religion

Anti-gay churches have booths at Indianapolis Gay Pride event

2013-05-29 UPDATE: According to a facebook note from the Indy Pride Organizers, These two churches will no longer have booths at this year’s Pride celebration.

Last year and for the past few years apparently, there have been two churches from Indianapolis — Castleview Baptist Church and A.C.T. For The Gospel — who have had booths at the Indianapolis Pride Celebration and who have marched in the Pride Parade, with the purpose of trying to convert LGBT people from the “sin” of homosexuality. Unlike many churches in Indianapolis who are affirmative and supporting of gay and lesbian people, these two churches have a secret agenda for appearing at Pride: telling LGBT people they are sinners. These same two churches have reserved booth space at this year’s Pride Festival as well.

The issue was recently brought to the attention of the gay and lesbian community by Rev. Marie Siroky, a minister in the United Church of Christ and leader of Interfaith Coalition on Nondiscrimination (ICON), a multi-faith organization of faith communities and leaders advocating for LGBT equality and justice in Indiana. Siroky raised the issue on the facebook page for the group Indiana Equality, where she shared some examples of the two churches problematic beliefs.

A.C.T. For the Gospel’s blog post on “converting” gay and lesbian people:

June 9th, 2012 we had a booth for the second year at the Indy Pride Festival. We had great conversations with several people. We focused on heart issues rather than singling out any specific sin. Our goal was not to win arguments, but to win souls for the kingdom. That does not mean that we affirmed any sin, but we lovingly addressed what we all have in common (our need for a savior).

We had a button this year that helped start conversations. You can click here to see the art work. We addressed the heart issue of pride and our need to humble ourselves before the almighty God. There were at least four people that prayed to be born again, confessing Jesus as their Lord and asking Him for victory over their sin. {emphasis added}

There were many other great conversations. Our Lord was lifted up.

Click here for a short video on how and why we developed the button.

ACT Church's Anti-Gay Button
Note the fine print – “Pride goes before destruction”

The video referenced in the blog post quoted above is this one – on it you can see why this organization isn’t friendly to LGBT people.

Eric Bancroft, senior pastor at Castleview Baptist Church in Indianapolis, also has a problematic paper trail on the internet that illustrates why this church shouldn’t be marching in Gay Pride Parades or having outreach booths at our Festival. Bancroft participated in a Prop 8 panel discussion at Southern Baptist Thelogical Seminary called Marriage in a Post Prop. 8 Culture and shared some thoughts on gay marriage that are very disturbing to say the least. There isn’t a transcript and I wasn’t able to embed the video, but you can view it at the link. I’ll watch the whole thing in the morning and transcribe Bancroft’s remarks and add them here. The video is 48 minutes long, so be prepared for a long and painful slog as you watch it. Wear some teflon.

I can see how these problematic churches would slip by Pride Organizers. They probably don’t have time to vet every single booth, especially groups like these two who are being fairly subtle about their anti-gay messages to the public, but open about it to their own church members. It’s interesting that in A.C.T.’s blog post they mention having been at Indy Pride two years previously, though. At some point no one brought this anti-gay group to anyone’s attention?

Update: apparently, this was brought to the attention of Pride organizers last year, according to a post by Marie Siroky on ICON’s web site. But organizers took their money and accepted their application again this year, knowing who they were. I have a real concern, given that ACT has claimed that they have four converts to their preaching last year.

From what is being discussed on the Indiana Equality page, Pride organizers have told members of the LGBT community that they are planning to have vendors sign a Core Beliefs document next year when they apply for booth space, along with a method for lodging complaints, but the two churches will still have booths in place for this year’s pride festival.

Where these two churches are on the festival map, in case you want to check out their booths. What I’m going to do – recruit a camera person (my wife) and visit the booth, introduce myself, and ask them some questions about what their outreach to LBGT people is about. I want to specifically ask “Do you believe homosexuality is a sin?” and get a filmed response. I’m good at parsing what people are saying vs. what they really mean, and teasing out ambiguity, so I think I can get them to say the truth on camera. Which I will promptly post on my blog, of course.

Other people are suggesting “Angel Protests” where folks dress in angel costumes and shield the booths from view. That’s an interesting idea, but not one I really know how to organize.

Circle City Pride festival map

A.C.T. for the Gospel is at booth #52, along the side of Meridian Street, just south of the beverage tent. Castle View is at booth #116 on the same site of the event site, but far south, just near the festival security operations booth.

Pride Map 2013

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Richard Dawkins

I went with our friend Mike down to Bloomington to visit our friend Joe and to see Richard Dawkins speak at the IU auditorium last night. He was there to read from and discuss his newest book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

I don’t have the book and haven’t read it, but the lecture was interesting enough that I’ll pick it up. Dawkins is a compelling speaker and like anyone who regularly engages in scientific inquiry, he rigorously examines his own ideas and lays out premise and conclusions well (unlike, say ME). An excerpt from chapter 2 the book:

We can turn to the example of dogs for some important lessons about natural selection. All breeds of dogs are domesticated wolves: not jackals, not coyotes and not foxes. But I need to qualify this in the light of a fascinating theory of the evolution of the dog, which has been most clearly articulated by the American zoologist Raymond Coppinger. The idea is that the evolution of the dog was not just a matter of artificial selection. It was at least as much a case of wolves adapting to the ways of Man by natural selection. Much of the initial domestication of the dog was selfdomestication, mediated by natural, not artificial, selection. Long before we got our hands on the chisels in the artificial selection toolbox, natural selection had already sculpted wolves into self-domesticated “village dogs” without any human intervention.

Only later did humans adopt these village dogs and transmogrify them, separately and comprehensively, into the rainbow spectrum of breeds that today grace (if grace is the word) Crufts and similar pageants of canine achievement and beauty (if beauty is the word).

Coppinger points out that when domestic animals break free and go feral for many generations, they usually revert to something close to their wild ancestor. We might expect feral dogs, therefore, to become rather wolf-like. But this doesn’t happen. Instead, dogs left to go feral seem to become the ubiquitous “village dogs” — “pye-dogs” — that hang around human settlements all over the Third World. This encourages Coppinger’s belief that the dogs on which human breeders finally went to work were wolves no longer. They had already changed themselves into dogs: village dogs, pye-dogs, perhaps dingos.

I’ve had a copy of The God Delusion since I saw Dawkins speak on the Bill Maher show in 2006, but haven’t read more than the first few chapters. I have to admit I put it down a few weeks ago because as I was reading it, I became depressed about the fact that there is no afterlife and that this life is all there is. Terrifying to me. And terrifying that the idea of an afterlife is so strongly comforting to me that I was willing to put down a book and turn away from critical examination of an important subject out of fear. The childhood indoctrination of religious belief has a powerful effect on rational thought.

I’ve written critically about organized religion on this blog, and particularly on the religion of my family – Roman Catholicism. All of that writing has been reactionary in nature (like almost everything I write, I admit) in response to news stories and I haven’t explored the topic of religion in any depth – in truth because I haven’t done that for myself outside of the context of blog writing.

I guess there’s no time like the present, is there? (Especially if this is all the time we have.) I’ll pick The God Delusion back up and complete it, and do the same for Dawkins’s new book as well. And hopefully I’ll have something intelligent to say about them after.

A few thoughts on visiting the IU campus – wow, college students are young, given the questions they asked Dawkins after the lecture. Many of them gushed to him and about him because he’s famous, and it seemed to me that few of them had read his books or even had a clear as picture of what they were about. It’s odd that they’re on a college campus surrounded by the tools of learning and yet they’re so full of not-fully-formed thoughts. And yet they get to have Urban Outfitters on campus, and trucks that do “to your door” cookie delivery. How unfair.

2022-03-13 Update:
Didn’t Dawkins turn out to be misogynist Mother Fucker? I unlinked his books. I did finish The God Delusion and as far as religion goes, I agree with him. But not on much of anything else.
Continue ReadingRichard Dawkins

DJ Shiva’s Take on Obama and Warren

DJ Shiva wrote an excellent blog post on Obama’s decision to pick Rick Warren to do the inaugural invocation, which I’m just going to quote the whole thing of, since it’s awesome. But go read her blog regularly; it’s good.

fuck you, obama.

i was gonna write a long-winded piece about how hard gays and lesbians worked on your campaign, and how we were already smarting from the clinton administration pissing on us the last time around only to feel the hit again from the results of prop 8. i was gonna write about how inviting a guy who compares our love and relationships to fucking PEDOPHILIA to start your presidency off makes me want to fucking scream and cry and throw shit.
i was gonna write about the fact that it’s one thing to know someone who talks a lot of shit, but it’s quite another to invite them to stand at the door of our nation and claim to speak for the spirit of our country. i was gonna write that we are a part of that “main street” you keep talking about. i was gonna write a lot of things.

but right now, all i can say is that i don’t like you very much. and while i hope you can make something good happen for our economy, and get us out of iraq, and all the other things that were reasons for our votes, i feel like i have been punched in the gut. i feel like my life has been spit upon.

and i feel like no matter how much you want to claim to be an ally of the gay community (your unwillingness to stand up for gay marriage already made that alliance a shaky one at best), that you really do not get it. it’s like inviting goebbels to a bartmizvah and claiming you really care about jewish people. it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t fucking wash.

i have never been one to hope for ANYTHING from a politician, but for some fucked up reason, i trusted you. not further than i could throw you, but still…for me, even a little trust of a politician is a big fucking leap of faith.

and once again, i find that hope, in a country whose very origins and success were based on the subjugation of human rights, is as empty as a poor man’s wallet.

thanks for the reminder, obama. i won’t make the same mistake again.
i coulda said a lot of things, but the one thing i want to keep saying is:
fuck you, barack obama.

Continue ReadingDJ Shiva’s Take on Obama and Warren

Real Biblical Marriage

Passed along from a friend via email

If we were to create a constitutional amendment defining marriage based on the teachings of the Bible, it would look like this:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man’s right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother’s widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law. (Gen 38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

G. In lieu of marriage, if there are no acceptable men in your town, it is required that you get your dad drunk and have sex with him (even if he had previously offered you up as a sex toy to men young and old), tag-teaming with any sisters you may have. Of course, this rule applies only if you are female. (Gen 19:31-36)

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Priorities

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A man was walking up the street, when he passed by a Catholic Church. He noticed smoke pouring out of the building. He ran inside, and yelled to the Priest, “Father, Father!! Your Church is on Fire!” The Priest grabbed the New Testament, and ran out.

A little farther up the road, the man passed by a Jewish Synagogue. Smoke was pouring out of the building. He ran inside. “Rabbi, Rabbi!! Your building is on fire!”, cried the man. The Rabbi grabbed the Old Testament, and ran out.

A little farther down, the man came by a Unitarian Universalist Church. It, too, was on fire. The man rushed inside. “Minister, Minister!! Your Church is on fire!”, cried the man. The minister grabbed the coffeepot and ran out.

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Message of Welcome to the UU Church

As we welcome our new members and visitors, it is only fair to let them know what we Unitarian Universalists are like and what we expect.

  • We are friendly. If you are not friendly, out you go!
  • We are genuine people. Even our phonies are real phonies.
  • We are always sincere, even if we have to fake it.
  • We aren’t sure how ambivalent we should be.
  • We believe in tolerance and cannot stand intolerant people.
  • We are optimists. Anyone who doesn’t look on the bright side depresses us.
  • We are more non-competitive than other groups.
  • We believe in equality; everyone is as good as the next person and a whole lot better.
  • Every Unitarian is a feminist, so he has to watch his language.
  • The organization is run democratically because the president insists on it.
  • We have our critics, but they are paranoid.
  • We are prompt about being late to meetings.
  • Dogmatism is absolutely forbidden.
  • Freedom of belief is rigidly enforced.

And to this wonderful place we joyfully welcome you.

Continue ReadingMessage of Welcome to the UU Church

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

It Takes 300:

  • 12 to sit on the board which appoints the nominating and personnel committee.
  • 5 to sit on the the nominating and personnel committee which appoints the House committee.
  • 8 to sit on the house committee which appoints the light bulb changing committee.
  • 4 to sit on the light bulb-changing committee which chooses who will screw in the light bulb. 3 of those 4 then give their own opinion of “screwing in methods” while the one actually does the installation.
  • After completion it takes 100 individuals to complain about the method of installation, another 177 to debate the ecological impact of using the light bulb at all, and at least one to insist that back in her day the lit chalice was quite enough.

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your light bulb. During next Sunday’s service, we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted; all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.

How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

NONE! We don’t screw in light bulbs. We screw in sleeping bags.

Continue ReadingHow many Unitarian Universalists does it take to screw in a light bulb?