When religious dogma is your advisor, it’s not the solution but the problem.
The solution is to ignore supernatural advice and use down-to-earth reason instead.
For instance, this cartoon reflects the official Catholic (and Protestant) notion that homosexuality is a sin because God purportedly condemned it in the Bible as “an abomination.” Of course, this assumes, without any concrete evidence, that God actually exists in the first place and is also equipped to condemn anything, as, say, gravity isn’t.
But if you employ reason to understand homosexuality in the real world, you discover that that particular expression of naturally diverse human sexuality is strikingly consistent and proportional in every society worldwide. It’s as consistently evident as heterosexuality, if not as extensive. The leading global psychological institutions and disorder manuals agree that homosexuality is a naturally occurring human tendency, not a deviant abnormality.
So which explanation sounds more sane and reasonable — that an invisible being condemns homosexuality so we must too, or that experts in human physiology and psychology insist its natural and noting to worry about, much less hate and discriminate against?
The rational answer is “the latter.”
Keep in mind that the biblical mindset on this topic can lead to even more onerous mitigating efforts, such as so-called “conversion therapy,” where gay people receive psychological intervention to turn them “straight.” It doesn’t work and, in fact, has been banned by a number of states because it has been deemed cruel, abusive and ineffectual.
Of course, no one wants well-meaning priests or other clergy to go “poof” even when they try to indoctrinate the faithful with religiously bigoted prejudices based on a 2,000-year-old book of moral stories written by even-God-doesn’t-know-who.
However, it would be most helpful to those suffering from unjust discrimination and hatred if such well-meaning but bogus “advice” instantly and automatically disappeared from short- and long-term memory in a poof of unholy smoke.
Cartoon/Thanks to Atheist Trooper
