Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
As a recovering Lutheran (Misery Synod) I cannot help but take a rather dim view of religion; a fact I point out here at the outset in the interest of full disclosure.
Like many Americans who are too dumb to turn off the TV, radio and any and all news apps on their phones, I’ve been swamped in reaction, coverage, reaction to coverage, coverage of reaction, fault finding and blame shifting related to the tragic nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida over the weekend. After the predictable, pathetic bleats for more gun control, and then after armies of arm-chair shrinks attempted to determine the terrorist’s sexual orientation postmortem, I was convinced I’d heard the dumbest stuff I would hear in relation to the tragedy. The worst was over, it had to be. Soon, the media circus will pull up stakes and leave town and we’d go back to celebrity gossip and the zika virus. Like a dummy, I forgot that the Christian far right hadn’t weighed in yet.
It’s 2016. Most of us are adults. Theoretically, all of us are human beings. Yet…
“’Are you sad that 50 pedophiles were killed today?’ Um, no, I think that’s great! I think that helps society. I think Orlando, Florida is a little safer tonight,” said Sacramento, California based Baptist preacher Roger Jimenez during his Sunday sermon, which he thought so much of he posted it on You Tube. “”I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job because these people are predators.”
Face palm.
You Tube later removed it for violating their policy on hate speech.
Much of what follows here will sound to some like I am just bashing on religion in general; and to some extent that’s true. I want to be clear, however, that my biggest problem with religion as it relates to the Orlando tragedy specifically, and to world issues generally, is that it aides and abets the primary source of all the problems facing humanity today: the inability of humans to mind their own damn business.
The entire debate over equal rights for homosexuals is an example of applied non-own-crap-minding. The tragedy in Orlando this past weekend was, at its most basic level, an extreme manifestation of non-own-crap-minding taken to a degree of unfathomable horror that, I do not believe, can be reached without being convinced one is doing god’s own work, whatever they call that god.
That Wahhabists and Salafists and some Baptists all agree on what should be done with homosexuals isn’t really surprising as they all worship the same god anyway. Christianity’s “God the Father” is the same as Islam’s “Allah,” as “Allah,” is merely Arabic for “God.” The similarities between the Old Testament and the Quran are abundant. Kosher and Halal dietary requirements are virtually the same. Many of the draconian dictates associated with Sharia law have cognates in Old Testament law. Moving forward in the Bible, Jesus Christ is revered as a prophet who sits beside Allah in heaven in the Quran, and Jesus’ mother, Mary, gets at least as much ink in that book as she does the New Testament.
I’ve always found it helpful to think of the chronological development of monotheistic religion thusly: Zoroastrianism (BASIC), Judaism 1.0, Judaism 2.0 (Christianity), Judaism 3.0 (Islam) Judaism Vista (Mormonism).
As similar as all of the Abrahamic faiths are, the similarity of the attitudes toward homosexuals among devout Muslims and devout Christians are eerily so.
“God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality,” the terrorist’s father said Monday on Facebook, later adding that humans shouldn’t do the punishing themselves, as that’s reserved for god.
“The point that I was making is if God puts the death penalty on it, God says they deserve to die, and they die, this is not something that we, as Christians, need to be mourning,” Jimenez said. “In the same way that this gunman who went in there and killed all these people, he violated Scripture. God says that he deserves to die for taking their lives. We don’t need to be mourning his death either.”
So, for Jimenez, the mass-killing was basically a win, the sinful shooter was punished for doing god’s work, but there was a net loss of 49 “sodomites.” That sort of calculation makes perfect sense to a sociopath.
Now, in common fashion comes the part where I rush to reassure you, dear reader, that I understand not all Muslims share the terrorist’s attitude toward homosexuality, nor does every Baptist share Jimenez’s psychotic mindset.
The problem is, however, that the revered prophets who “authored” the “holy” books that form the basis of those religions most certainly did have very dim views of homosexuality. It isn’t that easy, apparently, to divorce one’s contemporary opinions from the tenets of the faith they serve. A 2011 Pew Research poll found that 39 percent of Muslims said that homosexuality should be “accepted by society” versus 58 percent of the general population surveyed. Further, 45 percent of Muslims surveyed thought homosexuality should be “discouraged by society” versus just 33 percent of the general population having that worldview.
A 2014 Pew Research study of Christian attitudes toward homosexuality shows that some denominations are still as hardline on the subject as Muslims. Among members of the Southern Baptist Convention, only 30 percent believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. Other major Baptist denominations had 54 percent of their members say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Less-fundamentalist denominations had homosexuality acceptance rates that were much higher, with the Episcopalians setting the high bar at 83 percent.
So, it seems safe to say that the more fundamentalist one’s religion and the more literally they take their holy writ, the more hostile their view of homosexuality, regardless of what direction they face when they pray.
I’ve long said that the root cause of most of the problems we humans face today is that humans, by and large, don’t know how to mind their own business. While that tendency is problematic enough as it is, it can be made exponentially worse if an external force convinces a person that they are a busybody in service to god. Religious conviction is often the accelerant that turns a spark of busy-bodied-ness into an inferno of imbecilic action.
Religious conviction also blurs what should be an obvious demarcation in people’s minds between what is their concern and what isn’t. If one convinces themselves an entire country will face divine wrath because of the actions of a few “sinners,” then it becomes increasingly easy to rationalize action against said “sinners” as heroic measures taken to save a nation. Likewise, if one believes they’ll receive in the afterlife that which they could only dream of in the real world if they die in service to their god, then rationalizing evil acts becomes much, much easier. When people who aren’t wound too tight on the spool to begin with become convinced that their violent ideas have a divine blessing, it becomes impossible for them to mind their own business as they’ve lost all sight of what their own damn business even is.
Despite such delusional thinking, it bears repeating that it still is exactly none of Roger Jimenez’s business what people do for fun while naked. Nor was such any of the Orlando terrorist’s business. Nor is it ever anyone’s business as long as the aforementioned naked people are all consenting adults. Period.
The terror attack in Orlando was the confluence of many things, but the most salient of those things gets the least mention by the mainstream media, most of whom still think this is a “gun control” issue because they’re idiots. The root cause of the attack wasn’t the “easy” access to “military guns” (number of armies that issue the AR-15 worldwide = 0). It wasn’t homophobia, per se, or even homophobic busy-bodied-ness hopped-up on religious fanaticism, really. It was, at the end of the day, the inability of one deranged asswipe to mind his own damn business.
And that problem is widespread, affects people of all walks of life and will continue to contribute to the overall misery of our species until we fix it.
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