Facepalm: verb. to raise one’s hand to one’s face, typically expressing exasperation, frustration, disbelief, horror or general woe in the presence of the burning stupid.
Greetings web denizens, heathens, zealots and the rest of you!
So after my recent column and follow up commentary here on the Grant Rant Blog, I was lucky enough to receive this email. And by “lucky” I mean lucky in the same way one is lucky to have a root canal done by a blind, drunken dentist with no thumbs. And while I give its author credit for using his full name in the email rather than hiding behind a handle, Donny’s missive is still a fine example of the burning stupid. Here it goes, with my commentary:
Donny: when you tell God f****ts are okay —- you are telling him your word means NOTHING!!! Why sing the national anthem asking God to bless your land when he looks at it in disgust.
As readers of the rant know, I am an atheist. I don’t “tell” a god anything … well, except for Thor when there are frost giants about. I hate those guys. Anyway, if I allow myself to play a thought experiment for a bit, if the average Christian concept of god is true — an all powerful, all benevolent, all loving creature — why would it hate anything? Why would it possess so petty a human emotion? Why would it hate the honest expression of love between two consenting adults, straight or gay? I’ve never understood why some believers insist upon defining their god as someone who love you, and then proceeds to crank out of list of things it hates and will torture you for.
If the god Donny here believes in existed, and fortunately it doesn’t, it would have to be opposed on basic moral grounds for it would be, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, a deeply unpleasant creature: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Donny: Look at all the tornadoes in Oklahoma – all because of a Gay pride parade. God destroyed Sodom & Gomorraha because he calls homosexuality an abomination………
Ah, yes, the 700 Club, human sexual behavior model of meteorology. I don’t have a degree in tornadology, but I am pretty sure that they are formed by the interaction of cold and warm air during a supercell thunderstorm in the part of the world that sees this type of weather event more than anywhere else.
Or by Thor. Take your pick.
All kidding aside, this sort of thinking is no different that a belief that throwing a virgin into a volcano will prevent an eruption. Fortunately, we aren’t living in caves anymore, we know for a fact that who we sleep with, or marry, or what food we eat, or crops we grow, or clothes we wear, or what days of the week we work doesn’t impact the weather. At all. To believe otherwise is to live one’s life under the gravest of misapprehensions.
By the way, since we are on the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is worth pointing out a bit of the story Donny has failed to mention. In it, two angels hit the city of Sodom looking for enough good people to prove to god that it is not beyond saving. But Sodom is kind of like the angry love child of Las Vegas and Mad Max’s Thunderdome. So naturally, the two supernatural tourists are chased down by a rape gang. They find shelter with a dude named Lot, but the gang isn’t about to let that stop them. They really want to a piece of these angels. Lot, being an upstanding and moral guy, offers to give his own teenaged daughters to the rape gang in exchange for leaving the two visitors alone….and Lot is the hero of the story! Seriously.
Donny: Today newspaper people don’t have the guts to report the truth most are cowards —– Canada is a disgusting country in the gutter with a f****t Premier and I am so glad I no longer live there.
You know, I am never one to believe in blind patriotism. It is, as Oscar Wilde said, the “virtue of the vicious.” Nevertheless, Canada remains a fantastic country with a proud history. We have our issues, our mistakes and missteps, but it remains one of the freest, safest, and best places to live on Earth. We should be proud that, for most of us, gay marriage is a non-issue and that our government had the courage to do what was right and make it legal several years ago. We should be proud that we have reached a point where the sexual orientation of our Ontario premier is simply not a relevant issue (except for good ole Donny here) save for the fact that is shows we are increasingly willing to judge people by their character and ideas and not by bigotry of a bronze aged religion.
I think I speak for many of us, Donny, when I say we are quite happy you aren’t living here. But be warned, the world is an increasingly shrinking place. The march of freedom and equality is not so easily stopped and sooner or later, it will catch up with you. So unless you can find yourself a time machine to go back to 18th century (I suspect you’d be happy there) you’d might as well get used to it.
Read the bible Grant – read Lev. and see what your creator said and guess what 10 out of 10 people die and they face God…..and queers do not go to heaven by their own choice. Wake up Pal!!
I almost don’t have the energy to keep going with this. Yes, I have read it. More than once. It’s an awful book with worse writing than than Fifty Shades of Grey. (A book that would have been popular in Las Sodom Thunderdome, no doubt.) It is little more than an artifact of a primitive, fearful and paranoid culture that knew next to nothing about the world they lived in or the greater universe beyond it. They lived in a world where the only explanation for the things that nature does was the actions of an angry god and finding ways to sate that rage was a serious concern.
Fortunately, we’ve moved on since then.
Donny: “Wake up every day like you are broke and hungry and you will never be either.”…
Uh, no. If you wake up like you are broke and hungry, you probably are broke and hungry. If you are neither but pretend you are, you need serious help.
