But I've been thinking about Richard Mourdock's God. I don't understand how a professed Christian can form a mental image of a loving God, while simultaneously attributing to that God a mean streak a mile wide. How could a loving God allow a woman to be raped, trip the switch that says "pregnant" and then force the woman to carry her rapist's child? That's a strange notion of "loving" if you ask me. Wouldn't it be better to go with Kurt Vonnegut's God the Utterly Indifferent, and admit that some bad things just happen, without any larger purpose?Instead, Mourdock and others like him (it seems it's always a "him") appear to have a Bible with a different version of Genesis 1:27, attributed variously on the Web, but reading "Man created God in his own image." Maybe Mourdock and similar Republicans are just mean mofos, so they make their God similarly a mean mofo. It would explain a lot.
Mourdock is married, which means that one presumably masochistic woman must wake up with this moral lamebrain every day of the world. The GOP seems to be doubling down on Mourdock's batshit crazy statement, backing him with money and endorsements, so we can assume there are other women who awaken each day to the sight of a stern disciplinarian who admits of no exceptions to his anti-abortion rule, not for rape, not for the woman's health, not even if the woman will certainly die of the pregnancy.
If that's what the Republicans' God tells them to do, then it is incumbent on the voters to see to it that none of them... none... ever serves in a position of authority over any woman, let alone in the United States Senate. Flush them from that august body. Send them home; send them to Sunday school like small children, for a refresher course in treating other people as you would yourself be treated.
It seems to me to be a degeneration and perversion far beyond ideological politics, but a profound corruption of the very base and substance of American culture: the result of a century of crass materialism that has promised the greater good and delivered hell instead. As for god, to each their own, but it seems to me once the line of fantasy has been crossed, sheer common sense and rational realization create a truth that overwhelms the conditioned reality of human subservience to a masculine authority usually modeled on patriarchy and power. Once realized, one is faced with the absolute nonsense of deity and its tragic consequences for humanity.
ReplyDeletekarmanot, I've met and occasionally been forced to converse with enough of these people to understand that "reason" is not in their vocabulary. I've known plenty of religious people who are able to compartmentalize, or to understand that maybe applying first-century punishments like stoning for adultery to 21st-century Americans is inappropriate, indeed cruel. But not these folks!
DeleteWhatever the motivations, the results are just that: cruel. These people must NOT be permitted to control women's lives outside their own narrow sphere!