Glorious Mud

Sodomy.  Now there is a great word.  Just saying it makes your mouth feel dirty. Most people only have a vague idea what the word means.  Its origin lies in the Bible - and it means "behaving like someone who is from the city of Sodom."  The city of Sodom is well-known because it was fried by God in a shower of fire and brimstone.  But that isn't why the word is still in our vocabulary today. In Genesis 19, there is an account of a group of men from Sodom who attempt to gang rape some angels who come to visit a guy named Lot, one of God's servants.  As a result, the word has come down to us referring to a number of different deviant sexual behaviors.  While this word has come to be used very little in the general public, it is still widely used by two groups: lawyers and religious fundamentalists.  The former use it to describe a collection of sexual crimes.  The latter use it to demean and offend homosexuals. The irony is that the sa...

I posted this on one of my older blogs and it generated some new conversation lately, so I thought I would repost it here (with a little editing). The article isn't brand new, but the link is still active and so is the conversation. The USA Today ran an article about how our nation's youth see Christianity as anti-gay, judgmental, and hypocritical. Here is an excerpt: "The vast majority of non-Christians — 91% — said Christianity had an anti-gay image, followed by 87% who said it was judgmental and 85% who said it was hypocritical. Such views were held by smaller percentages of the active churchgoers, but the faith still did not fare well: 80% agreed with the anti-gay label, 52% said Christianity is judgmental, and 47% declared it hypocritical. Kinnaman said one of the biggest surprises for researchers was the extent to which respondents — one in four non-Christians — said that modern-day Christianity was no longer like Jesus." The full article can be viewed...