In the Year of Our Lord 866 ce, Pope Nicholas I decreed that all Christians should abstain from eating the flesh, blood, or marrow of warm-blooded animals on Fridays as a way to honor Christ, a warm blooded animal who gave His life to redeem us from a sin His father sprung on Adam and Eve without sufficient warning about consequences especially as anything He might have explained came before they ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and would have understood none of it.
This began centuries of people fearing that even the accidental or unavoidable, sometimes necessary, consumption of meat sent even the nicest people to hell for eternity with no one having to worry about that anymore since the rule changed.
The steak that sent Gramama to the fiery pits of Gahanna for all of eternity is now okay with a few beers with the guys at the local Steak and Ale pub after a rough work week.
What was considered meat had to be established because there seems to be very little wiggle room when it comes to divine laws on the oddest, yet strangely important, things,
According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meat is considered something that comes only from animals that live on land, like cows, sheep, pigs and chickens with fish considered a different category of animal, and, although the rule, Canon Law 1252, promotes abstaining from any animal-derived products, foods such as gelatin, butter, cheese and eggs are an exception.
While it was not acceptable to eat lamb, chicken, beef, pork, ham, and most other meats, things like milk, fish, grains, fruits and vegetables, and eggs were all allowed.
If you cannot eat chicken because it is meat, but can eat eggs because they are not meat, at what point does what is in the shell become a chicken?
THOSE WHO WANTED US DEAD IN THE 1980S AND SINCE HAVE CALLED FOR THE GOVERNMENT’S EXTERMINATION OF GAY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN GIVEN PERMISSION BY THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES TO DISCRIMINATE AGAINST US IN PUBLIC ACCOMMODATIONS AND THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE IN BUSINESSES OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, AND THE CRICKETS ARE ALL THAT RESPOND LOCALLY.
The underlying fact, the simple truth was that within the last forty years religious leaders and politicians wanted Gay people to die and took steps to let that happen.
THEY WANTED US TO DIE.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, and based on God giving everyone rights by virtue of their just being human and humanity’s right to have this recognized, honored, and not abridged, because God gave the rights and who is any man to override God, we formed the United States.
Self-evident means not hidden, so obvious even a moron can see it, All does not mean some or only those who fit certain parameters, not a chosen few, the Creator would be God and to question Him or speak for Him is blasphemy and irreligious, and “among these” is acknowledgement that these aren’t all the rights but just as cars in the dealers showroom may be samples of what’s available and are not all the cars there are for sale, just a few there is room for, otherwise there would only be one dealer with thousands of cars on a lot the size of Rhode Island, these are examples of a much larger list.
The Declaration may go on to say that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” but that does not mean once in power those who govern do more for the people they have been chosen to govern than they do creating a system they present as beneficial to the people while making sure the system benefits them.
Monarchies did not come about because the people chose that system, but because someone in a position to benefit supporters got himself put in as king of the hill and started giving things away to stay there. They did not come about by the will of the people.
Although it might have started simple enough, just as in any grassroots movement, once Christianity got to the point it needed a leadership structure, the secularization and politicization of the Christian religion began which not only involved benefiting those within the power structure, but further cemented its position by killing those who believed differently, thus becoming a religion based secular power.
Look how close bishops were and still are close to the seats of power and use titles and symbols that smack of the material world.
Any political entity that can control the people with promises of things unproven to deal with the crap they throw at us now because there is a mansion for us in heaven provided we keep doing as they say and, as eternity is a lot longer than our peasant life-span, yields great power and people went along.
I keep seeing ads on cable trying to get old people to sign up for a promise that a certain policy they paid into that will reap rewards for the bereaved after the death, and the response to a person asking, “How will I now the money will be there and get to my family after I die?”, the person who will not be around to make sure the money will be handed over was that the company agreed to do that.
A promise that cannot be held to scrutiny by the person most likely to scrutinize.
When this political and religious pustule finally burst or at least began to leak after old man paranoia about the domino effect of Communism produced a war for the sake of having one and the youth of the sixties began to question not just blindly accept the system, and with it culminating in a president resigning because his abuse of power that we had been heading toward since Day One, July 4, 1776, was a threat to those benefiting from the established system and that includes the power of religion as, when finally questioning things without fear of eternal damnation, some of what religion had become, political power, became all to obvious.
One just has to look at the Popes with their sedan chairs, Egyptian fans, giant tiaras, robes and jewelry for days, before Vatican II and the Pope-Mobile now. You can see the change.
Some religious leaders long for the heady days of sedan chairs
One of the biggest controls that religion has over people is their use of human genitalia. God gives our human bodies the ability to enjoy a climax that shakes the body and would be wanted by anyone, but the church, knowing this, makes it the center of the worst sin imaginable that could only be paid for with an eternity of hell fire for just touching it. If it was so bad, why did God make it so good. Rather than than have the pain at birth, God could have eliminated the sin that He hates the most by making conception the painful part. Talk about a delayed punishment for an offense God had made very pleasurable.
We will not get into that whole foreskin thing where God apparently created man but forgot to take the mattress tag off, an optional action now but at one time a divine obsession.
As the politicians began to see the power shift and looked for strategies that would be beneficial to them, the powers of religion began to do the same things.
Gay people were coming out of the shadows and, as long as we stayed like the unseen monsters under the bed, religion was okay with that, but when they came out from under the beds as the harmless dust-bunnies we were, the religious leaders went nuts because just as politicians were losing the traditional threats to reason, religion was losing its powers and needed something to scare people into flocking to them, and so it was that when Jerry Falwell gathered his little group of pastors to form his religious coalition and with the Gay Community no longer silent and getting their rights as American recognized, since the majority of the population knew little about Gay people and would listen to whatever their pastors told them, they found their mark establishing Gay Rights as the strongest threat to America and your loved ones, and who would not protect loved ones from the threat the pastor spoke against on Sunday.
They painted Gay people as predators while at the same time praising themselves for loving Jesus enough they knew no Homosexuals yet presenting themselves as authorities on that which they constantly insisted they had no first hand knowledge of.
Like the pro-gun crowd that seems to see only part of the Constitution as binding while ignoring anything with which they do not agree or may contradict them, the Evangelicals carefully selected and rewrote Bible verses to support their personal opinions and political agenda, and chose to hang their whole approach on the Old Testamnent with all the sex and child abuse while ignoring the New where Jesus tells us to love our neighbor not persecute him.
They defend their belief in Jesus by ignoring Him.
AIDS, was seen as God “weeding His garden” so little should be done to stop His plan as man is to accept, not question. Oddly when Covid hit it was just a plain old, nondiscriminatory pandemic with God not trying to kill specific people off.
When it came to Creator endowed rights, the objection was that if everyone had the same rights, that would make those rights special for some people apparently because God did not intend certain people having human rights and religious leaders were to decide who did.
In their minds an eighth person coming to the table and taking a slice of pizza along with the other seven people somehow reduces the quality, size, and taste of all the other pieces because the eighth person getting a slice of an eight-slice pie somehow gets a better piece while reducing the existing quality of the seven other pieces.
And, so it was that not losing your job in spite of good performance, not being denied housing because the landlord does not approve rhygof your choice of a significant other, not being barred from a store or restaurant because you are different from the owner or the majority of his clientele, and the like were rights that others had just for being but were special when Gay people had them too.
My brother got a mortgage. Was my getting one something special denied to him while granted to me?
The religious right began to promote the idea that Gays wanted special rights that no one else had and this would reduce the rights of all others. If Gays could rent apartments like Straight people could, where would this end?
Part of our being citizens of the United States is that we are bound by the laws based on the Constitution that begins “We the People” not “We the listed People”. To be told that while we are bound by the laws of the land but it is religion’s right to choose which laws they follow and which they choose to ignore for personal reasons is to be told religion, sincerely believed or otherwise gives some people special rights.
The Supreme Court has ruled that businesses can now ignore the laws of the land if they can connect their doing so to some firmly held religious beliefs. I can discriminate against a person if I claim it is because something about them goes against my firmly held religious beliefs.
The student who attempted to get out of tests because “It goes against my religion”, has been given permission not to take the same test the rest of the class has to take.
What other group of people in this country besides the sincere religious believers and the ones who see a chance to use religion for gain (usually pastors) and run with it, can choose which laws they will or will not follow because there is something about them with which they do not agree.
Having the right to only follow laws with which you agree with an excuse to ignore the ones with which you don’t, is not one afforded to all citizens.
You break a law you pay.
Break a law and you can get off because of your religion.
Gays just wanted our rights recognized and our ability to exercise them. We did not have a list of laws that would apply to everyone else but us, and we did not demand more life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness above and beyond everyone else. We just wanted a seat at the table and access to the menu.
Religion, while distracting the American Peope by claiming the Gays wanted special rights, arranged to get special rights for itself, a right no other group in the country has, the right to pick and chose which laws will be obeyed.
It really was never about the Gays as in this case the Court based its decision on a situation that was hypothetical as no one had asked the complainant to perform any task going against religious beliefs.
There had been no harm done for the Court to address.
There had been no harm that would have called for the case, but there has been harm done to the rights of all citizens and to all citizens as one group has been placed above the law while we have to abide by their choices and religious beliefs no matter how far out there they might be.
A religion based on an extremely old man raping a teenager by proxy and then sending a messenger because after He has done the deed He moved on without once ever talking to His victim during the next 33 years and a religion that has a record of reenacting the conception through multiple child molestations and defending the molester does not seem to deserve more rights than the rest of us.
Religion got special rights while the rest of us, even the Gay ones whose rights are being erased, have to follow the Constitution and the laws based on it.
First they came for the Gays………
Independence Day has no meaning for those of us who are losing our Constitutional rights to a state religion.
