So I got pissed off, and spat a bitter little gob of snark into this Metafilter thread linking Christianity.com’s so-called Sexual Purity Fact Sheet.
Twine42 and Pollomacho both respond that the thread itself and the paste-in of the infamous Dr. Laura letter are aimed more at what I referred to as “those damn wacky homo-hating Christians,” to address the pick-and-choose Biblicalism of fundamentalist morality, and are not meant as an attack on what they call “true Christianity.” The thread goes on, however, to skeptical attacks on Paul and scriptural historicity (these “St. Paul was a misogynist revisionist bastard” statements have been popping up a lot in my attention lately) which cause me to question just what a “true Christian” is to them. While Christians may not all be the wacky homo-haters they think many of us are, we still are followers of a way of life and a world view which is becoming more and more alien to this increasingly secularized world.
Substrate drops more than one theological jewel into the thread with this comment: “So, according to this nobody is getting into the Kingdom of Heaven anyway.” Exactly right! We are fallen humans in a fallen world, and we are, each one of us — regardless of race, creed, sexuality, political affiliation, or MeFI user ID number — unable to inherit the Kingdom by the efforts of our own fallen virtue.
(Of course, if you’re one of them secularist types, the idea of salvation and an afterlife is probably just a superstition from some unreliable old religious text anyway, right?)