The Ballad Of Kat and Krista (Or, Why The Church Is Losing)

The city saw progress;
It’s moving, at last,
But the church remains stubbornly
Stuck in the past

When Kat married Krista
They first had to fight
Till the city agreed
To their benefits right

So health care was covered
Which only seems just
And the city agreed
That they certainly must

And Kat’s parents supported
Her fight all along
They were quite in the right—
Now their church says they’re wrong

The church has the parents
In hot (holy) water
Demanding the couple
Abandon their daughter!

Or at least, they must publicly
Fully repent
(“What? Supporting our daughter?
That’s not what we meant!”

“She’s sinful and evil,
Her marriage a fraud!
I denounce here right now
In the name of my God!”)

But the parents are better
Than God up above
Their daughter (now, daughters)
Get nothing but love.

For good, loving parents,
There’s but one way to choose:
If it’s church or your daughter
Then the church has to lose

From CNN’s belief blog, a couple on a bit of a nightmarish roller coaster ride. Kat and Krista are married (yay!); Krista’s parents have essentially disowned her (boo!). Kat’s parents love them both (yay!) and have supported them while they fought, successfully (yay!), for health benefits from the city where Kat is a police detective. Not all parents are so supportive (boo!)

So the family supported their daughters through the court battle (yay!) and their church wants to recognize that display of familial love… by kicking them out of the church (I’m gonna go with “boo!” here, even though I think being kicked out of church is cause for celebration).

Elders at Ridgedale Church of Christ told Linda Cooper and two relatives that their public support for Kat Cooper, Linda Cooper’s gay daughter, went against the church’s teachings, local media reported. In a private meeting, reports say, Linda Cooper was given a choice: publicly atone for their transgressions or leave the church.

Linda left the church.

More proof that morality is innate–clearly, in this case, the moral thing to do was to go against the wishes of the church.

When the Ridgedale congregation next updates its membership rolls, it will be crossing out the Coopers. The family told the local newspaper they were devastated to leave a church where they had been active for 60 years.

For now, both the Coopers and their former church are standing by their own convictions, and after six decades of traveling together, they are heading in different directions.

Those different directions are not equally valid; they are right and wrong. The Coopers have done right. The church is doubling down on wrong.

Stephen King On God

“You’re missing the sunrises, sunsets, and stars;
You’re missing the crops, and the bees.”
You’re missing the point, Stephen King, if you think
That we’re missing the moments like these
The natural world is a beautiful place
And I find it a little bit odd
That the thing that you see when you look at the world
Is the thing you can’t see at all—God.

“I choose to believe, because everything works
In a way that suggests it’s designed.”
But the thing is that science knows better than this;
The suggestion is all in your mind.
Once the gods moved the heavens, the moon and the stars
And to some, maybe that’s how it looks
It’s fun to pretend that such forces exist
But life isn’t one of your books

“God’s plan is peculiar; there’s stuff that seems strange;
And you know, I’m beginning to doubt.”
Keep thinking; keep doubting; keep reading; keep on,
And you’ll probably figure it out.
There’s much that we know; there’s much you can read
(Though most of it isn’t in rhyme)
And maybe… a sunrise, a sunset, a star,
You could see for the very first time.

The quotes aren’t exact, but they’re actually pretty close. Stephen King has yet another book out, and NPR has an interview with him. At one point, they discussed his belief in god:

“I choose to believe it. … I mean, there’s no downside to that. If you say, ‘Well, OK, I don’t believe in God. There’s no evidence of God,’ then you’re missing the stars in the sky and you’re missing the sunrises and sunsets and you’re missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together. Everything is sort of built in a way that to me suggests intelligent design. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, ‘Well, if this is God’s plan, it’s very peculiar,’ and you have to wonder about that guy’s personality — the big guy’s personality. And the thing is — I may have told you last time that I believe in God — what I’m saying now is I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts and I refuse to be pinned down to something that I said 10 or 12 years ago. I’m totally inconsistent.”

Intelligent design seems to make more sense to those whose job is designing. Engineers are more likely to be ID proponents than biologists, for instance. I suppose it only makes sense that a man who creates fictitious worlds might be prepared to believe that our own world has likewise been created.

Science… through a New-Age filter

PZ Myers writes, in response to a cretinist who cannot wrap his cortex around the fact that we and oranges share a common ancestor, a post reviewing some of the evidence that shows just that. Of course, we do have to go back a bit to get to that common ancestor… 1.6 billion years or so. A 2002 paper by Meyerowitz compares plants to animals in order to find similarities, differences, and what a common ancestor likely looked like.

Of course, I suspect that Myers’ orange-wielding muse will not ever read the post… which is too bad. One wonders what sort of conclusions a sharp thinker like that might draw from actual evidence. Sadly, it is beyond my imagination. So I cheated, and imagined a New-Ager reading it, instead. Sue me.

I took this post and ran it through
A New-Age Verbiage Filter—
Resulting in conclusions which
Are just a bit off-kilter.

It seems you’ve given evidence
For many a woo-woo notion,
And I predict the following
Will soon be set in motion:

If just two billion years ago,
In some primordial goo,
We shared a common ancestor
Then plants have feelings too!

And surely you have proved beyond
A shadow of a doubt
That houseplants are much happier
When folks don’t scream or shout.

Indeed, the information that
This science paper cites
Becomes a legal argument
That plants have civil rights!

The converse, also, must be true
That deep inside, we’re plants,
And we can photosynthesize
In meditative trance!

If just two billion years ago
The plants and we were one
It’s proof that man can live while
Eating only air and sun.

Of course, since none of this is true
No matter our desires—
The scientists are clearly wrong
And all a bunch of liars.