible stories and I said that I did, after which I told her a few, including the zombies and stuff that a seriously-but-rightfully pissed-off God sent between the crucifixion of His kid and the rise of Jesus, also a zombie, three days later and the least gory of which was the one with Elisha and the Good News Bears, in which some kids made fun of His prophet's bald head, after which He sends forty-two bears to rend those children into bits. She told me I was never allowed to tell her children Bible stories, haha.


This first link tries to explain away and justify the story of Elisha, but no.

Yo. The Bible has mixed messages on sexuality, but none of them says that homosexuality is a sin. Surprise!

"I don't hate gay people! But I am a good Christian!": Why You Are Wrong

What I Learned About the Gospel from Drag Queens

Jesus was a feminist and so am I.

On Interdependence

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“The first [interpretation] is "this arises because that is," which comes down to saying that things do exist in some way, but nothing exists on its own. The second is "this, having been produced, produces that," which means that nothing can be its own cause. Or we could say that everything is in some way interdependent with the world..” –Matthieu Ricard, The Quantum and the Lotus

The postulate of interdependence in Universe in a Grain of Sand strikes me as sort of the ultimate religious syllogism; if a then b. It is, then, a logical idea; and one of words and language. It is also a religious idea, present in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Unitarian Universalism, and others. It is an economic idea and a scientific one, because all of our actions affect the world, as a butterfly might cause a hurricane vis-à-vis chaos theory. The idea of interdependence, then, is interdependent. I find this idea delightful.

"Vell, Mitt's just zis guy, you know?"*

Dressage. Really. Although I have friends whom are avid riders, I had to search to see for the definition of 'dressage'. Apparently, it's horse ballet**, and is also known as the highest expression of horse training. Regular folks - folks who work and pay taxes and worry about a mortgage - don't own dressage horses. We also don't declare a tax loss of $77,000 for the care and feeding of a dressage horse that qualifies for the next Olympics. An interesting parallel is that in 2010, the same year in which they declared that loss, the mean yearly per capita income was less than $28,000.

But, hey, he totally represents me as a citizen!***

*Zaphod is equally well-suited to be our President, and for exactly the same reasons.

**I'm not being sarcastic. That's really what it's called!

***I am totally being sarcastic.

On Abortion

So here's the deal. Thousands of children die each year because they can't find organ donors. You can donate lobes of your liver with almost no problems. Kidneys are a little more problematic, but neither even comes close to having a child, much less raising one. So, if you haven't signed up to donate one, the other or both, then you have no business voting for a law that would force someone else to donate their organs to a child without consent. This seems like simple logic to me. Again, to recap:

If you think that unborn children have a right to my organs, then actual, live children surely have a right to your organs. So put up or shut up.

Yo, Christians.

Malachi.

“Is there not one Father of us all? Did not one God create us? Why, then, does each one of us despise his brother, violating the covenant of our fathers?” -Malachi 2:10

Why do so many modern Christians despise gay people, people of color, poor people, etc.? Love them. Feed them. Heal them. LOVE THEM.