'Gay Curer' Psychologist Claims Africans 'Better Off' As Slaves

[Marge_Innavera]

Well said.  A friend of mine left the Catholic Church because after a while, she could no longer stand the sight of a carved, larger than life, lovingly painted with true life colors near dead corpse hanging on a ancient world torture device over the altar, staring at her.

She thought it sick, unnerving and masochistic.

My Religious Science teacher, not famous for respecting ideas that made no sense, once speculated on what sacred art would look like if the Romans had used the electric chair. He wondered what making the 'sign of the electric chair' while praying would look like, and said that "It would have to be something sort of spastic - wouldn't go down well with some of our more pious folk, you know; it might be mistaken for dancing."

[delalluvia]

My Religious Science teacher, not famous for respecting ideas that made no sense, once speculated on what sacred art would look like if the Romans had used the electric chair. He wondered what making the 'sign of the electric chair' while praying would look like, and said that "It would have to be something sort of spastic - wouldn't go down well with some of our more pious folk, you know; it might be mistaken for dancing."

Your religious teacher is not alone.  Pagan critics of early Christianity had the same thought:

"These same Christians never tire of speaking of the "Tree of Life" and of the resurrection of the flesh made possible by the tree - the symbolism being obvious if we accept their story that their master was nailed to a tree and was a carpenter by trade.  I suspect that had he been thrown off a cliff or pushed into a pit or strangled - or had he been instead of a carpenter a cobbler, stonemason or blacksmith, we would find them telling tales of a cliff of life in the heavens, or a pit of the resurrection, or a rope of immortality or a blessed stone, or the smelter of love or the holy hide of leather..."

Celsus "On the True Doctine" ca. 260 c.e.

I find this extremely funny because it's very likely exactly what would have happened.  I've read this to several very religious friends and without fail, they all get very offended.

[Marge_Innavera]

. . . . we would find them telling tales of a cliff of life in the heavens, or a pit of the resurrection, or a rope of immortality or a blessed stone, or the smelter of love or the holy hide of leather..."

Celsus "On the True Doctine" ca. 260 c.e.

I find this extremely funny because it's very likely exactly what would have happened.  I've read this to several very religious friends and without fail, they all get very offended.

The 'holy hide of leather' - couldn't help but guffaw over that.

IMO part of the taking-offense stems from the fact that these things have become sanitized over time. People wear finely crafted crosses as jewelry, and churches do endless variations on it as art, and people don't even realize anymore what the reality of crucifixion was. It was one of the methods of execution that the Romans and others used specifically to horrify witnesses.  The Passion of the Christ has been criticized for its gruesomeness and the implied sadism of its maker; but at least it didn't shrink from the reality.

What's a more significant aspect of this, IMO, is the schizoid image of a deity as both the ultimate Creator and a curiously limited being.  It posits a god who created a being with free will but apparently wasn't aware of what any human parent knows: that a being with the ability to make choices is inevitably going to make some bad choices. The Christian view of the necessity for a glorified human sacrifice is that "God's eyes are too pure to look upon sin" (making God significantly more wussy than your average cop or paramedic) and that nothing but total perfection will satisfy him, therefore no matter how hard a person tries, they need a rescuer from an outside source in order to be acceptable.

But you can't have the ability to make moral choices without being able to make the wrong ones. Moreover, the idea that human beings do have a choice to "choose Jesus or choose sin" is bogus if the penalty for the wrong 'choice' is so horrific that no sane person would really see any option. It makes the Creator of the Universe a sibling under the skin to an armed robber who claims that he gave that convenience store clerk a choice: "he could give me everything in the cash register or get shot in the head, so I have him a choice."

Believers often justify moral imperatives, whether they make any actual sense or not, as God's loving attempt to save us from the consequences; e.g., monogamy for both partners will effectively protect them from sexually-transmitted diseases. But this is supposed to be the same god who set the whole thing up in the first place; it implies that there is some more powerful deity who did that and the god that the believer is worshipping is a lesser being engaged in damage control. If your house catches on fire because lightning strikes it and then a cloudburst of rain puts the fire out, it makes little sense to say that God sent the rain: who sent the lightning to begin with?

IMO, the impossible contradictions set up can make believers very crazy.

[Kelpersmek]

I've read this to several very religious friends and without fail, they all get very offended.

I find it seems to be a general rule that a lot of religious people without fail get very offended.
It's been a long time since I have seen a headline with the word "Muslims" that does not also have the word "Outraged".

But then, if you believe in absolutes it must be very disconceting to be shown a shade of grey.  I can't speak for all religions, but the ones I know best aren't big on thinking too deeply about the tricky parts of their faith.

Any psychologist who seeks to "cure" someone of a disease that does not exist should have their title removed.  It's plain bad-science, based on bigorty and mumbo-jumbo, and nothing to do with real psychology.

[delalluvia]

The 'holy hide of leather' - couldn't help but guffaw over that.

IMO part of the taking-offense stems from the fact that these things have become sanitized over time. People wear finely crafted crosses as jewelry, and churches do endless variations on it as art, and people don't even realize anymore what the reality of crucifixion was. It was one of the methods of execution that the Romans and others used specifically to horrify witnesses.  The Passion of the Christ has been criticized for its gruesomeness and the implied sadism of its maker; but at least it didn't shrink from the reality.

What's a more significant aspect of this, IMO, is the schizoid image of a deity as both the ultimate Creator and a curiously limited being.  It posits a god who created a being with free will but apparently wasn't aware of what any human parent knows: that a being with the ability to make choices is inevitably going to make some bad choices. The Christian view of the necessity for a glorified human sacrifice is that "God's eyes are too pure to look upon sin" (making God significantly more wussy than your average cop or paramedic) and that nothing but total perfection will satisfy him, therefore no matter how hard a person tries, they need a rescuer from an outside source in order to be acceptable.

But you can't have the ability to make moral choices without being able to make the wrong ones. Moreover, the idea that human beings do have a choice to "choose Jesus or choose sin" is bogus if the penalty for the wrong 'choice' is so horrific that no sane person would really see any option. It makes the Creator of the Universe a sibling under the skin to an armed robber who claims that he gave that convenience store clerk a choice: "he could give me everything in the cash register or get shot in the head, so I have him a choice."

Believers often justify moral imperatives, whether they make any actual sense or not, as God's loving attempt to save us from the consequences; e.g., monogamy for both partners will effectively protect them from sexually-transmitted diseases. But this is supposed to be the same god who set the whole thing up in the first place; it implies that there is some more powerful deity who did that and the god that the believer is worshipping is a lesser being engaged in damage control. If your house catches on fire because lightning strikes it and then a cloudburst of rain puts the fire out, it makes little sense to say that God sent the rain: who sent the lightning to begin with?

IMO, the impossible contradictions set up can make believers very crazy.

Well said Marge.  I agree completely.  The 'free choice' I remember being offered when I was a Christian I had a hard time differentiating from extortion.  If people do read the fine and not-so-fine print of their respective religions, the excesses, emotional blackmail and out and out 'setup' of the Fall would become all too clear.

This is why people don't look deeply into their religion.  It will tell them something they don't want to hear/see/do.  Same reason churches and sermons always preach the same material over and over again.  I have a hard time seeing how a pastor/minister/etc. would break with tradition and preach a sermon on the butchery in the Hebrew Bible.  He would be unable to justify the murder of men, women, children, old people and pregnant women at the word of god just because they wouldn't convert.

And yes Kelper, I imagine that the many 'outraged' Muslims I read about is akin to the 'outraged' Christians in this country.  A very loud minority.  Or at least I hope so.  On another board, one wag commented that it would be a much shorter list to make of things that DON'T make a Muslim outraged than what does.

[Marge_Innavera]

This is why people don't look deeply into their religion.  It will tell them something they don't want to hear/see/do.  Same reason churches and sermons always preach the same material over and over again.  I have a hard time seeing how a pastor/minister/etc. would break with tradition and preach a sermon on the butchery in the Hebrew Bible.  He would be unable to justify the murder of men, women, children, old people and pregnant women at the word of god just because they wouldn't convert.

That's part of the static nature of so many traditional religions that have the notion of God making certain statements to select people, or in some cases via book publishing,    which purported events took place thousands of years ago when people didn't even know what drove weather patterns or how contagious disease spread.  The notion that the creator of Universe being so obsessed with the doings of one dominant species on one planet might not have been hard for educated people to buy into centuries ago - though they would have done well to wonder why God's earthly doings were confined to the Middle East and the Mediterranean region - but today it's something many people try to accept without looking at it too closely.