conuly

Here.

The Religious Right are Pharisees....For those liberals who don't read the Bible -- that's part of the problem, by the way -- I'll explain. All through the gospels, Jesus is being heckled by the Pharisees, a group that promoted a strict interpretation of Mosaic Law. Again and again, Jesus sides with the spirit of the law against the Pharisees' loyalty to the letter of the law. (For what it's worth, the Pharisees look much more reasonable in Jewish versions of history, where they are not foils for someone else.) The law, Jesus argues, needs to be tempered by compassion and common sense. In the Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), for example, the priest and the Levite who cross to the other side of the road (rather than help the injured man) aren't just being jerks. They're obeying the letter of the law. They're maintaining their ritual purity by not coming into contact with blood or possibly a corpse. But the Good Samaritan ignores all that in favor of a higher law: Love your neighbor as yourself.

See where I'm headed? When Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their ilk get going, you don't hear much about compassion and common sense; but you hear a lot about the letter of the law. As the bumper sticker puts it: "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

and

Sex barely scratches the surface of morality. If your moral code instructs you to bring honesty, integrity, and compassion into all your human relationships, it's not clear that you need any special rules about sex at all. When Jesus listed the admission standards for Christians to get into Heaven (Matthew 25), not one of them concerned sex. The key idea was "Who did you help?" not "Who did you sleep with?"

Okay, just quotes, no commentary. Me bored.