Okay, so this post is sort of in response to what happened in Connecticut/a response to other peoples' responses.
The other day in my World Religions class, we were discussing what had happened just a few days ago in the aforementioned state. Someone (names shall not be stated) said something along the lines of, "We shouldn't care about what [the murderer] was like, or diminish him because he's still a Child of God."
I feel like I made that more eloquent in my restating, but nonetheless, I found myself rolling my eyes at this statement. I felt a twinge of guilt after doing this, but it quickly went away. The reason I think I did this rather rude gesture, is because I think it's ridiculous that we have to label someone a "Child of God" to establish them as a human being. Now, I know that what she was saying wasn't trying to be exclusive or anything like that and I get where she was coming from and nothing about what she said was ignorant or anything like that, but I still find it incredulous that we have to use religion to validate someone's right to being labeled a human while, in the past, we've used the same religion to take away someone's right as a human being. Actually, I take that back: we're still using that religion to take away certain minorities' rights.
After they heard about the shooting in Connecticut, did this infamous religious fanatical group pray for those in grief and for the loss of innocent lives? No, they decided to pick up their picket signs and protest that this most gruesome occurred because one single state decided to make same-sex marriage legal and God was punishing them. The group, as I'm sure you may have guessed, was the Westboro Baptist Church. Honestly, it's my opinion that those people need to actually read the Bible and maybe take Ms. Healey's World Lit class to understand cultural context.
I find this even more incredulous. How could you, as supposed "devout" Christians, think that your God-who is supposed to be all-forgiving-could have sent this man down to Earth and basically have him be a sleeper agent for the sole purpose of killing innocent children. That's pretty much what I'm getting from their logic.
I'm sorry that I'm basically losing my point on this post, but I just get carried away sometimes.
Anyways, I just don't like how people need to use religion as a way of justifying human existence. My personal belief is that there might be something bigger than us out there, but that we're no where even close to grasping the concept. While it's a rather pessimistic view to see life as we just live our life, gain success or failure, die, and then it was all for nothing; it's also one of the more realistic ones. Maybe we get reborn.
I read this one short story that told of this man who had died and was now meeting the entity he deigned as "God". It basically told of how every human ever, in the entirety of existence, was the same entity, just living different lives. We are all one, we're all connected. The point of this was to show how immature we are as a race and as a species. "God" eventually tells his child that the point of this is that we're too immature to have our rightful place as a god. We need to live all these different lives until we're mature enough to come out of our "egg".
I explained that in not-the-best-of-terms. I basically threw grammar and Standard English out the door, like, 5 paragraphs ago. I'll try and find that story and post it, however.
I'm really sorry if this offends anyone.
Amen
ReplyDelete