Des Downunder On Sundays

By Desmond Rutherford | Adelaide, Australia -- The End is Nigh

I looked and looked, all around my usual sites, but it wasn't until Sunday (U.S. time) that the 'make money out of marriage management organisations,' posted their disgust of the NY marriage equality legislation. Comments seemed to indicate that satanic secular governments were now going to have to accept the responsibility for bestial carnal lusts celebrated in nuptials with a sister, through to people wedding a rock. Furthermore, the prophesied Armageddon is nigh, and we should prepare for the Rapture...opps sorry, that was last month, wasn't it?

Prophecy is a very powerful tool in the hands of a skilled soothsayer. Remember Julius Caesar? He was told, “Beware, the Ides of March, O' Caesar!” On the morning of his assassination, his third female wife, Calpurnia, revealed she had had a dream with a premonition that predicted his demise. “Stay at home,” she advised him. “Jules,” that was her pet name for him, “Jules.” She was only sixteen years old or so when he married her, and like most teens, she liked pet names for her latest intimate much older spouse. Anyway she told him, “Stay home, Jules, stay home!” But he didn't, he went, and then he was gone.

Whether Caesar had gotten the dates wrong, or not, is immaterial. Some people seem to think that Julius may have believed that the soothsayer wasn't referring to the 'Ides of March,' but instead, that the warning was about being raptured by the 'nuts in May.' Of course that is most unlikely as the Romans had not yet crucified any notable prophets who might rise up to inspire a nutty religious enterprise.

Julius Caesar wasn't going to be put off, and he toddled off to the Forum Bar where some sinister senators, concealing daggers in their togas, greeted him with that immortal phrase, “O' Hi, O' Caesar, and then proceeded to stab him. Aren't you glad they don't do that any more? Well, not with daggers anyway, not since they managed to use faux news programs to politically assassinate the thoughts of people who don't have the same beliefs as they do.

The Warren Cup, Side B.
Image via Wikimedia

Jules had donned his toga, then he went, he was stabbed, but it was okay as the stabbers were all honourable men. We know that, because Shakespeare told us that Marc Antony (probably one of Caesar's boyfriends) said they were all honourable men; just like the money makers in the marriage management organisations. Ask them, they will tell you they are honourable; they are doing the work of their god, protecting their beliefs from being revealed as supercilious sanctimonious superstitions by which, they claim, all non-believers may be condemned.

Ancient Rome did celebrate same sex male marriage, but even so, there was discussion about accepting same sex relationships, under influence from the Talmud and Torah, and the Bible. It was in 390AD that the Christian Emperors, Valentinian II, Theodoisus and Arcadius declared homosexual sex to be illegal and those who were found guilty were condemned to be burned alive in public.

Need we go further, to mention how this Christian attitude towards non-believers, towards women who were judged as witches, and to whole nations being deemed unchristian thus being subject to Holy Crusades, was to make the non-believers capitulate to Christian belief? When you add the terrors of the Holy Inquisition you should begin to feel that someone didn't quite get the message of loving thy neighbour as thyself. There is no honour in that, only questionable priests, indeed, there were corrupt papacies which dishonoured the innocence of youth in every same way that they hypocritically condemned. Princes of the Church had blood on their hands, and sex of every type on their minds and bodies, most especially their bodies. All of this was paid for by the fear the priests instilled into the minds of the poor, the deprived, and the uneducated, diabolically collected in the form of indulgences for an unsubstantiated afterlife.

Torture of the Inquisition
Two old priests showing the application of torture
under the supervision of the Inquisition
etching via WikiMedia

Do you need to wonder why their descendants want to limit today's education system? Why they wish to promote the primitive untested conjecture of creationism over scientifically valid theories of evolution in our schools? Why they sidestep rational thinking in favour of blind belief? Why they emphatically beseech funds to fight against the freedom of others who simply want equal rights?

The answer is obvious, they want your money. They want your obedience to the laws of their beliefs, at the expense of your own ability to determine your own life. There is no faith in their hearts except for the power they can exert over others, for the money they can extort.

They bait minds with the concept of sin as something for which forgiveness needs to be sought. They never tell you that sin is a fabrication to keep you in their power, to keep you paying into their coffers, into the funds that they use to condemn unbelievers, to burn them, hang them, to torture and bully them if they can, wherever they can, to wage crusades against logic, reason and against appreciation of life itself. And of course, if any of the money is left over...well they might need a new car, or something...unless they bought the car first.

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Amidst all the reactions to New York recognising same sex marriage, the most obscene remarks have come from the hard core religious zealots. Hardly surprising, and whilst we might wish they would all go seek psychotherapy to assist them in regaining their sanity if not their humanity, we are bound by our recognition of the First Amendment to honour their right to free speech.

Somehow, whilst we do this, they are busy using freedom of opinion and religion as a loophole, to create lies about those who seek nothing more than equality in this secular social issue.

Their actions leave little choice for those of us who either worship deities in private, or have found no need to worship deities at all. We feel forced to demand that the rights of the First Amendment apply equally to those of us who are not members of religions, and that we should be able to live our lives without harassment from religion, whilst being recognised as equals.

Those people must be called upon to recognise that whilst they have the right to opine what they believe, that does not in itself give them the right to compel others to live by their expectations. Every time they claim that marriage is only between a man and a woman, as a gift from their God, they assume that they have the right to lord their God, and their beliefs over all of us. They demand that we believe as they do. Well, we don't. The First Amendment was designed to stop that happening, through prohibiting government adoption of a religion.

Religious extremists must now realise that they no longer have the right to demand that wars must be waged for the sake of their religion. Claims that the First Amendment breaks down when the belief of one group is ignored for the sake of the rights of another group, patently misses the objective of the Amendment, to protect rights over beliefs. Their right to believe what they wish is already safeguarded. Their demand that their belief be obeyed effectively denies the right of existence, and the birthright, of people who do not subscribe to those beliefs, and should be denied by the state without hesitation.

They need not fear Armageddon as a result of the freedom of individuals to believe as they will. Earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods and volcanoes are all explicable through scientific study of nature. The only thing they have in common with sexual relationships, is that, like sunshine, gentle summer breezes, glorious sunsets, and rainbows, they are all naturally occurring events. Yes, shocking as it may be to the zealots, sex is natural. Feel free to limit your own sexual expression according to your belief, but don't expect or demand that people who do not share your beliefs go along with such demands. You don't have the right to ask for that; you certainly don't have the right to demand it. As for when you tell the young they shouldn't orgasm except when married, is that working for you? I thought not!

No, no one need live in fear of sin, damnation, or of Armageddon happening tomorrow morning, but come the night before a wedding, it should and must be perfectly acceptable to hear all lovers singing, “Ahm a geddon married in the morning.”

That joyous sound is the anticipation of celebrating the love these two people have for each other, regardless of gender, and doing so is their intrinsic human right. To deny people this right, to seal their love for each other in a marriage, is a torture closely akin to any of the obscenities the religious have perpetrated on their fellow humans in the past.

All we should really need to worry about is getting to the nuptials on time.

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"Why is it had our son had a significant other in his life, they would not have received that death benefit or opportunity to go to Dover and receive his remains. Love is Love-  Just as the Whites that went into the south over the civil rightsissue, right now what this community needs are heteros to show up, on their behalf, and say hey look these are my people you're trying to discriminate against. You can keep your religion in your church, you can keep your ideologies in your home, but when it comes to the civil arena, when it comes to civil constructs, their citizenship is every bit as valid as yours or mine."

~ Jeff Wilfahrt father of Andrew Wilfahrt who was openly gay and was killed in action in Afghanistan this past February.