Brains in a Box: The Real Reason Catholicism Teaches People to Judge Homosexuals

 

Christianity has long demonized homosexuality as a sin by convincing its followers that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is the Bible's version of America's 9/11, with the divine attack being not only intended as punishment of homosexuals and all those who tolerated them, but also a warning to all future generations of God's willingness to nuke whole cities over who is kissing whom.

Christian morality, as such, is based on the idea that it is right and good for God to firebomb whole cities for a "sin" that such an infinitely enlightened being freely chooses to be offended by, despite having created such homosexuals in the first place. And he is as offended by the homosexuals he alone is responsible for creating just as much as He is offended by anyone who refuses to accept He likewise "intelligently designed" each of us with a sin-stained soul, for which He also commands us all to spend our lives begging for forgiveness. And hell awaits all those who dare to doubt the genius of such a divine "plan" to save us from the fires of a torture chamber such a God alone designed, just like the "sinners" He intends to throw into it, and which He intends to keep in perfect working order forever after he scraps the entire universe. Such reasoning is consistent with the New Testament, in which God crucified his own son, who was wholly innocent, rather than the devil himself, who was guilty as hell.

In short, the recording of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, along with the meaning attached to it, was all part of God's attempt to use terrorism to quite literally keep the whole of the human race, which God felt a queer desire to design with the gift of free will to be different, "scared straight." 

 Since those homosexuals were headed straight for hell anyway, so the reasoning goes, treating the cities they inhabited like Hiroshima and Nagasaki is God's moral prerogative, and any lowly human who dares to object is only likely to end up burning for all eternity in the same hell those homosexuals are "believed" to have both deserved and been sent to for daring to exercise their "free will" as freely as they wished. 

The lesson is that it is more moral to be an eternal torturer than  to use one's own free will to accept their gay desires as anything other than something they should live their whole life feeling deeply ashamed of.  From this perspective, a God created homosexuals so he could promise to save them from the fires of hell but only if they are willing to allow God's church to waterboarded them their whole life with shame for how God created them to begin with. To the Christian, this is divine logic, even if it requires the nuclear destruction of innocent women and children.  

 For those who see homosexuality as natural or at least harmless, such demonizing looks to be either the result of a fear of sex, with those who call homosexuality "unnatural" showing only an even more unnatural fear of sexual differences (despite their claim that their God is the most powerful God in the universe), or just a way of reining in that "free will" by exercising far more control over people's sexual organs (especially over women's wombs), then those same people fear of control their own government is trying to exert over their guns. Such an idea elevates a commodity designed for death to the level of the sacred and reduces a body made most in the image and likeness of a life-giving God to that of  mere livestock or a lifeless commodity designed for the sole purpose of killing.

This contradiction makes sense when you think about it, because such people see themselves as the ultimate "patriot" for loving a country whose government they have almost no faith in whatsoever. And they need those guns to not only protect themselves from that government, so they'll assure you, but also because  they think the gates of hell won't be able to prevail against their Church, not because Jesus assured Peter it couldn't, but only because of their willingness to pick up the sword of their firearms and glorify the God the New Testament by acting like the God of the Old. And for doing so, they expect to win an eternal retirement plan in paradise.

But there's another reason as well, so it seems, for demonizing homosexuality so much. That reason is to create a gauge with which to affect public perception. It does this by creating boxes of thinking. The box makers condition their faithful flock to accept the moral necessity of such boxed-in thinking as "natural" to souls born stained with the "original sin" of an intelligence designed with a curiosity and creativity that is as infinite as the desire to use both is insatiable. 

By conditioning humans to accept their human nature is unnatural because it is neither divine nor as infallible as a computer, venerated "priests" can use such thinking to create a defensive wall around their own fears made up of the minds of their followers. Such a wall is designed to protect "believers" against anyone who points out the logical fallacies such "beliefs" require to be maintained.  By doing so, those priests can convince their followers to depend upon those walls, which become a box that acts like a womb or a castle wall around their ideas. Those walls are built to alleviate the uncertainty felt by "believers" about the unknown, especially of the afterlife (despite claiming their faith is sure to save them - and them alone - from eternal torments in the fires of hell). 

Once those followers have accepted such beliefs to be natural to the human condition and necessary for their salvation, those priests can than convince their followers that the greater the increase in the number of those who refuse to live inside of such a box (and mostly because they find it hard to believe people who claim they and they alone have a spiritual Bat Phone to God - the same one God never bothered to pick up and call the Vatican to put a stop to the thousands of pedophiles it was not only employing but working so hard to protect), the more likely they can expect an apocalypse in which God treats the whole world like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Those priests do so by convincing those within the box that their fear of the apocalypse is not only a sign of their love for God, with each being a reflection of the strength of the other, but that the apocalypse itself it but a pinprick to the eternal rewards they can expect to receive for dying as a martyr. Dying as a martyr is the most noble death of all, by the way, because it grants the "believer" a first class seat straight to heaven while avoiding the Russian roulette of Judgement Day and any layover in purgatory, so the "believer" is taught to believe.  And they can win that all expense paid first class ticket to paradise by fighting in a war to slaughter all those to whom the box-makers attach the Scarlett label of "the enemies of God!" And who are they ?Anyone who doesn't like the brand of box being imposed on everyone else.

By "God," of course, they really mean the box that they claim was given to them, and them alone, from God. That box didn't come cheap, however. Rather, it came to those "priests" with the promise that their own salvation hinged on how hard they worked to keep not only their own ideas, but also everyone else's ideas, inside the barnyard of that box. A priest, in other words, is simply God's intellectual and spiritual farmer and overseer, and all because minds must be regulated even more than money, investment banks, and financial markets overall. And the confessional is designed to operate like a peep hole for the priest into our most inner thoughts, like Norman Bates spying on Marion Crane as she takes a shower in Hitchcock's Pyscho. If Marion was a gay, in other words, Norman was simply following the example of God with Sodom and Gomorrah. And if Marion was not gay, Norman was simply following the example of God with Jesus.

For Christians, the apocalypse means an end of the physical world itself, while for everyone outside of the Christian box of thinking, it simply means the end of living in a box, and paying a priestly class that lives tax free off of people's willingness to believe their claims that everything outside the box is bad and scary. This is like that M. Knight Shyamalan's  movie, The Village, in which the elders lie to the inhabitants of village  about the presence of horrible creatures that inhabit the woods that circle the village in order to prevent people from leaving. Doing so effectively builds a Berlin Wall of fear that keeps "believers" behind it with the promise of a utopia they insist is impossible to create here on earth.  

Linking the person's ability to only receive such a reward by keeping their own ideas within that box, which the box makers label as "sacred traditions," creates a tandem relationship between love of God and fear of change. And the stronger one's love for the former, the less outside of the box those within it are willing to wonder, or tolerate those who dare to see what lies behind the forest that circles the cloistered village of their own ideas. Those "thrill seekers" who feel a need or desire to venture into the "forbidden zones" of thought, from this perspective, are seen as therefore "disobedient." And disobedience to a God deserves no less than eternal punishment, in the same way obedience to a Church - regardless of its crimes - deserves no less than eternal reward. 

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan about the  Berlin Wall itself, it's long since time that such a wall be knocked down once and for all, and teaching all those who make their living building such a wall that, in contrast to what their religion has taught them to believe to be infallibly true, humanity can only be improved by building bridges and knocking down walls, for one is a symbol of freedom and love, and the other of power and fear.