Don’t confuse people for their religion

Earlier this morning I got into a small facebook argument about conservative Christians and sexuality when one of the people involved said:

“it’s important not to confuse these people with their religion.”

I can provide the full discussion for anyone who wants to make sure I’m not taking this out of context, but the way I understood what he was saying was that an individual (or group of individuals) who claim to be X should not be confused with X when they don’t actually follow X.

For example earlier this week a crazy lady tried to attack a painting saying that it was homosexual and evil for showing two women with their breasts exposed. Now this lady is crazy, there’s no doubt, but she claims her motivation is her religious views. There are plenty of conservative religious people (across all faiths, but primarily Christianity and Islam) who view the human body and any form of sexuality as evil.

When the person in the afore mentioned facebook argument said not to confuse people for their religion, he was saying that although these people claim their views on sexuality are Christian and are rooted in the bible, they’re not, and as such we should not confuse these “Christians” for being “Christians.”

But that just begs the question: What is a person’s religion if not the sum of their personal beliefs?

A group of “Christians” who would ascribe to said crazy lady’s views on the human body would undoubtedly say that they were Christians and that anyone who did not view the body as evil were not “true” Christians. The term Christian is essentially a useless term as it means whatever anyone wants it to mean. (Which royally pisses me off because any attempt at making words useless and thus making it harder to communicate concepts/ideas just reeks of 1984 style new-speak; but I digress)

If group X claims they belong to religion Y, and that their beliefs come from religion Y’s holy book, book Z, but nobody in group X has read or cares to read book Z, then isn’t their religion just whatever group X wants it to be?

Sure, their sexually oppressive version of Christianity might not be what Christianity is to you, but it is their version of Christianity and they’re going to call themselves Christians.  Are they wrong? They sure as hell think you are. Who’s right? Well nobody since it’s all “just a matter of faith and interpretation.”

In reality you can’t “confuse people for their religion;” whatever they say their religion is, that’s their religion. The 9/11 hijackers were Muslims, so too are the Muslims who say what the 9/11 hijackers did was despicable and un-Islamic. Abortion clinic bombers and the Westboro Baptist Church are Christians, so too are the liberal, gay-friendly, pro-choice Catholics. They all claim the same meaningless title to describe their radically different faiths. This in turn just inhibits our ability to discuss them and the views they have because the moment you use the term “Christian” to talk about the Westboro Baptist Church, another “Christian” with a different definition will jump up and scream that you’re generalizing and mis-representing the “true” Christians like them. (But I guess for some people muddying the water and making it harder for us to express ideas by requiring extremely specific, legalistic language is a good thing. Personally, whenever someone tries to inhibit the discussion of ideas, that’s a sign that they’re automatically wrong.)

How else are we to discuss these people if not by the meaningless title they choose to call themselves? Should we adopt an ever expanding system of Christian 1, Christian 1a, Christian 1b, etc? That would be impossible to keep track of, and yet again everyone would argue about what classification they get. Perhaps if we copied how we classified various animals by Life-Domain-Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species and created a similar system for religious belief? Maybe then we can stop confusing lions for mammals and Christians for Christians.

Woman has orgasm while voting- commercial

Recently the Young Socialist Party of Catalunya (in Spain) resealed this ad to encourage people to vote.

Now apparently people from both sides of the political spectrum have come out to criticize this ad as “highly offensive.”

A woman having an orgasm is highly offensive? Seriously? Meanwhile people think stuff like this is perfectly ok:

What I think is going on here is a perfect example of how people feel threatened by female sexuality. “A woman enjoying herself! Oh my heavens no! Women are supposed to be asexual angelic beings!” What’s the saying? “Nine out of ten women dislike sex, and the tenth is a prostitute.” People are just so unnerved at any public acknowledgement that women can enjoy sexual pleasure. In private, sure, but in public women must conform to the double standard and be sexless.

Shame on you Spain, and shame on everyone who is so prudish and repressive to feel offended by this ad.

Gender specific insults

So earlier today some lady on the road really pissed me off. Being human, I mentally shouted a slur at her as I swerved past.  Afterwards I realized that the slur I had mentally shouted had been a sexualized slur. I did it unconsciously, not actually giving any thought to this woman or her sexuality, but nonetheless I realized this after the fact.

Have you ever realized how sexualized insults are in American English? I wonder if it’s a cultural thing. I studied German back in university and I remember that a lot more of their insults revolved around cleanliness. Sure they had sexual insults, but you would never hear an American calling someone filthy swine.

It seems that in my culture when you want to insult a woman, you make some claim about her sexuality and promiscuity. When you want to insult a man, you make some comment about his manhood, usually equating him to being a woman. What gives? I know patriarchal Victorian attitudes about sex and gender roles are at the heart of it, but I’m dismayed that such attitudes have survived subconsciously in our language.

Driving in that car, I had no grounds from which to speculate as to the other driver’s sexuality or promiscuity. I’m a little ashamed that I automatically mentally spit out such an insult. At least it provided me with some food for thought. I’m going to have to work to undo the subconscious societal training and come up with more creative, gender neutral insults for idiots.

The human body and the holocaust

I have a feeling this will be another strange post. You see, I’ve just spent the night watching more foreign films dealing with beautiful people fighting, loving, and dying amid one of the darkest periods in human history; and it’s 3am, I’m exhausted.

Allow me to let you in on something a little personal: I often spend time thinking about the human body. No, not in the way you’re thinking a normal 20 something guy would think of human bodies, particularly female bodies, though that is a part of it. Most of the time it’s more of a detached, clinical observation; though to be honest it’s a mix of both, sensual and clinical. The whole thing is somewhat mystical to me, the way you might lie in bed examining the body of a lover; slowly gliding your fingers over their skin, taking note of the texture, the rise and falls of their curves, the soft malleability of their flesh, or the strength and elegance of their collarbone.

The paradox is intriguing to me. While the human body can be a graceful work of art, almost ethereal, at the same time it can be gritty and dirty; unkempt hair, sweat, grime, blood. Without proper grooming and hygiene, we can be a real mess. But the dualities don’t end at aesthetics. While the human body can be soft and delicate, we are able to build powerful machines and structures out of steel. Though we lack thick protective skin, or claws for self defense, we make up for it with tools and ingenuity. To highlight this contrast, imagine people going about their jobs, yet doing so in the nude. (And please leave the crass sexualization for the children, that’s not what I’m going for here) In the middle of a hard, sterile, mechanical environment we have these soft and delicate bodies that created it. It’s hard to try and explain this through words. What I’m trying to express is a thought that is very sensory in nature. Trying to translate how a thought feels, tastes, sounds, and looks like is hard to translate into text, so lets move on.

Maybe it’s the humanist in me, or an extension of that mystical feeling I feel about the human body, but we really are fascinating creatures. Yes, a machine can do something a million times with laser precision, but humans are just so versatile. While we divide up into various social and economic classes, and vary in degrees of intelligence, we all have basically the same potential. For example, the janitor who cleans a building, their job does not make them any less of a human than the CEO of the company they work for. If you took that janitor and trained them intensively, they would be able to do the things the CEO does, it’s just a matter of education and training. (Now obviously janitors don’t become CEOs, but that’s a symptom of society and some starting off in more advantageous positions than others, not because there is an inherent difference between people)

So where does the holocaust come into all of this? Well since I look at the human body as works of art, and value the potential of every human being, the holocaust is something that deeply interests and disturbs me. The wholesale, systematic slaughter of millions of people… It’s just beyond me. I may really hate somebody, but I can’t escape the fact that they are human. I still see them the way the curious lover does. Thus it’s beyond me how you could hurt something like that, let alone pack millions into freight cars and slaughter them.

Seriously, what’s going through this soldier’s mind? How can he not see that the mother and her daughter that is is about to murder are people? It just baffles me. People have been committing atrocities like this for millenniums, it still goes on today, though not as grand and mechanized as in the 1940’s.  How can we live with ourselves? I think most people just ignore it or put it out of their minds. I’m not sure we are able to fully comprehend the horror of what we do to one another. I’ve heard stories about soldiers who liberated the death camps, how many of them could never sleep well for the rest of their lives, how some could never forget the stench of the mountains of dead. I think to fully comprehend the horror would destroy you. My thesis advisor in college was a holocaust historian for a while. He had to stop because it was destroying his humanity just talking about it. He said he went numb and the numbers and atrocities blurred together, that if he hadn’t changed subjects he would have committed suicide.

How are we capable of such acts? How can we do such a thing to something a beautiful and amazing as a human being? I guess it’s also part of our duality;  we have the capacity for great goodness, and the capacity for unspeakable evil.

The pope and condoms

Well, the pope is at it again. He’s in Africa preaching the evils of condom use. In the most AIDs ridden part of the planet he’s denouncing condoms as “not the answer.” This is appalling because condoms are the most effective strategy to fighting AIDs according to the World Health Organization. When used correctly condoms can prevent an infection 98-99% of the time!

The pope’s answer? Just don’t have sex. How realistic. Just come on in Africa and try to impose your twisted ideas of sex and morality of a people suffering from a humanitarian crisis. People are going to have sex. They always have and always will. That’s a fact! Ideally the pope would like all the Africans to have christian marriages, join the catholic church, have copious amounts of children, and pay as big of a tithe as possible to fill his coffers. Not going to happen.

What the pope is doing is nothing short of encouraging mass death and suffering in the name of his fucked up ideas on sexuality and his invisible make believe god. As such he should be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity.