Contemptible
Gay hate group, Westboro Baptist Church has announced (via) that they are planning to picket the funeral of late actor Heath Ledger.
The church, which has become notorious for picketing the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq, announced on their website that they will picket the actors funeral because he “promoted homosexuality” by starring in Brokeback Mountain.
Marina Hyde says it all:
Further comment feels unnecessary, other than perhaps to wonder whether the “church” will ever realise that their continued existence is the most eloquent argument against the existence of any deity. And then to accept the answer would be a no.
Update
That epitomizes the problem, I think. There is a kind of sliding scale of belief: most of us value our lives to some degree, and consider how we spend our three score and ten to be important; then there are people who attach some degree of importance on an afterlife they’ve imagined, and consider this hypothetical eternity to be a matter of concern. Atheists have the scale pegged way over to the left and see this little slice of time we have as all we have, and therefore the only thing we have to make work. Most religious people have the dial turned up a little to the right — they are clearly operationally secular, spending most of their time on work and family, and socking away a little Sunday prayer time for an anticipated and wholly delusional Heaven. We can all live with that.
But then there are these wackos like Fred Phelps who have the dial turned so far to the right that they place a higher priority in their fantasies about what they’ll be doing after they’re dead over what they’re doing with their life right now. That’s where religion becomes a great evil, where it destroys lives and compels people to commit acts that are materially insane, but make great logical sense to people infected with the idea that there is an eternity of consequence for trivial transgressions against a shared belief.
0 comments Thursday 24 Jan 2008 | Paul | Religion
