God Hates "God Hates Fags"
If you've been paying any kind of attention to the news in the U.S. recently, you know that over the last few years there's been a war on homosexuality and abortion going on in the United States. The Westboro Baptist Church pickets soldier funerals. Individual States are waging internal wars on gay marriage, and all of this is happening because those things are against God's Will. But are they really?
I'm a mathematician at heart, and mathematicians prove (or disprove) things using preconditions and logic. So let's take a moment to think about God logically. For the sake of this article, let's assume that the Christian Bible is accurate in all ways: God not only exists, but created the Universe and everything in it. For the sake of pronoun simplicity, let's assume God is a He. He made the world, and later sent down His only son Jesus to share His message of love and tolerance. And with that as the groundwork, let's take a closer look at things.
If God created us, then God gave us Free Will, because that's part of the package. Free Will is basically license to do as we think or feel is right for us at the time, without God having to hold our hand through all of it; He trusts us to run our own lives the way we think they should be run. What that means is that it's God's Will for us to exercise our Free Will as we see fit; that's why He gave it to us. He's not trying to micromanage every last bit of our lives, He's saying "Take care of yourself, and report back to me at the end of it all." Based on what's in the Bible, God wants you to make your own decisions, and hopefully they'll be moral and compassionate ones; so even if you want to live your life according to God's Will, His Will is for you to think for yourself. If that wasn't His Will, then He wouldn't have given us Free Will of our own, because He knows how we'll use it, and if He didn't want us to do that, He wouldn't have let us.
So what does that mean on a practical level? It means if you want to spend 18 hours a day playing video games, that's you exercising your Free Will, so you playing video games is part of God's Plan. If you want to study Islam and immerse yourself in the culture of Iran, that's part of God's Plan. If you get pregnant and decide to have an abortion, you're exercising your Free Will to make that decision, so that's part of God's Plan too. By definition, everything that happens is part of God's Plan, which means on a purely religious level, everything that happens is happening exactly the way that it should, purely on the grounds that it's happening at all.
Not only that, but God also insists that we love ourselves, and embrace our emotions. So if you're gay, God doesn't want you to stifle those emotions - though you're free to do so if you so choose - He wants you to embrace them and act upon them. If you're gay, God wants you to be gay, because you being gay is part of His Plan. And at the same time, if you neglect those feelings and try to force yourself to be straight, then since you're exercising your Free Will to do that, that's also part of His Plan. That may seem a little confusing - His Plan is for gay people to both be fine with being gay and to hide being gay - but the point is that He wants you to figure it out yourself, and whatever conclusion you come to, that's okay with Him, because it's your decision. He gave us Free Will, so He wants us to use it as we see fit.
Now let's talk about Jesus for a moment. Jesus was sent by God to be His messenger, and he shared two specific messages: Love everyone as if they were your own flesh and blood; and Judge not lest ye be judged. There was more, but the bible is hundreds of pages long, and this is a short article, so I can't go digging into all of it; we're simplifying it a little for the sake of brevity.
Jesus said to him, "If you wish to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
This is repeated a number of times in the Bible. So why do so many rich people claim to be Christian?
That first message is one of tolerance. Jesus fed the homeless, healed the sick regardless of their health insurance, was pacifistic, cared for the needy, and genuinely loved everybody he met. Not only was that his ethos, it's the one he was trying to instill in all of us while he was here. Basically, the message is that God loves everyone, regardless of their gender, age, orientation, or religious beliefs (you're free to not believe in Him at all if you want, and He's okay with that). God loves everyone, and so too should you.
The second message basically says that it's not our job to judge each other, and we shouldn't be doing it; that's God's job. The basic theory here is that since we are all sinners, we're all guilty of something, and so we can't possibly have the moral high ground. The only one who is sinless is God, so God is the only one who gets to pass judgment on us, and He'll be doing that after we each come up to see him in person. Even if someone does something specifically forbidden in the Bible, only God gets to pass judgment based on it; your job is to leave it alone and let God sort it out.
So what happens when we put those two teachings together? Love everyone equally regardless of circumstance, and don't judge them? Well, based on observation, what we get is people picketing gay marriage because God hates fags. That's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there, don't you think? We've already established that God doesn't hate anybody, which means the people carrying those signs are at best incorrect, and at worst knowingly corrupting God's message. Moreover, it's not God judging those people, it's the picketers judging those people in the name of God. That's like killing in the name of Gandhi: the actions bear no resemblance to the subject's message at all.
Gay people are exercising God's Will just fine. The picketers are protesting God's Will, and doing so by judging when they shouldn't be, and hating when they should be accepting. And wedged between those two extremes is everyone else, who are somewhere between approving of gay marriage, and hating it but not preaching that hate in person. That means that out of everyone, it's the picketers, who claim to be visiting God's Will and message upon the sinners, who are the least Christ-like.
To put this another way, who do you think is more likely to go to Heaven: someone who acted peacefully and in accordance with their heart, or someone who preached hate in God's name?
People claim that the United States is a Christian nation. A Christian nation would be full of love and acceptance, where people care for each other indiscriminately, they let everyone do what they think is right for themselves, and even if you disagree intensely with your neighbor or the things they do or say, you still love and respect them despite your differences; a place where if you thought your neighbor had sinned against God, you would keep your own council, because God will judge that person Himself when the time comes. Instead, the United States is a place of inequality, bigotry, racism, violence, and hatred. That is not a Christian nation; the United States is not a Christian nation. If it was, everybody would be much better off.
Merry Christmas.