LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY ladyegreen)

Post from my LJ that Sunfell thought I should post here.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ladyegreen/180650.html



I haven't much time. I'm on my lunch and it is not ideal to post anything at all from here.

I wanted to do this long post the other night that addressed most precisely my concerns with religion. I had it burning in my blood so badly that my hands shook.

I just couldn't do it. The post I would want to write involves disclosing information about myself that even after twenty odd years still mucks with my mind. I wanted to do it because it gave way and high lighted the very wrongness of a young woman, 16, who was hung for her *smart mouth* in Iran last summer. I knew the sensation and I knew it for reasons that empathized with one another.

Instead of writing I took into my bed and had the most horrid lucid dreams. Lucid dreaming is a gift but not on nights like that. I most certainly should have imbibed on more rum before trying to lay my head down.

America is in a state of tremors. We're worrying about the world's metaphorical earthquakes and all the while ignoring our own tremors. We want to defeat human travesty yet we're ignoring it in our country, even in embracing it in the name of bastardized, misbegotten morals.

How do you think the stoning of women from sexual indescretion comes about? How do you think the deaths and physical persecution comes about of homosexuals, of lovers, of young 16 year old girls who are the victims of rape?

What foothold was there that in India there are the Untouchables? A sect of people with no recourse, a group of people where a mother was raped and burned to death as a lesson to her son for trying to marry out of his caste?

Religion. We have so much knowledge yet we all understand so very little. We cling to our "morals" in desperation no matter how they burn our very souls and break our minds.

We sit and cry foul at the cruel bizarre punishments dealt under the hand of Islam. We fail to see that those cruel bizarre punishments are also dealt out all over the world, some in the name of Christ himself.

In Africa a young woman, a mother of several children was tried for sleeping with another man. He walked free while her countrymen worked diligently to stone her to death. I signed the petition to save her and last I heard she was triumphant. What if her story had never made the International News?

Morals, they were up holding their precious, sacred morals. I'm so very tired of the word morality. Such a twisted caricature of itself.

And the same rot, the same disease that has you watching the Middle East with such vindictive, righteous, moral outrage is already here. It's always been here, man carries this illness with him wherever he goes, wherever fertile ground is met he plants its seeds and feeds it till grows and consumes the land.

In Kansas a young man has been sentenced to life in prison for receiving a voluntary blow job from another young man who was slightly under age and slightly below average intelligence. Under the Romeo laws in Kansas a young heterosexual man in the exact same situation would have been slapped on the hand. This young man is being crucified because of the orientation, not the crime. The morality of his actions unacceptable to us.

Do you feel the tremors?

In Oklahoma and Texas women have been denied access to birth control, the moral, religious indignation of the pharmicist out stripping their personal right to life and pursuit of happiness.

Do you see the hair line fractures?

Matthew Sheppards scarecrow cruxifiction raised its head this past year. The poor perpetrators of his death placing the blame on his shoulders. He meant to rob us, he was after drugs, we were only defending ourselves and our sense of broken morality!

You don't beat someone to the edge of death and tie him to a pole in a field because you were upholding morals. It takes hatred to do such a thing but also a sense of righteousness. God does hate fags doesn't he?

And we let them come on TV and do such a thing. I wonder if we ask the judge in the case of that young Iranian woman, the very judge who made sure that he himself put the rope around her neck and gave the order to lift her from the crane, who watched her suffocate to death; I wonder if we ask him how he could have done such a thing, do you think his moral, indignant righteousness would come bursting forth to the surface? I know it would. Allah looks down upon mouthy woman who entice men to rape them by the merit of breathing alone, just like God hates all fags.

Anything shaking on your cupboard shelves yet?

A moral, righteous, religious majority is taking over America, seeping in to places of power and exploiting their positions and their numbers. They are going to take back this country from it's shameful, insolent, unrepentant ways. Clean the streets and bring the prohibtion of ones right to dissent straight to you door. A fire burns in their eyes and in their souls, they know they are the chosen ones, the true believers of the one true God and they are coming to clean up this place.

I stand in the shadow of a cross I can no longer bear to look at. I constantly come under fire in my life by those who can't understand why I fight this thing so. Don't I want a nice, clean Christian country? Don't I want those poor gays to find peace in Jesus and marry some nice young girl? Don't I want to save the innocent not yet babies that have yet to be? What's wrong with me? Can't I see the white steeples rising into the blue skies and not find the good and the just in that? What's wrong with wanting America to be for us and not those coming across the borders? Shouldn't they look and speak like us if they do? Isn't that moral and right? What would Jesus do?

But of course I do understand. I understand more than many people in my day to day life realize. I understand all too well that good people do horrible things when given the freedom and mind set to do so. I know full well that persecution comes from misplaced righteousness and that religion is the quickest route to ones own outrageous definition of morality.

I stand in this cold, dark shadow and shiver. I feel the tremors. Where most see a symbol of Christianity and goodness, I see a fatted calf made of gold and money. I see a false god that gives us the cruelty we crave to deliver to others. The road from wrongful imprisonment to death isn't nearly as long as most American's like to believe.

Save some of your well meant outrage at other countries and their religions for your own. Those terrible acts of cruelty are coming to roost in our own homes if we all are not more diligent, not more aware of how close we are following in the footsteps of those that we claim to despise. Claim to be so far above, so much more peaceful and kind.

Faith can turn your world on its axis and lift you from your darkest recesses, but religion is not just a path, it is a well honed weapon in the wrong hands and a blight upon us all when misused. The false god's have to be defeated, even if it means removing all vestiges of God from public life. The price is to great if we allow this country to be run from the pulpit and not from the mind. Morals are slippery creatures and can be quite vile if they are not your own.

L.