3 & 4. Not What You'd Expect From Looking at Me

[nezumiko]

I'm going to tackle two days at once: intoxicants and religion. If you looked at me and didn't know me, you'd probably assume I was pro-drugs and anti-church, but you'd only sort of be right about that.

Comments

[nezumiko]

Um, wow, no, I wasn't thinking about the Mormons when I wrote that. I was trying to articulate my view of Universal Love and how I don't believe there are any barriers to God's love.

To the extent that I was thinking of specific religious groups or individuals, I was thinking about Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, Osama Bin Laden's brand of Islam, some of the more extreme Zionists in Israel, the Aryan Nation people, the historical Catholic Church of the Inquisition era, and loudly outspoken "celebrity" preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

I do have some issues with the LDS church's stance on homosexuality, but I don't think Mormon preaching falls into the category of outright incitement to hate, and I don't think I have ever heard from any of my Mormon friends that they have been taught they should hate. It's a more general intolerance, and one that's common to many, many conservative religions, that I'm talking about, not specifically the Mormons.

If we confine ourselves to one narrow subset of that bigger picture, as an example, and look at mainstream American conservative Christian rhetoric about homosexuality, the messages of antipathy, both subtle and outright, have so deeply colored popular thought amongst my contemporaries that it's as frightening to come out as religious to a LGBTQ audience as it must be to come out as queer to a conservative Christian one. But that's just one example.