Gay People And The Strange Love of Christians

Welcome friends!

Last time out I discussed the Sultan of Brunei’s recent attempt to pander to the increasingly conservative and extremist Islamic religious sentiments in that part of the world by instituting a law requiring gay people be stoned to death if caught expressing their sexuality, a barbarous and torturous form of execution representatives of the Sultan suggested anyway was integral to Sharia or Islamic religious law.  Whenever I report on the news of the day from the more Muslim parts of the world I’m always afraid people may get the wrong end of the stick and suspect I have a particular antipathy toward the Islamic religion, which I don’t believe is really the case at all.  Indeed, I consider Islam to be a fairly typical representation of the religious mindset, which I suppose must explain why I write from a humanist rather than religious perspective.  I’m sure I must have mentioned before the similarly barbarous and gory history of Christianity, which has arguably been relatively benign the past few decades but of course was formerly the wellspring of an appalling amount of murder, torture, warfare, hatred, and discord throughout the world.  Not sure I remembered to do that last time out but fortunately I got a little dose of Christian “love” upside the head the other day to remind me.  It got me thinking about the similarities and differences in how those two great Middle Eastern religions cope or fail to cope with the existence of sexual minorities, so maybe I can just do a quick follow up on that.  (I’d say three great Middle Eastern religions and address Judaism as well but honestly who really knows what they think about anything unless one is actually in the club?  I suppose that’s one of the things I like about them.  If you’re going for a walk in the ether at least do us all a favor and keep whatever you think you discovered there to yourself.)

To get back to the matter at hand, the article that caught my eye this week involved an Australian rugby player named Israel Folau, who apparently got into a bit of hot water recently by sharing his Christian religious views on gay people and others as follows: “Drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolators - Hell awaits you."  In case anyone took it the wrong way Mr. Folau clarified later, "I share it with love.”  In the same spirit of avoiding misunderstandings allow me to clarify I have no real interest in rugby, Australian or otherwise, or in Mr. Folau personally, and also that I understand Mr. Folau’s religious sentiments are not necessarily typical for Australia.  I’m interested in Mr. Folau’s sentiments only because they represent a handy example of a certain common interpretation of Christian theology as it applies to gay people that can certainly also be found here in the USA.  Well, actually I suppose I was a bit interested in the other characters that ended up in the same boat as gay people including notably drunks, atheists, and idolators.  Apparently according to Mr. Folau’s understanding there are many paths to hell including nature, illness, philosophy, and competing religions.  And by the way what exactly is an idolator anyway?  Christians are always waving around that horrifying image of an ancient crucifixion.  Does that count?  How about statues of saints?  Mary?  I don’t really care, just saying.  Who exactly is praying to an idol anyway?  Well, actually I suppose it wasn’t just the people who ended up in the boat but the ones who didn’t make the cut I found a bit noteworthy.  We’ve got the thieves but how about their close cousins the robbers?  Murderers?  You know, just trying to detect some pattern in what’s going on here.

Anyway, the main thing that caught my eye in Mr. Folau’s little flipping off of gay people is the way Christians of this sort express their hatred of gay people in contrast to how devout Muslims like the Sultan of Brunei for example express their hatred of gay people.  Mr. Folau uses a little rhetorical trick or gimmick one commonly encounters in popular Christianity in which he is ostensibly not telling you what he thinks about gay people himself; he’s just passing on the good word about what his supernatural lord thinks about them.  He’s a messenger or middleman of sorts.  He’s not saying he wants gay people to go to hell.  He’s not consigning gay people to hell himself.  Indeed, in warning gay people of their fiery fate Mr. Folau himself is ostensibly expressing his love of gay people not his hate.  It’s a nice story although of course I suppose everyone must know by now not all Christian sects endorse this particular point of view and if Mr. Folau disagreed with it or was troubled by it in any way he could very easily investigate and eventually espouse a different form of Christianity, so of course it’s quite clear the hatred under discussion is not emanating solely from some other worldly plane but is centered squarely at least partially in Mr. Folau’s own personality and perspective on the world.  In other words, one can’t help but recognize Christians like Mr. Folau as somewhat hypocritical when they discusses expressing their agreed upon hatred of gay people with love for gay people.  It’s a strange sort of love isn’t it?

This third party, faux innocent bystander motif one finds in certain strands of Christianity stands in interesting contrast to certain strands of contemporary Islam in which not only are devout Muslims such as the Sultan of Brunei encouraged to share their understanding of the good lord’s feelings toward gay people they’re expected to actually carry out the lord’s bile and hatred by serving as the instrument by which the lord consigns gay people to hell, in the case of the Sultan by stoning them to death.  It’s clearly a much more active hands on and potentially ethically troubling approach than just standing on the sidelines warning them the lord will consign them to hell when they die and contemplating the day with evident satisfaction.

On the other hand, maybe I’m splitting hairs.  Christians for a long time were very much in step with contemporary Muslims in terms of their perceived moral duty to kill, main, and torture people on behalf of the lord.  Interestingly they talked pretty much the same way they do now.  Yes, they burned people at the stake but only because they loved them and wanted to save their souls by helping them atone for their sins here on earth in the agreed upon way: by slowly burning them into a pile of smoking ash.  They didn’t hate anyone themselves.  No, no.  They were all about love, love, love even when carrying out their perceived duty to their supernatural master to kill, kill, kill gay people, atheists, and a great many others besides.  And indeed I’m not even sure the distinction between active agent and third party messenger is significant from a theological point of view because the omnipotent supernatural entity ostensibly consigning gay people to eternal torture in hell is typically meant within Christian theology to also be a paragon of love, at least the strange love of the Christians.  One supposes the Sultan might similarly imagine himself to be expressing love and peace even while dutifully bashing in the head of some random gay youngster with a rock.  By the same token, one supposes there may be sects within Islam taking an approach more similar to Mr. Folau’s version of Christianity and contenting themselves with visions of the lord allowing and indeed consigning gay people to be tortured for eternity in hell rather than feeling any particular duty to act as the good lord’s court executioner and torturer in this life.

What’s my point?  Well, I suppose it must be that Christianity and Islam don’t appear to be all that different to me at least as far as gay people are concerned.  They’re both typical of at least the Middle Eastern form of the religious mindset.  Tomorrow a form of Christianity more similar to traditional historical Christianity might arise that might involve torturing and murdering unbelievers and gay people and so on while a form of Islam more similar to modern mainstream Christianity could break out any time and indeed likely already has with people neglecting or disavowing their moral duty to murder and torture to instead bang on about peace and love all the while looking forward with satisfaction to the prospect of the various objects of their various hatreds and sexual hangups getting their just desserts in the afterlife.  We give Christians the benefit of the doubt in this country.  We assume if they harbor feelings of hatred toward other people, such as gay people for example, they can talk about it and carry it about in their hearts and minds and so on but allow the good lord to express it in more concrete form in the next life and in that way co-exist with non-Christians who don’t share their ancient hatreds.   We should give Muslims the same benefit of the doubt and expect they can also come up with similar expediencies and adjustments in their theology that would allow them to co-exist peacefully with non-Muslims.  They have no reason to bother with that sort of thing in foreign Muslim-dominated countries of course, so one would hardly expect to hear anything like that from the majority Muslim areas of the world, but in the very different context of countries like the USA they do.  We can never accept anti-social behavior but when it comes to people’s religious beliefs we should give people some room to come up with something that works and not simply always assume the worst.

References

Israel Folau: Australia end player's contract over anti-gay message. April 15, 2019.  BBC.  https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/47932231.

Brutal Brunei, Islam, And The Killing Of Gay People

Welcome friends!

Have you read the news stories about the small South-East Asian country of Brunei deciding they should execute gay people if someone discovers them having sex with one another?  Yes, indeed, and apparently by the medieval and rather tortuous method of execution known as “stoning” no less.  Apparently it’s all meant to be based in Sharia, Islamic religious law.  The intent of the authorities in adopting these draconian punishments at least according to government spokesperson Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah is to “see Islamic teachings in this country grow stronger.”  According to a fellow named Mathew Woolfe, founder of a human rights group called The Brunei Project, one likely practical reason Brunei has decided to start murdering gay people right now is the country’s interest in “attracting more investment from the Muslim world, along with more Islamic tourists.”  He opines this latest move “could be seen as one way of appealing to that market.”  I’m not sure whether Mr. Woolfe had in mind Islamic tourists showing up specifically for the stonings, perhaps as part of some sort of public festival of torture and murder, think the worst of medieval Europe but with hummus on pita rather than beef on a stick, or whether he meant simply Islamic tourists would likely be more comfortable vacationing in a country that kills gay people.  And by the way, it’s not just gay people up for the chop.  The new law also involves killing people for “insult or defamation of the Prophet Muhammad.”  Clearly the traditional American values of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and free speech have no place in an Islamic paradise like Brunei.  I say paradise because according to the article I saw Brunei’s ruling royals possess a huge private fortunate and “its largely ethnic Malay residents enjoy generous state handouts and pay no taxes.”  I’m imagining fat, lazy, spoiled, berobed people lolling about on divans and carpets smoking hashish and watching their servants being whipped, but of course I’ve never been there so I might be thinking of an old movie.  What difference is it to me anyway?  I don’t live in Brunei.  I will certainly never travel to Brunei or really any other locale in the majority Islamic regions of the world.  Ever.  The vast gulf in our values and ethics precludes that possibility.  I’d like to just laugh it all off the way one laughs off all the other peculiar things people in foreign climes get up to that have nothing to do with one personally.  Unfortunately, one small step removed from what happens in ostensible devout Islamic Brunei is the awkward fact we have quite a few Muslims living here in the USA as well.  Should we be worried?  Well, yes and no.  Let’s discuss.

This is clearly one facet of a very major and serious problem.  Here in the USA a great many people have a great deal of unease over Muslim immigration partly or more likely largely because of the obvious and indisputable fact that the values and ethics of the greater part of the Islamic world don’t align very closely or indeed at all with the traditional values and ethics of modern western democracies such as the USA.  A common and entirely understandable sentiment is that most Muslims would probably feel much more comfortable and indeed much happier living someplace other than the USA.  Indeed, moving to the USA seems rather a recipe for disaster or at least the production of some very, very confused and alienated young people.  Yet perversely a certain number of Muslims insist upon immigrating to the USA, where of course we accept them into our society no matter the obvious potential and indeed likelihood of their holding and espousing views offensive to us because, well, that’s our way.  Until they act upon their offensive views and peculiar ethics of course, say by murdering a gay person or blowing up a nightclub full of loose women or what have you, in which case we kill them or at least throw them in prison for what one hopes is a very, very long time.  We have plenty of other people in this same general category, by the way.  It’s not just Muslims.  We have any number of domestic anti-democratic hate groups in this country and they’re all allowed to think and talk whatever rot they like until they act on their beliefs and kill or maim someone, in which case it’s the same deal: we either kill them or toss them in jail for what one hopes is a very, very long time.

The American way of accepting this sort of problematic and challenging diversity must seem quite odd to our foreign friends as well as to some of our domestic blockheads who never got the memo so perhaps a few words of explanation may be in order.  It involves maintaining a healthy realm of personal freedom.  The presumption lying behind our approach is that what people say and profess to think does not always align very closely with what people actually do, particularly when the state and the law is involved.  One may want to kill gay people, believe one’s ethics require one to kill gay people, and wish the state would, in fact, kill gay people, but when it comes to flouting the law of the land and murdering some random gay passersby on the street one may see things differently.

This can happen any number of ways and for any number of reasons.  One may subscribe to some sort of generalized “one should obey the law” or “do as the Roman’s do” ethical belief so even though one feels the law is wrong in some instances one feels a moral obligation to go along with it whatever it is.  I’ve personally never heard of that being part of Sharia of course, but one supposes individual Muslims might mash up Sharia, general Islamic ethics, and various bits of ethical reasoning from who knows where, so that’s certainly a possibility.

In other cases, one supposes simple cowardice and fear of legal consequences may play a role.  One may believe it’s perfectly ethical to murder gay people but the prospect of the state ending one’s own life if one acts ethically may make one take a rather more reflective and philosophical as opposed to active perspective on one’s ethics.

Another issue of course is it’s not entirely clear if all self-described Muslims say or profess to think the same things.  Even though the belief Sharia calls for the murder of gay people appears to be quite common in Islamic circles, at least I’ve heard it espoused in various places by various Muslims with various religions credentials and does not appear at all specific to the theological stylings of the government of Brunei, the religion of Islam, like Christianity and indeed most of the big religions, seems prone to a certain degree of interpretation.  Among Christians here in the USA anyway “following” the Christian religion quite often means in practice shopping about for a priest, or a church, or a sect, that espouses a version or interpretation of Christian ethics that corresponds to one’s personal ethics, which might always of course be based on one’s own study of scripture but one suspects might equally involve ethics arriving from other places such as angels sitting on one’s shoulders whispering religious insights into one’s little ears or from other more conventional religious or philosophical sources or indeed even from simple introspection and the consultation of one’s own moral sentiments, emotions, and feelings about what seems right.  To a large extent contemporary Christianity is basically whatever one wants it to be.  Now I must admit I’m not aware of different sects in the Islamic religion or the prevalence of Mosque shopping, but I suspect that may have more to do with my ignorance of that particular religion than an actual dearth of options for practicing Muslims.  One other hand, I have read a number of people arguing there is little centralized control over official Islamic theology and as a result at least some room for different beliefs about what Islam and Sharia really entail.  Where one Islamic scholar may find Sharia requires the stoning to death of gay people another might well interpret the relevant material as suggesting one should simply disapprove of gay people in some more general and less bloody and horrific way.  I suppose a few daring independent minded Muslims might even interpret the whole thing as a big misunderstanding and attempt to accommodate modern scientific knowledge of human sexuality.  Reformed Muslims, if there is any such thing.

So where does that leave us?  What is the point?  What should be we actually do about the Islamic threat to our traditional culture and values?  Well, I think we recognize and face the challenges posed by the presence of our Muslim friends head on but nevertheless maintain our traditional values and accept them as we accept everyone with unusual and offensive views. In other words, let’s not go all crazy.  Yes, having Muslim neighbors would understandably make one rather nervous.  Sharia appears to cover an awful lot of ground and according to some Muslims anyway involve quite a bit of violence.  One never knows whether one’s Muslim neighbor is about to launch himself or herself over the garden gate kitchen knife or meat cleaver in hand to dispatch whatever gay person, infidel, insulter of the Islamic religion, alcohol drinker, shaved person, or what have you may be standing on the other side.  In that sense having a Muslim neighbor is rather like having a neighbor with a swastika or the letters KKK carved into his or her forehead.   But our tradition is to not overreact to these sorts of superficial provocations.  Live and let live, that’s our way.  Let people work things out on their own and in their own time and in the meantime pay rather more attention to what they do than what they say.  Stories in the news explaining what foreign potentates in faraway lands believe Islam entails may or may not resonate with your Muslim neighbors here in the USA.  Extend the same consideration to your other neighbor of course, the one was with the swastika or KKK carved into his or her forehead.  Perhaps the offending inscription was the result of some past mental illness or youthful ignorance or a bit of drunken tomfoolery.  Or maybe it doesn’t represent what that person is really all about but is just for show, something for the benefit of other people, something to make granddaddy happy.  Give people the benefit of the doubt until they show their true colors through their actions; that’s really the American way.  But of course if you have unusual neighbors and you have a notion to avoid them and lock your doors at night and buy a higher garden gate, … well, those might be good ideas as well.  Awkward to be sure, but then no one ever said freedom was easy or free of risk.

References

Brunei implements stoning to death under anti-LGBT laws.  Yvette Tan.  BBC News.  April 3, 2019.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47769964