"I don't think that being a strong person is about ignoring your emotions and fighting your feelings. Putting on a brave face doesn't mean you're a brave person. That's why everybody in my life knows everything that I'm going through. I can't hide anything from them. People need to realise that being open isn't the same as being weak."

- Taylor Swift

Friday, September 09, 2011

When we swap religion with, well, common freaking sense.

I am so sick of people using religion as an excuse to ban everything that isn't TRADITIONAL or blah blah. Last time I checked, using non-existant friends in a legal or social context was called SCHIZOPHRENIA.

I don't honestly care what God's opinions on gays are, just like I don't honestly care whether God exists or not. All I care is that there are people in this world who are suppressed and denied their basic rights even in the most sophisticated, first-world countries. GAYS.

It bugs me so much that people use religion against gay people - I mean, people have been using religion against That Scum That They Don't Like since the dawn of time - blacks, women, Asians. I'm just so over it. All these people make me think is that God must be some angsty homophobic misogynistic redneck - because religion just seems to favour these people so much, you know?

People consider marriage to be a wholly religious thing; old geezer in bedsheets, church and steeple, etc. But what people don't understand that, especially in this diverse and multicultural world, the religious element is more a personal than legal thing. Nobody actually cares where you get married now, or how you get married; nobody actually cares if you get married at all. What matters is the rights, the responsibilites of marriage - the right to get married in itself. That is the lynchpin of this argument: everyone has the right to marry whoever and however they want. I don't want some Bible-basher to tell me who I can and can't marry.

1 comment:

Adelaide Dupont said...

It does seem that the personal element would take away what would otherwise be accepted as common sense.

"Personal" would not be valid in the way that "religious" might be, and it is the fear and insecurity...

Yes, religion and mental distress/illness do get conflated a lot, especially among people who make opinions (qualified or not!).

And I would not encourage you to do so as to make a rhetorical point, beyond which is factual.

It is true that the legal and social norms have become severed from each other and from common practice (which I respect more than I do sense).

(So I grant that the presences/absences are non-existent but do I grant friendship? The presences might be neutral or negative, but certainly they might be headspace).

And scum is actually originally the stuff on the pond. The beginning and the end of life.

(Society for Cutting Up Men: a great "feminist" moment in the 1960s and 1970s).

For the rights and the responsibilities of marriage, read Tim by Colleen McCullough. There is a very poignant scene where Mary and Tim get married in a civil and civilised way. Not without angst, but not without acceptance.

The suppression and the denial has to stop. One is a mature response (suppression) and one probably is not.

And using religion [to justify and condone intolerance, its causes and results] is no more acceptable than using any other code of thought and organising behaviour.

But it does take sense beyond that which is common! (or rather, that which is popular).

The people who it disfavours seem to tell a lot more about religion than the people who it favours (I know it shouldn't be that way!). And "favours"/"indulgences"... Again, it is not religion per se, but the use which it is made by 1) those who don't understand and 2) those who would claim special understanding.