It makes me sick to see people hiding behind things like religion to rationalize and legitimize their feelings of hate and fear.
Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan put up a post about an extremely brutal hate-crime attack on an openly gay man. The 2-minute news report he embeds is depressing, but there was something to laugh about at the end. The studio interviewed one of the attackers’ friends, who proudly displayed this tattoo:
It’s a tattoo reading “[Thou] shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22″. Who else sees the problem here?
Leviticus also forbids tattooing. In the very next chapter.
“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28″
If logic played into these sorts of disagreements, pointing out glaring inconsistencies like this one, should undercut just about every bible-based argument against homosexuals.
But it won’t. And it’s not just the wacky religious who fall prey to cherrypicking. It seems to be human nature to only hear what you want to hear.
Links
Cherrypicking Illustrated | The Friendly Atheist
Why God Backs Beating The Crap Out Of You | The Atlantic
Also in Leviticus (19:19), on the actual same page in my Bible as 18:22, … “Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.” So, you know, everybody wearing a poly-cotton blend = SINNERS! Check your labels, people!