Tags
Couldn’t resist passing this on – the CoE, having just voted against same-sex marriage and women becoming bishops, is now outraged that the government has specifically excluded them from legislation allowing them to marry same-sex couples.
Wait, what?
the bishop of Leicester said: ‘We didn’t ask for it’ … and was very upset about it because it gave the impression that the Church of England were unfriendly towards gays.
So telling same-sex couples that they are not entitled to get married because they’re not ‘real’ couples is being friendly, but government legislation to exclude a homophobic organisation is not?
What gets me about organised religion is not just the things they do, but how, when they get caught out, rather than quietly admitting their hypocrisy and/or appalling behaviour, they go on the offensive with absolutely no insight whatsoever as to how they look from the outside.
That is stunning, and yet not. Yikes.
Though a religious person, there are some churches at which I want to yell “GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE EFFING MIDDLE AGES! YOU DON’T GET TO CONTROL PEOPLE’S LIVES ANYMORE!”
Not being religious, I can only theorise, but there seems to be a kind of ‘I believe in god, therefore what I say is right, therefore I don’t have to examine any area of what I say – including its internal and external logic’.
I think this is a human trait, generally, but in those particularly predisposed to it religion seems to add another set of blinkers. They can often (sort of) justify their behaviour when using the bible, but when they step outside of it, as in this case, their the total inability to parse what they have done to themselves is really funny.
Yeah, there is a particular strain of religious thought that seems to leave people with the impression that if it’s written somewhere–most especially in the Bible but not even necessarily–then they carry no personal responsibility for choosing to believe it or failing to make any assessment of whether it makes any sense at all.
“It’s not MY belief; it’s just what God says,” I hear a lot from people whose homophobia or opposition to equal rights I challenge in some way.
These are often the same people who I literally have to explain to that just because something’s written in a book or a study, doesn’t make it true.