Things are not always as they seem.

February 6, 2010 by Pastor Dan.

Thanks to my friend Jay who runs this quote at the bottom of his e-mails.

“If God is telling us he can’t do anything about starving kids in the Sudan, but he has the time and energy to make gay people straight, then God is one hurting buckaroo.” — Colin McEnroe (according to the Connecticut Forum), well known Connecticut personality, witty and opinionated radio talk show host, columnist, author, social commentator, and playwright.This quote messes with our sense of God— long enough for a quick chuckle —but it really should mess with our sense of ourselves and for quite a long time. The starving kids of Sudan have fallen off the front page, but the homeless and orphaned kids of Haiti are on the front page. Human disasters are not God’s fault (like an earthquake is an “act of God”!) The disasters of humanity are human-caused disasters. Human beings generally have a weird sense of blaming God for tragedy and expecting God to deliver a miracle for human-made events over which we have control anyway, if we would accept responsibility, stop passing blame, and share our resources.Earthquakes would not harm people if humans hadn’t constructed the dangerous buildings that we live and work in. If we were all still living in the shade of big trees or thatched huts, the trees and huts might shake, we would say “wow” and that would be the end of it.People who are starving are hungry because this bountiful earth is either being pillaged or destroyed by sociopathic greed, fear, ego on the part of other human beings. There is plenty of good soil, but we allow water and land to be controlled by the rich and powerful. There is plenty of food in the world, and the human know-how to grow more. In the United States food is so over-plentiful that we have porked out — one third of all Americans are obese. Yet we want to seal our borders to keep the hungry from coming here to eat or work, and we pretend to be are completely in the dark as to why other peoples would despise Americans so much they would become our enemies. there are probably well–meaning Christians who pay to God for protection from our enemies, without realizing our own role in making enemies.

Laws and rules — the things that make criminals and sinners out of us— are humanly determined. Yes, I know about the Ten Commandments, but they don’t’ say a word about, for example, “controlled substances,” the age of majority and statutory rape, moving violations, or derivatives and securities. We have made our society so complex that it creates both the crime and the occasion for wrong-doing. Our human complexity amplifies the human tendency to be greedy and inconsiderate.

There are a higher percentage of people in U.S. prisons than any other nation. Are those people all better people , more moral, less criminal than we are? Or have we criminalized too many things? Or have we made our fat and greedy nation a magnet for bad human behavior. There are more Catholic marriages annulled in the United States than the rest of the world combined (according to an AP report in late January). Could it be that our holy rules about marriage and divorce are the real cause of this? Or do Americans have more ridiculous expectations, which contribute to failed relationships, out of proportion to most other countries?

Human rules, constructions and expectations about sexuality cause our strange expectations and constructions about the divine. Somebody, or the entire aggregate of cultural attitudes reinforced by despicably false religion, has insisted that homosexuality is a choice, so therefore a bad choice. False religionists have deduced from those false premises the idiotic ideas that gay and lesbian people should and therefore must unchoose what they have chosen (even when lesbian and gay people overwhelmingly insist they didn’t choose their sexual orientation); and have created a whole industry set up to fake this un-choosing and re-choosing of sexual orientation.

They have the nerve to call this “reparative therapy.” Therapy is a word that means the treatment or curing of a disorder. But genuine therapists have been saying for 30 years that being gay or lesbian is not a disorder, and yet “pretend-therapists” steal the word and slap it on to something which isn’t broken, doesn’t need fixing, and can’t be changed anyway. Then those same screwballs attempt to put the monkey on God’s back, supposing that if lesbian and gay folks really turn to God, God will make them straight.

Go figure. Is it any wonder that 20-somethings want little to do with the Christian faith when it has already been hijacked? If only we could realize that the fundamentalist agenda is not genuine, that it has little to do with being Christian and nothing to do with Jesus. And that the monkey is on their own backs.

—Pastor Dan Hooper

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