Just a note.
As my husband and I privately predicted (he offered to lay money on it, but I refused to take the bet), Christians (and Jews) are chiming in declaring that the earthquake a couple days ago was a sign from God. Previous signs from God include birds dropping dead from the sky, a tsunami, a handful of hurricanes, another earthquake, and a spate of tornadoes.
I am a pagan who believes in the inherent good luck of black cats and finding money in the street, so when I tell you that this insistence that every act of nature is an act of God is nothing less than base superstition, no more enlightened than those who believe that cameras will steal their souls, I want you all to note the contextual irony of that statement.
I wouldn't actually care much about this, if it wasn't for the fact that between the blame-casting and the fear-mongering, many self-proclaimed 'prophets' seem to be steering the collective consciousness in the direction of using human sacrifice to appease this vengeful and destructive deity. After all, if the Joplin Tornado alone killed 159 people, and God sent the tornado because of gay people, clearly we need to get rid of the gay people to appease the deity. I'm not making a leap of logic here. Plenty of people have more or less said it outright. Troll the logs over at Right Wing Watch, or Towleroad, or even Think Progress and Media Matters which focus less of their attention on such things, and you'll find reams of dehumanizing, elimination rhetoric coming from the far Right, which shows its impact in the higher instance of violence and murder faced by GLB and especially T individuals.
Are Christians actually laying out 'sinners' on the alter of deity appeasment? No, not in so many words. I'm not accusing anyone of making deliberate human sacrifices. I'm just saying that the pattern is disturbingly familiar: base superstition + anti-intellectualism (which results in dismissing more mundane causes of natural disasters) + vengeful deity + dehumanizing rhetoric = human sacrifice. We're less direct about it these days, but really? Not by much.
I am a pagan who believes in the inherent good luck of black cats and finding money in the street, so when I tell you that this insistence that every act of nature is an act of God is nothing less than base superstition, no more enlightened than those who believe that cameras will steal their souls, I want you all to note the contextual irony of that statement.
I wouldn't actually care much about this, if it wasn't for the fact that between the blame-casting and the fear-mongering, many self-proclaimed 'prophets' seem to be steering the collective consciousness in the direction of using human sacrifice to appease this vengeful and destructive deity. After all, if the Joplin Tornado alone killed 159 people, and God sent the tornado because of gay people, clearly we need to get rid of the gay people to appease the deity. I'm not making a leap of logic here. Plenty of people have more or less said it outright. Troll the logs over at Right Wing Watch, or Towleroad, or even Think Progress and Media Matters which focus less of their attention on such things, and you'll find reams of dehumanizing, elimination rhetoric coming from the far Right, which shows its impact in the higher instance of violence and murder faced by GLB and especially T individuals.
Are Christians actually laying out 'sinners' on the alter of deity appeasment? No, not in so many words. I'm not accusing anyone of making deliberate human sacrifices. I'm just saying that the pattern is disturbingly familiar: base superstition + anti-intellectualism (which results in dismissing more mundane causes of natural disasters) + vengeful deity + dehumanizing rhetoric = human sacrifice. We're less direct about it these days, but really? Not by much.