Friday, February 17, 2006

So I Had One of Those Conversations...

My mother gets on her soapbox occasionally (okay, daily) about whatever happens to be getting her goat. You can see where I take after her just by reading this blog! :D I love her to death, but she can be a really backwards individual at times. For example, we just had one of our lunchtime conversations, and she happened to say for at least the 1,000th time: "You know I don't agree with your lifestyle, but ..." and then she goes on to make some kind of point regarding:

1.) She loves Rich just like any other of her kids
2.) She hopes we can provide her with grandchildren at some point
3.) She thinks God is still working in us

This is usually where I roll my eyes, but whatever.

But today I also said, "What is it about my 'lifestyle' you don't happen to agree with?"

MOM: "Well, you know the whole gay thing..."
JAY: "So what does or does not hang between a persons legs is important because...?"
MOM: "Well, it's like my pastor says, 'God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.' "

*Pause: Another rolling of the eyes occurs here, but also a supressing of anger. I continue patiently:

JAY: "And this has to do with the price of tea in China because...?"
MOM: "Well, you know God doesn't like the whole gay thing, he created man and woman so they could be together, not with other's with the same ... plumbing."
JAY: "So you think you wouldn't have made a good parent if you didn't have a vagina?"
MOM: "I wouldn't have been a woman otherwise, would I?"
JAY: "Okay, so where do intersexed people fit into the whole 'Adam and Eve' thing?"
MOM: "Inter... What?"
JAY: "People with male and female organs? Hermaphrodites?"
MOM: "Oh, well, that's just one of those weird things..."
JAY: "And so, would they be able to marry someone?"
MOM: "Um.. I suppose, I mean..."

And then the subject got changed. As usual.

I would pit-bull her about it, but she doesn't take reality-shifts easily.

God also didn't create a person of every color. If he made only two people, well, I suppose that could be a right-wing argument against interracial marriage as well. Now I've heard most of the arguments before, but I have a problem with the entire mind-set of the so-called right-wing think-tanks. Why would someone think that boiling the whole argument down to "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" would solve an issue? What crosses someone's mind to say, "Well, yeah, anyway! Right on!" when they hear this? WHY DON'T MORE PEOPLE ASK QUESTIONS!!!!!

I mean, I really have a hard time believing that the presence of a penis (or the lack thereof) is the only mitigating factor in marriage rights, parental rights, health benefits, and the like. If the presence of a vagina were all that was required to be a good mother, I dare say our world wouldn't have too many kids waiting to be adopted, kids born addicted to crack/alcohol/heroin, kids born with AIDS, and so on.

But I'll digress, as I need to touch on another issue Ergo Sum brought up in comments earlier about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I had said something along the lines of "They had a choice," and Ergo had said something along the lines of "He told them not to eat it, that's not a choice, but a command." (Please forgive me if I don't remember exactly, but I think that's the jist.) I believe the choice was in the fact that God didn't place the tree behind some impenetrable force-field or something. He set the tree right in the middle of their Eden. No fence, no "No Trespassing" signs. He simply said don't. And they did. Enter that whole original sin thing.

But here's a question I'll pose. If Adam and Eve were "ignorant" to what was right and what was wrong, when the serpent tested Eve, she wouldn't have balked, or even remotely argued about eating it because of what God had said. She just would've shrugged her shoulders, grabbed the fruit, and bitten. She wouldn't have known it was wrong to eat the fruit, as she supposedly had no knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong. She wouldn't have said, "But God said not to" because that statement inherently states a knowledge of "should do" and "shouldn't do," hence, knowledge of right from wrong--what she should do, obey God, hence "right," or not.

I hope I'm making sense. I'm all about practical application, and not very good at all about explaining the theory and logic behind such.

By the way, I had ham for lunch. I think God called that bad in the old testament as well.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had ham for lunch, too! Right on! All Hail the Hams!

Anonymous said...

"She wouldn't have known it was wrong to eat the fruit, as she supposedly had no knowledge of good and bad, right and wrong."

That's a very interesting thought... very interesting. I never thought of it that way. You make a good point: any reluctance of Eve's part at eating the fruit would have revealed some prior knowledge of right or wrong.

However, upon thinking on your point, I realized - there is difference between being obedient because you were ordered to, and being obedient because you *know* it's the right thing to do.
So, I think Eve was disobeying God (assuming all of this crap is true) *without* the knowledge that the disobedience was *wrong* per se. I think it's comparable to a child who has no concept of "right" and "wrong" but can be commanded to not do something, and could be expected to follow the command, (or not follow the command, as the case may be). Take the nazis as an example, the lower rank soldiers just blindly obeyed without any conceptual analysis of their actions...

Anonymous said...

Here is an argument that may sound odd at first, but the more I ponder it, the more intuitive it becomes.

Years ago with some time on my hands, working in Riyadh, I began a genealogical hobby and was proud of the approximately 500 individuals, back to Jamestown and before, that I had discovered. I had seen how, not just arithmetically, or geometrically, but exponentially do the cousins and grandparents and branches and twigs grow into a tree, that were it to be taken back twenty or so generations would have encompassed most of the then population of the then Europe. This may be the core unconscious draw to genealogy.

It is this realization of the connectedness we constantly deny. We stop at a traffic light and are indifferent to the “relatives” in the car next to us. Or we haven’t a clue as to our relative who lives a few inches away in the next-door apartment. Or the very distant cousin who is the annoying salesperson we dealt with recently. It is this realization on which I’d like to weave this rather odd but encompassing argument – the argument that, to have the civil right of civil marriage forever denied to homosexuals, is abhorrent to the reality that all gays are from families and that almost everyone has a homosexual in their family (in fact with the new UK government survey that showed six percent in their population, we can assume that there are tens of millions of homosexuals in our American population). And it is consistent, rather than inconsistent, with not just family values but with “Tradition American Family Values”, that we do not undervalue any American and certainly not any member of our family. As we are all family in the truest sense.

Our founders used no word or phase more forcibly, more courageously, more passionately – then they did the word “we” and the phrase “we the people”. We are one large family – or should be. And a family would not act to deny the civil right of a relative they loved. They would want that person to have as full a citizenship as they have. And they would want the protections and rights and responsibilities to be equally assessable.

Ergo, in the most fundamental of fundamental arguments, traditional family values should rule the day. Certainly it would not be family values that would lobby to amend a constitution in this land, the primary aim of which was to prevent two heterosexual lovers who wanted to get married from getting married - and to thus effectively promote sex outside of marriage.

A note to the religious right. You have yet to provide one reasonable argument to describe in any believability how amending our constitutions will bring about a favorable change in your lives. And you have yet to acknowledge any damage this action may bring upon tens of millions of your blood relatives – if not in blood, certainly in the blood of Christ.

Bill Garnett said...

Here is an argument that may sound odd at first, but the more I ponder it, the more intuitive it becomes.

Years ago with some time on my hands, working in Riyadh, I began a genealogical hobby and was proud of the approximately 500 individuals, back to Jamestown and before, that I had discovered. I had seen how, not just arithmetically, or geometrically, but exponentially do the cousins and grandparents and branches and twigs grow into a tree, that were it to be taken back twenty or so generations would have encompassed most of the then population of the then Europe. This may be the core unconscious draw to genealogy.

It is this realization of the connectedness we constantly deny. We stop at a traffic light and are indifferent to the “relatives” in the car next to us. Or we haven’t a clue as to our relative who lives a few inches away in the next-door apartment. Or the very distant cousin who is the annoying salesperson we dealt with recently. It is this realization on which I’d like to weave this rather odd but encompassing argument – the argument that, to have the civil right of civil marriage forever denied to homosexuals, is abhorrent to the reality that all gays are from families and that almost everyone has a homosexual in their family (in fact with the new UK government survey that showed six percent in their population, we can assume that there are tens of millions of homosexuals in our American population). And it is consistent, rather than inconsistent, with not just family values but with “Tradition American Family Values”, that we do not undervalue any American and certainly not any member of our family. As we are all family in the truest sense.

Our founders used no word or phase more forcibly, more courageously, more passionately – then they did the word “we” and the phrase “we the people”. We are one large family – or should be. And a family would not act to deny the civil right of a relative they loved. They would want that person to have as full a citizenship as they have. And they would want the protections and rights and responsibilities to be equally assessable.

Ergo, in the most fundamental of fundamental arguments, traditional family values should rule the day. Certainly it would not be family values that would lobby to amend a constitution in this land, the primary aim of which was to prevent two heterosexual lovers who wanted to get married from getting married - and to thus effectively promote sex outside of marriage.

A note to the religious right. You have yet to provide one reasonable argument to describe in any believability how amending our constitutions will bring about a favorable change in your lives. And you have yet to acknowledge any damage this action may bring upon tens of millions of your blood relatives – if not in blood, certainly in the blood of Christ.

Kel said...

I had ham for lunch, too! Right on! All Hail the Hams!