Editor:
Re: Epitome of hypocrisy, letters, April 19
I wasn’t going to write about this, knowing full well that pitting logic against the tightly-held vision of a firm believer is like trying to awaken Trump devotees to the con artist that he is.
There is no amount of provable evidence that can penetrate a fortress built from necessary belief.
Yet there exists in me an untameable compulsion to challenge contradictions, whether it makes a difference or not, and so here I am. As a fan of the one we call Jesus, even though his mother named him otherwise, I am particularly sensitive to the issue of “truth” in the Bible.
In Helen Friesen’s upbraiding of Paul Dukes’ criticism of the Star of the Sea’s refusal to rent space to gay people, she informs us that: “True Christians follow the teachings of the Bible and only pseudo-Christians pick and choose those parts they will follow and those which they ignore.”
This is not a statement I can ignore and still digest my food.
First, there is no such thing as a “true Christian.”
Only those who were close to J.C. back in the day can know what he thought and said and most of them got it wrong half the time due to intellectual limitation and human conditioning, as Jesus lamented on more than one occasion. Research strongly shows that Bible Jesus bears little resemblance to the Messiah who walked the Earth.
Second, we all cherry-pick what “holy scripture” we will follow and what we will ignore, including Ms. Friesen in her triumphant assertion that “the Bible clearly states that man shall not lie with man as with woman.”
Interestingly, she has omitted the rest of Leviticus 20:13 which states: “they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”
Are “true Christians” putting gay people to death and, if so, why don’t I know about it?
They must be, because, after all, the Bible instructs them to do so, as it instructs them in the matter of who lies with whom.
While I am no biblical scholar, I seem to remember a lot of fire-and-brimstone, eyes-for-eyes, kill-your-enemies and stone-the-harlots that we have civilized ourselves past believing to be the “Word of God.” I think this is Mr. Dukes’ point.
We cannot seem to grasp that the Creator commands no one. To do so would be to negate free will and violate His own immutable Law, of which He is incapable. It is enough that He has put in place a system of cause and effect to guide us in a more loving direction.
One final note: Ms. Friesen makes a seemingly valid point about the hypocrisy of “demanding the right to live and believe as one chooses but, in the same breath, deny that right to another.” I guess that’s what they were doing with Hitler – not denying his right to live and believe as he chose.
It is not God we need to answer to, Helen, but ourselves.
Maureen Kerr, Surrey