RE: Why This Bothers Me

I second the observation of the irony here, but I think it's a little more complicated.

First, I don't really think you've captured quite what's going on here. It's not that the traditional, hard-line, literalist bible assholes have started "reinterpreting" the bible to see sex as being "ok".

What's really happening here is what always happens. People "shop around" for religion, and it's a buyer's market. The last decade has been one in which many people found the hard-line literalist religions to be attractive, and fundamentalism has grown. But I think people are finally starting to get tired of how the bullshit tastes, and they're shopping around again.

This time, they're starting to again hear the more liberal interpretations that have been there all along. Karl Wojtyla (better known as Pope John Paul II) gave as his first major papal teaching, nearly three decades ago, a generally sex-positive series of lectures called the Theology of the Body.

Liberal theology is on the rise again. That's a good thing - not as good as dumping theology entirely, but better than a fundamentalist shutting off of the rational faculties.

Where I've always found the irony is that the fundies are so adamant that humans are different in some essential way from animals. And yet the one way in which we are observably quite different - our capacity to reason - they want to put to an end.

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