We Shall Gather in the Restroom . . .

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand gayness. You know: homosexuality in all its many permutations across gender and age. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't leave meeting notes on restroom walls like gay males do. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't meet in parks and highway rest stops to have moments of passion (whether amorous or just hedonistic) when so many homosexuals have no problem with such meetings, judging by the arrests & crime sweep-ups of such events. I don't understand what is so inspiring of passion in a young boy's butt or the soft skin of boys' faces yet to be touched by a razor.
     I just don't get it.
     But then, I don't get how anything at all happening in the world is immediately taken as a sign of the divine's disapprobation of whatever is judged sinful or damnable by the divinity of the moment.
     And after such an announcement, I can get down to the point where the sex and the gods get together.
     See, a friend of mine referred me to a blog website whereon the blogger proposed that the fires now doing a Bushian job of California are the divine getting back at gays.
     Only problem with that is such an event would show that the divine hand is pissed at California for voting against gay marriage. Hell, you can be gay and get married in Connecticut. How come god ain't burnin' the livin' bejebus out of the East Coast? You'd think any god who was weirded out by two men French kissing in a restroom stall would set fire to the stall and its wide-stanced inhabitants as a much more directly readable response to gayness on the part of the deity in question.

Of course, the blog aforecited engaged many comment responses, the most rational of which proposed that the Christian propensity to explain natural events from a divine perspective was, at the very least, self-serving and self-absorbed. That and how "not everything is a sign from god" and that such explanations of events are a more sure sign that "you are not allowed to make it up as you go along."
     Which is exactly what we're talking about here: making it up as you go along.
     At which point I am in firm agreement with the commentator's extension of the metaphore:

"Religion is -- in my opinion -- a brain virus. The need for some daddy figure or his graceful, lithe, unmarried, hippie son to rescue you from your own personal misfortune is childish enough. But the further need to have this dad or his son visit wrath upon your enemies is pure school-yard nonsense that really speaks to a sense of helplessness in your own personal life."

     To which I must go on to say is a perfect explanation for the tendency among believers of any stripe to blame misfortune of others on the other's being unapproved, unloved, unsaved in the sight of whatever divinity is supposed to be doing the misfortunizing. That or the misfortunate are supposed to be unschooled in the divine mysteries and/or belief and thus even more deserving of the divine wrath.
     It is schoolyard stuff, however, plain and simple.
     Little Johnny gets his feeling hurt by a girl don't like his nose and he then claims that he's gonna get back at her for it. Only problem is, Little Johnny ain't got the muscle for it. So he thinks about how he'd like to see whatever misfortune fall on the girl. But time she go by and the girl goes on about her life while Little Johnny wastes time and neural energy vilifying the girl in his mind, which Little Johnny knows subconsciously is a further sign of his weakness before her and thus even more disempowering. And it's the disempowerment that really does the job on Little Johnny.
     Weeks go by and every time he sees the girl he gets pissed at her and even more pissed at himself. On and on like that until he's so full of hatred and bitterness that he can barely spare a smile on a sunny day.
     And when the slightest thing happens to the girl, like a cold or a bruise or a missed period, Little Johnny doth rejoice in his heart that some bad luck has finally befallen the object of his bitterness and disgust.

Ach, Freude in Himmel! Gott hat Seinen Zorn gegen das Mädchen doch aufgewiesen!

Makes no never mind that the girl got sneezed on by her little brother who had a cold or that she happened to walk into the open fridge door in the middle of the night or that she engaged in unprotected sex with her best friend's step brother. To Little Johnny's little mind, it's the divine hand taking retribution against the girl on Little Johnny's behalf.
     As if all the starving children in Africa and all the people poisoned by tainted milk in China or the seventeen-year-old youngster got shot in a ghetto drive-by had to be put on hold from the divine's protection just to avenge Little Johnny's pitiful, puerile and prepubescent sense of dishonor.
     As if Little Johnny took precedence over the divine hand saving a child from dying of an asthma attack or the divine hand preventing a family in Yorkshire from being mowed down by a drunk and obviously sinful Muslim.
     Like that.
     Which is exactly where the comment quoted above points: Such claiming to understand the hand of divine justice are stupifyingly self-absorbed, self-centered and quite seriously & immaturely self-adulatory.
     "I know what god's doing 'cause, well, I'm tight with the god-dude, yo."

Yeah, right.

This is the same shill been used for the past thirty-thousand and some years. I figure that stretch since it was about thirty k-years ago that we flat-faced chimps drove the last Neanderthals off the cliffs of southwest Iberia and into the sea. We took control of everything and then decided that our invisible friend was really in charge and that he had given us control of everything.
     Another "yeah, right" moment.
     Everyone claims to be in contact with the divine but we always leave it to one special, usually self-appointed loudest monkey to tell us what god has in mind. You know: the prophet has all the answers, even if we each claim that we understand how the divine has punished this person or that.
     You died. I didn't. God loves me.
     What a horribly self-absorbed way to think. What a horribly self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited way to view the world.

Let's face it: the fires burning the hillsides and valleys of California, much like the earthquakes that rattle buildings which subsequently fall on children and parents and the floods and tornadoes that rip up farm lands and families happen because, well, somebody's at whatever site it is that the catastrophes take place.
     If nobody were there to notice, nobody'd be bothered by an earthquake or a storm or grass or forest fire. And if we didn't have the technology to monitor and understand such things as earthquakes or the weather at a distance, we wouldn't know about them or even care that much. But since there have been at least a few hundred million humans on the planet for the last couple tens of thousands of years and since we're so widespread in our overpopulation of the planet, we notice a lot of stuff goes against our survival.
     Or so we think.
     See, we survive mainly 'cause we've figured out how to have the free time to make our lives easier. If we didn't have our imaginations we wouldn't have figured out how to make arrow points out of metal, which of course led us to being able to kill more of each other over time than we would ever have done with a Clovis point and a stick.
     All that imagination has taken its toll on us and not the least of which toll-taxes of our imagination is our ability to dream up goofy ideas for the way things work when, later on we were able to imagine new ways of seeing how things work so that we could do away with the goofy ideas. At least that would be the plan, were it not obvious that many more of us than is necessary still believe the goofy stuff even if we accept the possibility of the new ways of seeing stuff being more correct than the goofy stuff.
     That's why we fight over the space between gods and science.
     That's why we still manage to build conceptual pictures of the molecular structure of the basic cell while going off to thank the divine hand for having given us the last couple hundred thousand breaths. That's why we pray for good weather and wonder how we pissed off god when the weather turns sour, even if we can read in the technology how the weather patterns are predictable and produced.
     It gives us the ability to cop out, religious belief such as that does.
     God's burning the forests and valleys and homes and houses of people in California because they voted against gay marriage?

Gimme a break.

The houses being burned down in California are burning because they were built in the middle of a forest area that has been for a long, long time notorious for its near desert-like drought and fire cycles. Ain't no god told folks to build there and it ain't no god told folks not to think of what they were doing.
     It was just such pretty countryside that somebody had to develop it.
     And people paid for the houses thus developed.
     Without one thought to the fire and drought possibilities. Or the possibilities of flash floods in those times when water was droppin' from the sky in buckets and barrels.
     People moved in there of their own delusion, much like the delusionals who believe that they know the hand of a god being that no one in history other than seriously deluded psychopaths have ever seen. Ever seen. Not once.
     Which leads me to the following proclamation: I do not understand gayness. It just don't even begin to make any sense to me. That don't mean that I think gays are the demon spawn. Yes, I do wonder about the juvenile and narcissistic hedonism that I see in the multiple messages on restroom walls. But I ain't about to claim that we should cull the herd beginning with the gays and lesbians.
     And if I cannot understand such a simple concept as gayness . . . or the lifestyle that it is supposed to be, or any of the other bits and pieces of gay behavior or gay thought or gay psychology or gay physiology, up to and including transsexualism, I am sure as hell not going to understand the even more simple concept of the existence of a divine being punishing its creation (humans) for the divine having allowed the gay humans (its own creation as well) to be. And I do not understand how anyone can claim to know that catastrophes are happening to people because they themselves do not want gays getting married. It just don't make sense.