I FB-shared this article because, as Irin Carmon says “Dear everyone asking what it is about Republican candidates and their clumsy talk about rape: This is a feature, not a bug.”
The title of the article is “Does God Want You To Be Raped?” I didn’t comment any further, because that was the message and I didn’t want to derail it with unrelated thoughts. That’s what my blog is for.
So, to derail – Of course that’s what god wants!
Or rather, if you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient god, then he is at least OK with it.
It’s this sort of ethical quandary with Liberal Christians that throws me into fits. The Fundamentalists are morally repugnant, but they are intellectually honest. They say “Yeah, god’s fine with that. He does want you to get raped, because the clothes you’re wearing offended him,” or some shit. I can engage these sorts of monsters head-on.
Liberal Christians are, in day-to-day life, cool with me. I want to encourage the people who have to be religious to be so in the least damaging way possible. One that respects human rights, defends the Enlightenment, and supports science. I can’t be an advocate of drug legalization and be unwilling to live in a society with some drug use. These are good people, we all have our vices, and it’s a pleasure to live alongside them. But then they ask the rhetorically stupid question “Does God Want You To Be Raped?” It’s very hard not to engage them and tell them YES. According to your beliefs, HE DOES. So don’t try to use that to score any points!
And that leads me to my ethical conundrum. I want the world to have less bad people (Fundies) and more good people. I consider liberal christians to be good, so where possible it’d be desirable to step them down from fundamentalism to liberalism. But that feels like lying to them. Ok, screw feels like, that IS lying to them. It’s very hard for me to do that. It’s all I can do it keep my mouth shut when a liberal preacher is trying to make points. Hell, this blog post is proof I can’t even do that, I have to rant about it somewhere, even if it’s just in the privacy of my blog.
I think maybe this is the way to go. I’m usually able to not interfere in public. Maximizing Obama Christians while minimizing Phelps Christians is good, yeah? Just release the pressure in private. It’s like fighting in WWI. You may want to knock the silly-looking Beret right off that French dude’s head, but he’s there in the trenches with you fighting against the Krauts. Just complain about it in private back at the English Pub and be happy those guns are on this side of No-Man’s-Land.