As noted in a previous post, the United States Supreme Court recently supported the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to harass grieving parents of sons and daughters who died in combat.
Making a mockery of the First Amendment, the Court’s decision legitimized the anti-gay hate speech spouted by Marjie J. Phelps and her father, Fred Phelps, leader and counsel for the Westboro Baptist Church.
The Phelps band is notorious for violating the privacy of suffering military families by parading around funeral sites with their brightly colored signs thanking God for dead soldiers and declaring that God hates fags.
Ignoring the fact that psychologists agree that a percentage of the population is born gay and are therefore God’s creations, Ms. Phelps and company continually project their own violent nature onto divinity. Quoted in the Huffington Post, Ms. Phelps said:
"Let me tell you what this church does: Shut up all that talk about infliction of emotional distress," Phelps said, in response to the claim by Albert Snyder, father of slain marine Matthew Snyder, which had provided the impetus for the lawsuit. "When you're standing there with your young child's body bits and pieces in a coffin, you've been dealt some emotional distress by the Lord your God."
The Phelps band are not the first to accuse God of unspeakable crimes against humanity and all of nature – in the Abrahamic traditions the practice goes back to antiquity. One Sunday last April, I dropped in at a local Islamic Center for a monthly Muslim-Christian dialog. The topic for discussion that afternoon was “Sacrifice.”
A Muslim presenter told stories of martyrdom in his tradition featuring the brutal deaths of a male slave and of a woman who refused to deny Mohammed’s message. According to the narrator, the woman’s accusers tied her legs to two camels that pulled her body apart.
Another Muslim contributed a tale of human sacrifice in which a man abandoned his wife and infant to die alone in the desert in obedience to what he believed was God’s will.
The following Monday morning, still overdosed by the previous afternoon’s exposure to violence in religion, I found no respite in the daily news.
The Associated Press reported: “A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.” (Men were given no responsibility for controlling their sexual impulses.)
The article noted that Iran is a nation prone to earthquakes.
So, I thought, along with Pat Robertson, a Christian, who blamed God for the recent devastation of Haiti, the Islamic cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, also charges divinity with periodic mass murder to keep humankind in line, not to mention the collateral damage to other species.
The statements of Robertson and Sedighi confirm yet again that a literal understanding of horrific stories in ancient scripture continues to influence the judgment of religious leaders and laity.
A quick sampling of the charges against God in the Bible includes the following heinous crimes against humanity: mass murder (Gen. 6-9); infanticide (Ex. 12:12); and torture - consider the fires of hell where the unsaved are reportedly condemned for eternity (Rev. 20: 9-15).
It bears repeating: how we human beings understand ourselves in relationship to God informs how we understand ourselves in all of our relationships: to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world.
It follows that the Phelps band, in its zealous hatred of gays and anyone else who might differ from them in one respect or another, would project onto God their desire to destroy those whom they’ve chosen to marginalize.
Some of us, taking our cues from the teachings of the non-violent Jesus, Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh and other widely respected religious leaders agree that in making decisions, both large and small, a loving God eschews violence and instead, invites us toward the path most beneficial for all of life.
Where does that leave the Phelps band? The religious leaders noted in the above paragraph urge us to cultivate compassion even for those who spew hatred toward others. In the process, we are called to provide a buffer zone between Westboro Baptist and its targets. Hopefully, we can influence this misguided congregation and other haters to give up their perverted notions of religion and move toward fulfilling our covenant to love others as God first loved us.
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