When I got religion, I got a lobotomy

What is your view on Christianity and it stance on homosexuality?

I think that the so-called Religious Right has hijacked Christianity and molded it into its own twisted vision. They’ve taken this beautiful story of a man, so full of love that he sacrificed his life so that people would be saved, and made it into a hate rhetoric.

The problem with these people is that they’ve been taught that faith equals lobotomy. It’s like accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior means that they don’t become responsible for anything anymore; as long as they live their life according to the gospel as interpreted by some other person, they will have a happy life and go to heaven.

They never stop to think, is it possible Billy Graham’s interpretation of the Bible is wrong? Could there be some other interpretation? Maybe we should be studying Martha Graham’s interpretive dance version--the story of Noah’s ark could be like The Lion King on Broadway, wouldn’t that be fab?

When I was younger, I was taught that the Bible was the Word of God and therefore, it is infallible. In fact, I remember my Sunday school teacher telling our class that God possessed a bunch of people who wrote all the verses exactly as God whispered in their ear. I often wondered about those people and whether they should’ve been taking Prozac. Then the Bible would’ve had less incest, there would be less murder, it would be so much less Jerry Springer.

It is because of people like my Sunday school teacher that the Bible is so misunderstood. I mean, christ, people think that the universe is only 10,000 years old and that dinosaur bones were put on the Earth by God to trick us. I'm just waiting for God to come out of the Control Room in the Sky to tell us we've been punk'd.


The Museum of Earth History

I think when I went off to college, I finally understood why we can’t be lazy and let other people interpret the bible for us. All my life I had read only the Gideon version of the Bible, which was kinda like the low-fat granola version of the Bible. It omits entire sentences and re-words verses from the so-called gold standard, the King James Version. There were also other versions: The Living Bible, the Good News Bible, the Bad News Bears Bible.

And then also, I realized that all the people in the Bible, duh, they didn’t speak English. So clearly, all the bibles I’ve read in my life were translations. And anybody who is bilingual knows that there certain words, concepts, phrases in one language that do not neatly translate to another.

What if in the original bible, the one written by the Possessed Ones, ‘homosexuals’ were in fact, just men who enjoyed going to musical theatre? There is evidence that the translations to these passages can be highly subjective. The lack of lesbians in the bible also lends credence to this theory, since they would be very hard to miss driving those big rigs.

I think that the traditional religious model of having a priest/pastor/rabbi as head of a congregation can be very tyrannical. Only the religious leader is allowed to interpret God’s word. I disagree with that. If you have a dissenting view, you’re faithless and a heretic. I have a mind. I am going to use it. I propose a new religious model, possibly with a born-again Derek Zoolander--I'll start practicing my Magnum.

I’d also like to point out that Jesus was a dissenter. Think about it.

I am at peace with my religious beliefs. My relationship with God is one that I am comfortable with and nobody can tell me different.

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