In 2016 a high profile professional footballer was sentenced to six years in prison in England. It was a tremendous scandal because the player in question was a Premier League player who had been capped a dozen times by the English national team. Because of his talent, Adam Johnson had the world at his feet. …
Continue reading It’s Pride Month: Let’s talk about grooming
Christian nationalists are making a lot of noise these days on social media and elsewhere about wanting to set up a Christian theocracy in the United States because they don't like things such as "wokism" or "gender ideology" which in turn is because they're pro-bigotry. Take William E. Wolfe who served as the Deputy Assistant …
Leviticus is one of the books in the Jewish Torah and the Christian Old Testament. Chapter 18 of the book deals with a variety of sexual issues that the authors felt were important to Israelites in the Ancient Near East. Leviticus 18:22 is one of the "clobber passages" that Christians have often weaponized to use …
Christians are often broadly painted with the same brush by people as a large homogeneous group. When I was immersed in the fundamentalist's worldview, the term Christians meant the people who believed as I did that the Bible is inerrant, penal substitution was the heart of the gospel, and all nonbelievers were going to suffer …
During a recent trip to Ohio, the current occupant of the White House said that if Joe Biden were elected that Biden would, " "Take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God. "He's against God, he's against guns, he's against energy, our kind of energy."(1) From …
Continue reading On Trump’s pandering and using God as a prop
Once upon a time... I was a bigot, brazenly proclaiming my bigotry towards God's beautiful and wholly beloved LGBTQIA rainbow children. Once upon a time... I was completely unaware of the racism I carried within me that sometimes came out of my mouth. Once upon a time... I had no concept of white privilege or …
Vice President, and fundamentalist Christian, Mike Pence recently told the predominantly white graduates of Liberty University (a fundamentalist university run by Jerry Falwell, Jr. who is a vocal Trump supporter) that they should be prepared to be ridiculed and shunned for holding what he calls "traditional Christian beliefs." In his view the "voices for tolerance" …
There is a great deal being said about diversity in society today. Inexplicably, this has become a political issue, because some politicians and their allies believe that certain people deserve better treatment than others, which is strange given that in the Gospels Jesus reiterated the Jewish teaching to love our neighbors without condition and …
One of the things that gets me riled up is the conflation of things done in the name of a religion by fundamentalists with the actual teachings of said religion. Case in point, America in 2018 is being enthralled, in the most negative sense of that word, by fundamentalist "Christians" who are gleefully celebrating every …
In the early 1990s I was indoctrinated, the only other appropriate word would be brainwashed, into fearing and discriminating against those who were born homosexual. It was a time of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military and I was in the Marines. I was also a member of a Southern Baptist Church in Honolulu …
The Tattooed Theologian 