Yeah, I think I'm in the same boat as Quesi. I've got a lot of religious friends but they tend not to post religious things to post them. Instead, they tend to pepper regular posts with religious language. My aunt for example, recently put up a picture with me and my brother and our cousin, who had just got out of rehab at the time, after having had a motorcycle accident. The quote was:
"We thank God that the injuries he sustained are healing quickly and he can return home to Chicago.... Aint God good!!"
I really don't see why I should take issue with the God bit. I share her sentiment exactly. Dude is lucky to be alive after that.
On a side note, I wish I would have had the foresight to get the video that one of my cousin's boys took. (He can't seem to figure out how to email it to me and he doesn't want to post it publicly. And I don't want him to.) My cousin, who it should be noted is one of the most magnetic brothers ever to exist, was left alone for all of one minute when we went to this bar...somewhere in the East Bay, I think we were in Hayward, I don't remember. We come back and dude's got this crazy ass girl sitting in his lap. He's in a wheelchair mind you. And for whatever reason (I'd been drinking, so I don't recall exactly) he tells old girl to pray for him or his recovery or whatever. So she's praying for him, hands clasped and all that. All the while, she's sitting in my cousin's lap while he's putting his face in her back, touching on her hips and pantomiming like he's smacking her booty. It was one of the most surreal things I've ever seen.
I say that to say this. I think it's pretty telling that a good Christian woman will sit in your lap and pray for you while they're trying to get in your pants. So nah, I don't take a lot religious language they use all that seriously. I think we're all motivated by more or less the same sorts of impulses, regardless of who we believe is or isn't in charge of the universe.
And as far as that exchange about marriage goes, I didn't read the whole thing. But from what I can tell, it demonstrates what I think is one of the greatest evils that religion can do. You see, I was pretty homophobic growing up. But I grew out of it. I got to know gay people and it just became impossible for me to maintain the thought that what they were doing was somehow wrong. I can find no logical reason why two men or two women shouldn't be together in the same way that an opposite sex couple might be together. And I can find no good reason for the state not to recognize that. Religion, however, can provide that reason. It can enshrine that gut-level revulsion of homosexuality that I felt in my youth as something to be held up as true, rather than what it was: something I needed to get over....something that we need to get over.
So yeah.
Peace
