When Tim asked “How the fuck did we get here?”

So a couple of weeks ago (yes, well over a month ago, geeze) I invited y’all to submit questions that I would do my dead-level best to answer.

First, your questions are far better my responses, thank goodness we’re all in this together.

Second, there are no answers, only responses. I have this weird little hang-up about using the word “answer”.  Response leaves the door open for dialogue where “answer” just sounds so definitive and final and really, who the hell am I to think I have answers??

Third, I am going to work my way through the questions one or two at a time and they will all be clearly labeled with that hideous featured image so you can easily find them (if you give a rat’s ass).

As you already can tell, these will come in fits and starts but always with sincere attention to the question being asked. Because I refuse to do them half-ass, it may take a minute to get through them all. And remember, my response is not a final word but an invitation in to deeper conversation.

Okay, first up –

Tim Wilson Brown asked

“Why do many Christians only give a fuck about who fucks who, and when? (Oh, and the use of the word “fuck” itself?)

But people are fucking dying all around the world, and we just say: “not my problem”?

I think this demonstrates fucked-up priorities.

How the fuck did we get here?

When we care more about the genders of the fucking neighbours fucking, than the fucking homeless and starving?

(Ok, so that’s kind of rhetorical and sweary, but I am genuinely interested.)”

Response: Constantine. Oh, and us.

More on history later but for the sake of getting things rolling…

Tim, I too am deeply disturbed, confused and generally pissed off by the distortion of the gospel in the hands of the empire. Throughout the centuries religion, specifically Christianity and the bible, have been used to justify oppression and to sanctify particular world views. It is simple, once you claim that God not requires but blesses enslavement, then slavery is righteous. Once you claim that women are evil creatures responsible for the fall of humankind that God has assigned to a morally, intellectually inferior status in the world whose bodies, minds and behavior are the possession of men, then you can do whatever the fuck you want with them. These are all convenient, though faithless truths for those in power and savage inequalities for those who are not.

But that is not the whole story right? What about just regular people who are not in power and are just somebody’s mamma or auntie? It seems that we are here because otherwise good and loving people are a little scared of what they do not understand, desperate to keep their world from changing, a little ignorant about how that will impact them and unwittingly being manipulated by a political machine that has convinced them that the most important thing about their faith is to obsess about how other people are bumping uglies.

To be fair, it is an easy obsession to sink into, far easier than feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the sorrowful, sheltering the destitute or beating swords into ploughshares. There are far more people suffering through unspeakable, and what seem to be unsolvable, miseries than there are lesbians like myself who just want to live and love in peace. Paralyzed by the immensity of the world’s suffering it may seem like the only control we have over our lives is to control the lives of others who do not need our time, sacrifice or resources.

In the end I think it is a complex trajectory of ignorance (it is a choice, it is unnatural, marriage has always been between one woman and one man), fear (you will look at me with lust, you will hurt my child, you will make my child gay), loathing (all who are different from me are evil), a theology of a small, stingy and mean god (he’s so small he is fully encapsulated in this one collections of books), resignation (we can never alleviate the great sufferings) and shrewd manipulation by those who know that the first three make for powerful puppet strings.

It is this last that concerns me most these days because I see otherwise good and faithful people who are themselves suffering under the boot of a system that grows increasingly corpulent and corrupt off of the ignorance, fear and loathing perpetuated by a never ending stream of lies that the media is all too happy to perpetuate. Lies so insidious that people happily bear their own throats to be slit by the religious elite in collusion with the state in the name of glorious Mammon.

PS – As for the fear of language, I am not sure why people get their knickers in a knot over words rather than the problems that provoke the words in the first place. In response to one comment by [a woman who preferred for her super common first name to be removed] who said: “Sorry. The “cussing” is just a turn off and seems a cheap way to titillate.”

[Woman who preferred for her super common first name to be removed], sorry but if the language is more of a problem than the issues that cause real, dire and often fatal frustration then perhaps you could take a moment to peek under the hood of your priorities. I do not use language in cheap ways to titillate, I am very intentional about my words and what they are conveying. Check out this post a longer response to this little comment.  Of course, folks who don’t like how I write are welcome to move along.