I'm better at Christianity than you

Leviticus doesn’t care if you gay marry. Well, that guy might, but he doesn’t matter. The important thing to know is that Jesus doesn’t care. Seriously, it wouldn’t bother Him at all. He even said it. I swear, it’s in the Bible. Fine, I’ll prove it.

Jesus was, by all accounts, a pretty good guy. It’s really a shame that the 2000ish years after He died have been filled with dumbasses and shitheads perverting everything He said. Like, the Crusades. Does anyone think that Jesus would have approved of that? Going by what He taught, I’m going to guess not. But that’s not the point. I’m going to tell you the religious dogmatic justification for gay marriage.

First, I guess we should know what biblical passage douchebags base their opposition. The most quoted source is Leviticus 18:22. It says, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is abomination.” I’m using the King James Version of the Bible, here and throughout this post, because it seems pretty well respected. Anyway, for those of you not familiar with Leviticus, it’s basically of book of God giving a bunch of rules to Moses that I guess weren’t important enough to be included in the Ten Commandments. That’s essentially the whole book, just God telling Moses what the Jews could and couldn’t do. One rule says that a priest must marry a virgin (I’m pretty sure a priest wrote the book), another says that you can’t eat animals like hare, coney (never heard of it, but it’s probably delicious), or pigs.

Clearly people have been pretty selective in deciding what rules of Leviticus to follow. That’s because, and I absolutely believe this, most really religious people are awful hypocrites; it starts with the Pope and extends downwards through Catholicism, and just rampages through protestant and evangelical denominations. These people seem to have forgotten the disdain Jesus had for hypocrites. But just because people that don’t want to allow gay marriage love eating bacon doesn’t mean that Leviticus doesn’t matter. Leviticus doesn’t matter because Jesus said it doesn’t.

I don’t understand why people are so willing to go back to Leviticus when there are other sources, specifically the Gospels. Well, I do, it’s because the Gospels don’t give them the answers they want. Matthew 22 deals with all the laws in Leviticus. Jesus is being questioned by a bunch of Pharisees and Sadducees, and these guys are pretty big assholes. After Jesus annihilates the Sadducees, an uppity Pharisee tries to trick Him. He asks Jesus what the most important law is. Jesus answers, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. “ (22:37-39). Nothing about not marrying another man, nothing about not eating pork, nothing about priests marrying virgins. Why? Because all of these rules are ridiculous. Seriously. If you want to get married, or have gotten married, who are you to stop someone else? I’m not saying that this invalidates the 10 Commandments or any of that nonsense. They’re consistent with this. Don’t kill anyone, because you wouldn’t want anyone to kill you. The same goes for stealing from them, or lying to them.

Jesus just wanted people to stop being dicks. No one remembers that. John 11 says that Jesus wept when He heard that Lazarus was dead. He must be bawling over the current state of the Church.

Finals Interruption

So I’ve been mired in finals for the last week or so, and the end is nowhere in sight. It’s a pretty miserable experience; torts was yesterday, and property is Friday. (As an aside, I really don’t know if torts should be handled as a singular or plural word. Like, I know that when you commit multiple torts it’s obviously plural, but what about referring to torts class? I’ve been struggling with this for a couple months. Do I say “torts sucks” or “torts suck?”) Finding time to write here has been tough, but since I’ve already done a lot for Friday I figured I would find some time to share some of the things I’ve been thinking about.

First of all, Mike Vick is getting out of jail soon, and I would love for him to end up on the Eagles. My dream scenario would be for the Birds to sign him and draft Tebow, and then run a double wildcat option formation. Just have both Vick and Tebow out on the field at the same time, with Westbrook too, and defenses wouldn’t know where the snap was going. Defenses would be paralyzed, and it would be so much fun to watch. Also, it would mean that McNabb is playing somewhere else, which is definitely a plus.

I watched President Obama’s press conference the other night, and thought he did a really good job pointing out how retarded some of the criticisms of the stimulus package are. I’m really afraid that he’s just too smart to be President, and people just aren’t going to get him. Also, how is it a story when he hits his head getting into his helicopter? Was it really necessary for Drudge to have it up, with a picture, for like two days? Let’s be honest here, I’m pretty sure that Andrew Card had Bush wear a helmet in the Oval Office for the last eight years.

There’s a lot of pressure in picking a team name for a keeper fantasy baseball league. Because it’s going to be around for years, current event references don’t really work. I’m torn between doing something sorta timeless, like Waddell Fire Co., or throwing out some absurd prediction of something that I think may happen five years down the line. I’m probably going to spend more time thinking about this than I am a draft strategy.

I guess it was last week when some crazy woman, Nadya Suleman, had another eight babies, bringing her total to fourteen. She needs to be sterilized, for the sake of humanity. Obviously she has a publicist, and will probably make a ton of money off of people who for some reason think that a book of her parenting tips would be worthwhile, but she’s really just going to fuck up 14 kids’ lives. She’s an uncomfortably weird woman.

I would like to take this paragraph to write an open statement to the residents of Coatesville. Stop lighting shit on fire. It’s really not a good idea; there’s no reason to burn someone’s house down. Doing it more than twenty times is ridiculous. So seriously, stop it.

A-Rod took steroids. Meh. All this talk of Hall of Fame exclusion is ridiculous. So he took steroids to gain a competitive advantage. Babe Ruth got a competitive advantage by not having to play against any black or Latino players. Maybe we should limit the Hall of Fame to players who played between 1947 and expansion in the ‘60s, because after like 1962 the talent pool became diluted. Or maybe that’s as bad an idea as keeping steroid users out of the Hall; everyone was doing it, Bud Selig didn’t care, it happened, it’s part of baseball history, it should be recognized in Cooperstown.

It really bothers me when something that sucks has a really cool name. For instance, I really like the word flowchart, it’s a great word. Actual flowcharts kinda suck though. Same thing with chinchillas. Chinchilla is a phenomenal word, it’s fun to say and to write. But actual chinchillas suck, they’re terrible animals. And I hate when people say that they’re pets. There’s one rule for whether something is a pet or not: if it can save a child from a burning building. If an animal can’t rescue a child from a fire, it’s not a pet, it’s merely an animal that you’re saving from being eaten by a bigger animal.

I’m ridiculously jealous of my younger brother’s tenth grade English class, they’re able to read some really cool things. Obviously they’re doing stuff that everyone does, like Gatsby and the Odyssey, but they’re also doing modern fiction. Last semester he got to read and do a presentation on I Love You, Beth Cooper, and this semester he could have done a research paper on Michael Chabon’s stuff. Even though it’s a little unwieldy at times, and parts of it definitely could have been cut, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a great novel. This doesn’t seem fair when I think about my last high school English class. Writing a paper on the weather in Ethan Frome? A third grader could have done that, why was it assigned in an AP class? Probably for the same reason that we spent 7 days reading Slaughterhouse-Five aloud in class; I wasn’t upset when I hear that teacher got fired. Dumbass.

Bret Favre says he’s retiring. I don’t believe him.

A kid in my class has an interesting idea: what if we experiment with zombieism to the point that we can learn how it works, and use it. Like, we take the aspects of zombieism that make someone indestructible, but exclude the brain-eating impulses and stuff: we could unlock immortality. I think that scientists need to focus more on this; if all of the funding that is going to AIDS and cancer research went to this, we would be set, and there wouldn’t be a loss, because AIDS and cancer can’t kill someone rendered invincible by partial zombieism.

Speaking of zombies, somebody wrote this book, and it’s gotta be awesome. Yep, he took the text of Pride and Prejudice and wrote zombies into the story. I think that this might be the future of literature, as so many books could be improved by adding a few zombies. What if they had to fight zombies on the Pequod, or Nurse Ratched was a zombie, and her brain obsession led to McMurphy’s lobotomy? I really think that this could be the future of literature.

So that asshole still won’t admit that the Holocaust happened. He won’t go to Auschwitz, but is willing to study the scientific evidence and may possibly change his mind. This guy strikes me as pretty anti-Semitic, even quoting St. Paul’s statement that the Jews “are our enemies for the sake of the gospel.” What the hell? What possible benefit could there be for having this guy back in the Church? What an awful decision.

Finally, PECOTA has predicted that the Mets will win the NL East this year. They made the same prediction last year. If you’re wondering how that went, I’ll let Chase Utley enlighten you:

Vatican City Exports: Coins, Stamps, Stupidity

So this has been a pretty big weekend for the Holy See to say and do dumb things. More than most weekends, I swear.

First, a senior Vatican official predictably criticized President Obama for once again permitting government funding for family planning groups that operate outside of the United States. That’s fine, that’s their belief and everything, but, well, he said some dumb things, calling this “the arrogance of someone who believes they (sic) are right.” I guess this is somehow different from the arrogance of the Church in telling people not to vote for pro-choice politicians because the Church believes it is right. Or maybe not? Whatever, fuck them.

The Pope must have decided that he couldn’t let any of his subordinates steal the dumbass spotlight from him, though, so he did stuff too. Most notably, he reinstated four bishops who had been excommunicated by John Paul II. The bishops, members of the Society of St. Pius X, an utterly forgettable Pope who’s notable only because he chose the same name as Pius IX and rejected any form of modernization, were excommunicated because some French guy made them Bishops, not the Pope. Whatever, if Benedict is cool with that, fine, I’d have no problem with papal primacy being slightly diminished. I don’t even care that they oppose the Second Vatican Council, which is one of the only things the Church has done right in a really long time. But one of the guys refutes the Holocaust. Despite pretty much everything pointing the other way, this dumbass is siding with people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in saying that Hitler didn’t have a deliberate policy to kill Jews. And now he’s a Bishop again. What the hell, how is this ok? Shouldn’t this guy be in a Pius XII society instead? And does Benedict really think that this guy is going to shepherd souls into Heaven? Ugh, I guess this is what happens when the Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth. How close are we to opening Mass with "In nomine Patris, et Fuhrer, et Spiritus Sancti?"