Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Like Holy Crap, God, You're Not Even Trying

Oh boy, back to the Bible, and once again good ol' God proves to be a poor role model for conflict resolution. In this episode, God apparently gets frustrated with the state of morality in two towns called Sodom and Gomorrah. I guess even the babies were evil, because God sure didn't seem to hesitate about killing literally everyone in both of these towns. But wait! Comparatively-decent guy Abraham convinces God that it wouldn't be fair to destroy the whole towns if God could find even a few good people in them. So God makes a sort of bet with Abraham, except the stakes are other people's lives so this is an exceptionally shitty bet. God agrees that if there can be found just ten people in the two towns that are good people, Sodom and Gomorrah will be saved.

So God sends a couple of angels to Sodom. Who knows if he even tried with Gomorrah (we get the impression God wasn't terribly interested in losing this bet). Lot, a citizen of Sodom, meets the angels and invites them to his house. Before long - gossip travels fast in a town full of sinners - the whole town (presumably? again, we get the impression God was kinda generalizing on purpose here) is at Lot's door demanding he turn over the visitors so they can be raped (this is the part people get "sodomy" from, since evidently to the Church the rape part is less offensive than the male-on-male part). Lot, ever hospitable, offers the mob his daughters instead, but the villagers aren't falling for his blatant misogyny. The angels subsequently command Lot and his family to leave - there were only 4 of them, and since the angels were too lazy to continue their search they assumed Lot's family were the only half-decent people there (again, gonna have to question how great a guy Lot was after offering up his daughters for rape). The angels tel Lot's family not to look back upon their home, which is about to be destroyed along with the rest of Sodom. As they flee, Lot's wife looks back, in a genuine display of humanity, and God punishes her by turning her into salt, because God is a pedantic dictator who never tolerates disobedience or doubt. Sodom is destroyed, Lot and his daughters escape, and later they try to incest him up (but that's another story.)

Unfair punishment is everywhere. It seems to me a lot of the time that large portions of society are almost built upon the idea that people can be punished or penalized for things they have no control over, or can be punished in a way that is far from proportional to their crime. Oppression is, after all, a sort of "punishment" for being a member of a group outside the Default (white, cisgender, heterosexual, male, able-bodied). People are punished every day essentially for existing in a way somebody finds disagreeable. On the opposite side of that coin, those who commit these unfair punishments every day are so thoroughly impenitent about it that I often lose any hope that they'll ever change.

(This is a terribly shoddy piece of writing and I apologize but I'm kind of upset right now due to issues of this sort so please forgive me)

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