A Reader’s Guide to “On Homosexuality”

I have no idea what LOGBTQA means.  This was placed on my blog by an unhappy reader who didn’t like that I used the terms “homosexual” and “gay,” and suggested that LOGBTQ be used instead.   For the moment at least, I have decided to use the term (if a term it be) GLBT.   At least I think I know what it means.

Please do not confuse ignorance with bigotry.  One may seem bigoted because they are ignorant.  This does not mean they are bigoted, it just means that they are ignorant.  Of course they can also be both ignorant and bigoted.  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

My blog post “On Homosexuality” has suddenly drawn more negative responses than has any other of my writings.  This should get my attention.  And it has.

The work is a reprinting of my essay “On Homosexuality,” written in 1995 or before, and published in my book, “Baubles of Blasphemy,” originally edited by Ed Buckner and published by the Atlanta Freethought Press, in 1995.  The work has gone into a second printing, edited by Frank Zindler and published by American Atheist Press, in 2009.  You can order a copy, if interested, at atheists.org or amazon.com.

There has been a pleasing amount of praise for this book by some and much criticism of its contents by others.  Indeed, there have been specific criticisms of the essay “On Homosexuality,” but the comments have most commonly expressed outrage that I was supporting “gay rights” in any way at all.  I was deemed to be a secret homosexual who was in the pockets, if not the pants, of those promoting the imaginary “Homosexual Agenda.”

Then, in 2012, seventeen years at least since the essay was written and published, in the idealized visionary hope that it might do some good to those of our fellow mortals who were GLBT, the work was republished in Freethought Blogs.

To my stunned amazement, there followed an avalanche of negative comments accusing me of being homophobic and insensitive to the feelings of those I was, in the greatest of good faith, trying to help in combating the same type bigotry that is still occurring against GLBT(s?) and atheists.

I still do not, after much thought, understand fully what is upsetting to those who wrote as they did.  Whether or not I understand the emotions of the writers on this, I do understand that a certain portion of my essay has hurt them deeply.

I have just researched LOGBTQA and learned that LGBTQA means “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning, and Allied, but I have not been able to learn what LOGBTQA means.  Might be a typo.  It is easy to make such mistakes; mistakes which should be readily forgivable and fixable.

Being thus admonished and educated, I shall henceforth (at least in this writing) use the term (if term it be) LGBTQA.  Am I an Allied?  I would certainly hope so.

I will readily concede that it is indeed possible to be unconsciously bigoted toward a group such as  LGBTQA, even while writing in support of their rights.  I do not believe I fit in this category, but it is pretty hard to know just what one might be unconsciously thinking.  What are you unconsciously thinking right now?

The snake bite joke (for joke it was and is), that forms the frame for the essay was, consciously at least, nothing more than a mocking of people who actually felt that way.  I am an Eagle Scout.  Of course I know that snake bite kits and making X cuts and sucking and spiting poison from a snake bite wound are to be avoided because doing such will inevitably cause even graver injury.  Such a conversation never happened.  It was a made up story thought, at the time of writing, to be useful in making from humor a more serious point.  If a friend of mine was in a life threatening situation, I would do anything possible to save that friend, even if it meant risking my own death.  Embarrassment or sexual phobias would have no place in such a situation.  I would do what was needed, no matter how unpleasant such actions might seem to be to me or to anyone else.

Yes, my writings are intended to offend—but not to offend those they are trying to help.  If the use of the snake story offended you, I sincerely apologize.  Please know, and hopefully understand, that such was not intended.  What was intended was to offend those who might actually act in conformity with such “moral” principles.

The misunderstanding comes, in part I think, from generational differences.  Before many of you were born, I was active, and under fire, in a variety of activities that achieved greater civil rights and open housing for those then self-called “colored people.”  I was condemned as a “Communist” by my U.S. Representative, and I was called a “nigger lover” by my minister father. It was unthinkable that any decent person (meaning white person) would favor going to school with them, or, perish the thought, marrying one of them.  Both going to school with the “colored” and marrying a person of “the colored race” were crimes in most states.  Homosexuality was an unthinkable crime and was unlawful.  In some places, it could be punished by death.  I clearly remember such horrors as separate “white” and “colored” drinking fountains.  You could easily tell which was which.  The “white” one was a nice water cooler.  The “colored” one was a pipe with a faucet.  “Separate but equal” indeed.

It is perhaps impossible for persons who did not live in a certain time to understand the emotions of that time.  Nor is it possible for one person to fully understand what may offend another person who holds a different view, be that on race, religion, atheism, or sexual orientation. Particularly if they are from different generations.   When I was in law school, everyone smoked.  Even in class.  It would have not been possible then to imagine a world where no one smoked.  People of the present generation might well find it impossible to imagine a society in which almost everybody smoked.

Similarly, it is probably impossible for some of those who have written accusations of homophobia to understand just how far things have come in the past generation.  Those who do recall, or understand those times, should try to appreciate just how daring it would be to advocate any rights whatsoever for persons thought to be deviate.  Persons the law had declared criminal.

I am honored indeed to be given a spot on FTB, and I do not wish to do or say anything that might seem retrograde to the entire spirit of the undertaking.

I have published all comments that I have seen.  It is within my power on the blog to delete any comment I wish.  In that I believe in free speech, I have deleted none of them.

Edwin Kagin, by dog.

 

Omitted Reader Comment

The following writing apparently had not been approved for posting.  That is because I hadn’t seen it. A writer of such clear vision and such artful use of the language should in no wise be ignored.  So here it is.  Edwin

 

Caine, Fleur du Mal says:

14 January 2012 at 2:42 am

My comment to Kagin is awaiting moderation. It may or may not show up, so here it is:

What’s going on in your little universe that you equate saving someone’s life with sex? I have a bit of news for you – sucking venom out of a body part is not a blow job, nor is it sex.

For you to say something like this is, indeed, homophobic and it’s also amazingly stupid. Personally, I am disgusted and dismayed to see such utter shit posted at Freethought blogs.

Exactly why were you and your friend discussing such a situation in the first place? Playing a game of “I’d suck you here to remove venom but not there?” And you honestly didn’t bother to give any thought to this idiocy?

Kudos to your stepdaughter, in spite of your asinine descriptor of liberated who recognizes homophobia when she sees/hears it.

I’m sure it feels good, Mr. Kagin, to have your head so firmly lodged up your anus, but you might want to pull it out for a bit. Get some air.

 

Edwin.

Thought Police of Freethought

 

There seems to be a danger of Thought Police in the world of Freethought. You know, those know what is wrong with everything and want to tell you about it, regardless of the effect of their pronouncements on the future of our ability to say and do.

When this blog first got going, it was announced that there would be something on the blog to offend everyone.  This has been proved to be the case nicely and has inspired some to put fingertips to keyboard to criticize about everything touched upon thus so far.  This is an equal opportunity blasphemy.

Some of the writing on my blog has already been condemned by, among others, those who are frequently wrong but never uncertain.

To fully appreciate Edwinian writing, it is necessary for you to know that everything you think you know about a given Edwinian writing, together with your understanding of the motives of the author, is almost certainly wrong.

Readers would probably find it useful, and therefore well advised, to become acquainted with, at least before speaking, the literary concepts and devices of satire, humor, parody, metaphor, allegory, irony, sarcasm, and wit before providing their opinions so loudly and so often.

Edwin.

On Homosexuality

 

I don’t care what other peoples’ sex practices are, so long as they don’t practice them in the streets and frighten the horses.  Oscar Wilde, I think.

 

Some years ago, on a camping trip, my friend Joe Ray and I resolved that should one of us be unfortunate enough to be bitten on the penis by a venomous serpent, and oral suction by the other was the only life saving measure available, then the afflicted party would simply have to die.  My liberated stepdaughter finds this view “homophobic,” meaning fear of homosexuality.  I don’t think so.  I am not afraid of homosexuality;  I simply find the idea of people of the same sex having sex unaesthetic and curious and do not understand why up to ten percent of the world’s population wants to do that.

But there are many things I find annoying, don’t understand, don’t want to do, and don’t know why anyone else would want to do, like being left-handed.  Why, I wonder, would anyone choose to be left-handed?  They look funny when they write, and their hand moves across what they have written.  Also, lots of manufactured artifacts are most unhandy for people electing this deviation.  Parents sometimes force their children to be right-handed and normal.  In the superstitious past, such maladapted persons were thought blessed or cursed, depending on prevailing local mythology.  Kids forced to alter their basic nature became psychologically scarred.

We are more enlightened now.  Left-handed people are accepted and their rights acknowledged.  Sports stars and Presidents can be left-handed, as can anyone else, and special goods are manufactured accommodating their variance from the much larger right-handed population.  Their condition is seen as a result of the roll of the genetic dice, having no moral or pejorative implications.

Homosexuality appears to have been an aspect of the human condition forever, praised by some societies, condemned by others.  Because of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, American culture has feared, condemned, and criminalized this left-handedness of human sexual drives.  To the followers of Yahweh and St. Paul, sex has been suspect anyway, the source of original sin, and tolerated only to create new believers.  Homosexuality was viewed as a practice permitted by the unsaved heathens whose science and culture Christianity destroyed.  The Bible specifically condemns same sex erotic love, but then it also condemns women and gives instructions on repressing them.  One might muse darkly on what those twelve apostles did together on long nights in the desert, without women, or why the woman-hating apostle Paul lavished such affectionate words on his young disciple Timothy.  Anyway, the religious right wants homosexual acts to stay criminal and sees the practice as a sin, not as the genetically predisposed state of being it appears to be.  Because of this sin myth, homosexuals have been banned from the American military, and, if not made criminals elsewhere, have been denied the rights to live together and constitute a lawful family.  They may not behave as heterosexuals in love because their sexual orientation is mythologically viewed as immoral and wrong.  They appear to be not only loathed but feared.

The fear comes from the belief that homosexuality is voluntary and contagious.  Bigots believe gays and lesbians choose to be that way and that they try to convert others to their perversions.  As is usual in matters of religious certainty, if the facts contradict the myth, the myth wins.  The existence of homosexuals in the military is unsettling to many, proving that the perceived immorality is not confined to the arts and the priesthood.  We will not expend space here in prolonged discussion of the obvious hypocrisy of priests practicing that which they condemn as sin and absolving those sinners through the power of God.  That many religious leaders do “unnatural acts” is known from the confessions of nuns who have kicked the habit and from the confessions of priests in open court to the criminal molestation of same sex children.  If gold rusts, what will iron do?

The matter of gays in the military has brought our social myths on sexual orientation into sharper focus.  Gays have always been in our military, and in every military since society started resolving their differences through organized violence.  The Greek way was not confined to the armies of Alexander, and has been accepted, if not condoned, in all ancient and modern land and naval forces, except in those who insist, despite all proof, that the myth is right and reality is wrong.  The armed forces can function with homosexuals in their ranks because they have so functioned and continue to function, despite official denial.  Gays and lesbians have served with distinction, flying planes, running hospitals, manning artillery batteries, and so on.  Many have risen to high command rank without their sexual preferences interfering with duty and good order.  A well-disciplined conscientious gay in the military is certainly to be preferred over a sexually misbehaving heterosexual officer harassing female subordinates or a priest molesting choirboys.

If the sexual drives of the homosexual are propelled by forces within put there by his Creator, whose creations are perfect and whose will is unknowable and unknown, then prejudice against him is theologically unsound.  If homosexual behavior has a biological basis, then one so predestined did not choose his orientation any more than heterosexuals choose theirs, and the idea that such genetic drives are somehow catching is as absurd as a fear that left-handedness may be acquired by proximity or persuasion.

If gays and lesbians voluntarily choose to practice a lifestyle of deviation from mythical standards of proper behavior, they must be severely masochistic individuals.  Imagine choosing to be rejected by family members you love, risking shame, imprisonment, loss of career, and being denied the ability to publicly express affection, obtain housing, or serve one’s country.  Does it seem reasonable that a military person who adheres to rigid standards in rules of conduct and discipline would, in the sexual area of life, elect to destroy all that has been worked for, and risk beatings, private scorn, and public disgrace merely to flaunt freely chosen homosexual behavior condemned by others as repulsive and perverted?  Barry Goldwater correctly observed we should be more concerned with whether they can shoot straight (he probably intended none of the possible puns).

The notion that homosexuals are seeking special rights is in the same category, and is maintained by the same people, as was the idea that blacks were seeking special rights when they wanted to vote, buy a home, or ride at the front of a bus.  What is so special about wanting the same human and civil rights enjoyed by people who have a genetically ordained yearning for the opposite sex?  Actually, I am glad I was not born gay.  Heterosexuality has caused me quite enough problems, thank you.  Sometimes I think the Almighty erred by inventing it.  But I can accept that which I cannot understand without fear of being converted.  I do not believe my left handed paralegal, daughter-in-law, or President are likely to cause me to write in their strange way.  It seems equally unlikely that I could be persuaded to substitute my excessive fondness for warm, soft, perfumed women for attraction to hairy legged males.

Oh, yes, I bought a snake bite kit.

Edwin Kagin (c)

 

 

RESPONSE TO INTELLIGENT DESIGN WATCHMAKER POEM

 

Now most people know that watches in pockets,

Are made of different stuff than eyes in eye sockets.

A watch doesn’t have wings, or flippers, or feet,

A watch isn’t something another watch might just eat.

A watch doesn’t live in a nest, cave, or hive,

And that is because a watch isn’t alive.

If you can get that small detail resolved,

You can see why it’s dumb to say life hasn’t evolved.

And  pretend that making a watch for a wrist,

Is just like making an arm or a fist.

And pretend people were made and clearly designed,

Because life is complex and sometimes refined.

Life didn’t happen by magic or plan,

Like thinking some dirt was turned into a man.

And some folks believe, and this is no fib,

That the first woman was made from first dirt man’s rib.

Evolution happened and it isn’t true,

That people were made by some god from some goo.

Let’s say that you took about ten quillion rabbits,

All alike in their looks, and their hops, and their habits.

And that about half were colored bright snerfell,

And that about half were colored dark murfell.

And if they made babies those snerfells and murfells,

Some of those babies would be colored snerfell.

And some of those babies would be colored murfell,

And some of those babies would be in between.

In some brand new colors no rabbit had seen,

Maybe some would be colored a pleasing snerplean.

Or maybe some awful disgusting murgreen,

And some might be lovely and some quite obscene.

And if the rabbits thus colored should make some more rabbits,

With only those rabbits with their color habits.

A new color for rabbits would finally evolve,

And the colors they started out with would dissolve.

And be completely replaced after enough time,

With snerplean or murgreen not made out of slime.

And enough time and enough rabbit ranges,

Could make in those rabbits amazing new changes.

Until they perhaps were no longer rabbits,

But maybe some new type of postrabbitodabits.

A new kind of life we could not invent in our mind,

As new as a timepiece some watchmaker might wind.

But made from the life force creationists mock,

Who think life is something as dead as a clock.

So don’t be confused by people who lie,

Who think truth is found in a book from the sky.

If it weren’t for science we wish they could see,

We would all have to use candles to watch the T.V.

Edwin Kagin

On Prayer pour Petri

                                                                         

                                              Lord, what fools these mortals be!  Puck.

 

Be glad you are not a bacterium.  If you have an identity crisis, if you don’t know who you are, or your place in the universe, and this upsets you, while no one else cares, then be comforted by considering the plight of bacteria.  Some authorities consider bacteria plants; others think they are neither plants nor animals, but a completely separate life form.  All authorities consulted agree they are not animals. If a choice  be forced, they are flora, not fauna. If they were on the ark, they were stowaways.  Most people care less about them and their problems than they care about you and your problems.

Divine intercession has been sought for bacteria.  It had to happen.  Faithful readers perhaps recall that we have, in these pages, considered many events that may seem to us extraordinary–visits of the B.V.M., custody fights over frozen fetuses, satanic plots to stop abortions, public prayer as the cause of social disfunction, together with diverse other matters too numerous to recount–yet never, for all of our commentary, uncritically perceived by some as blasphemy or religion bashing, have we had occasion to reflect on so curious an idea as praying over bacteria in petri dishes.  We didn’t dream this up.  We saw it in a T.V. documentary, so it has to be true.  A secular humanist couldn’t have concocted  a fantasy so funny.  The hysterical reality of this event sprang unprompted from the creative energies of certain of those numbered among the righteously saved.

It came about in this wise.   Many have long maintained that prayer changes things, and that, upon proper petition, god will supernaturally intervene in human affairs to alter the course of events that would, without prayer, proceed according to the laws of nature.  It is alleged that this divine intercession extends to the healing of sick people.  If one prays for the sick, god will heal them or at least make them better.  Without the prayers, god will simply let the sick suffer.  Many believe this and have offered narrative proofs.  There have been “studies” of questionable reliability done to demonstrate the power of healing prayer.  The research results showed, to the satisfaction of the faithful, that people who were prayed over did better than those not so favored.  The data were challenged by certain of those cynical sneering religion-bashing secular humanist skeptical-of-everything godless types that religious faith knows so well and would be so much better off without.  These scoffers thought that maybe the mere belief that prayer worked caused the improvements, if any, and that the results sprang from the mind of the believer, not from the intercession of divine providence.  Equally effective, claimed the critics, would be any other conviction the stricken might believe would cure them.  By way of example of this principle, our household, for some years now, has remained free of the scourge of leprosy by avoiding the eating of possum.  To prove prayer, not placebo, worked the miracles, and to eliminate insofar as possible, as religion likes to do anyway, the menace of the mind, it was decided to test the effects of prayer on experimental and control batches of bacteria.  Guess what?  The occupants of the prayed over petri plates did better (whatever that means) than the prayerless petri plates.  Proof positive to shake to their very foundations the demons of doubt.

While this research and its results have not been published, to our knowledge, in any learned journals, nor have we learned of its details, nor heard of its replication, the implications, apart from proving the truth of religious faith, are awesome indeed.  We need no longer waste money in secular medical research trying to cure such things as cancer or AIDS.  Biological research labs can now close.  Departments of microbiology can now become departments of miracles.  Imagine if the human race had this knowledge when we were struggling with smallpox, polio, typhoid, malaria, and even the bubonic plague.  Think how many innocent rats could have been spared with this new knowledge.

But no use lamenting the mistakes of the past.  We must press forward into the new frontiers of faith.  To this end, the following is suggested as a petri prayer.  You are welcome to use this sword and shield of the spirit, at home in your closet, in the certain trust that it will prove divinely beneficial against anything biological that might prove bothersome.

“All mighty and all powerful god, maker of all things visible and invisible, maker of the mighty beast behemoth, and of the bacteria found in the bowels of behemoth, and of all of those least of thy plants that trouble thy creation man, hear, oh lord, this our prayer of supplication and grant intercession unto us.  We most humbly confess we have, in our blindness, followed other gods.  We have sinned against thee and forsaken thy path.  We have blindly ignored thy eternal truths, and forgotten thy ways that are above our ways, as we have sought to cure the sick through the teachings of the false gods of science.  In our weakness and folly, we have followed and whored after the medicine of man.  We repent of our error, and ask thy divine forgiveness, as we now reject those idols of the mind that have separated us from our god, the only true source of all good and perfect gifts of  healing.  Stretch forth thy mighty hand and smite the plants of thy creation that are unseen. Remake, oh god, the bacteria you made.  Remold their tiny forms to forms less harmful.  In dish, in dessert, in duodenum, they ravage us.  Restore to them the innocence they had before the sin of our first parents, before our fall from grace.  Render them, we pray, harmless to us, and, in thy infinite mercy, cure us, and protect us from them.  We are weak, and they are strong.  Nevertheless, oh god our strength and our salvation, not our will but thine be done.  Amen.”

Please let us know if this works.  It should.  Can’t think of any reason it shouldn’t.

Edwin Kagin (c)

 

Atheist Edwin Kagin’s Poem on Creation and Evolution at the Public Schools of the Butterflies.

Ode to the Butterfly Mind

 

The Parliament of Butterflies

Was racked by deep division

Questions of what to teach the young

Demanded their decision.

 

It had been known and taught and thought

Since butterfly life began

That butterflies in glory rose

From their creator’s mighty hand

 

Now some few who this truth mocked

Had attacked faith’s very pillars

“All butterflies,” these scientists claimed,

“Came from caterpillars.”

 

This indecent theory spread

Into butterfly education,

Until this “caterpillar cult”

Threatened creation’s revelation.

 

The faithful sought to restore the truth

About the origins of butterflies;

And to build an absolute moral base,

To stop the metamorphic lies.

 

“Believe you  descended from some worm

And wormlike you will be!”

Reasoned those who’d seen faith’s light

And knew there was nothing left to see.

 

“We see no proof,” some butterflies said

“That we are all come from cocoons–

Unbelievers who would teach this tale

Are all immoral loons.”

 

Some said the metamorphous lie

Was laid  by “the enemy,” they believed,

Set, like candle flames and windshields,

To destroy all who were deceived.

 

The matter was at last resolved —

Both theories must be taught — how fine!

Now all youth can simply decide the truth,

Each in their own simple butterfly mind.

 

 

Edwin F. Kagin

PO Box 559

Union, KY 41091-0559

(859) 384-7000

Fax: (859) 384-7324

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.edwinkagin.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edwin Kagin Abortion Satan Atheism

ON THE MYTHOLOGY OF ABORTION

 

Beware the man whose god is in the skies.

                                                                                   -George Bernard Shaw

 

There is a movement afoot in America to prevent pregnant women from deciding whether or not to have a baby.  The control freaks who advocate this view characterize their beliefs as “pro-life” or “right to life.”  Those who hold that they, and not the woman, should decide whether to let a fertilized egg develop into a living child share a common mythology.  It goes roughly thus:  all life comes from the deity.  The deity gives life, and every zygote is imbued by the creator deity with an “immortal soul” (a concept found nowhere in the Bible).  Microscopic products of conception are perceived to be persons vested by the deity with the right to be born.  The exercise of rational reproductive choice in obtaining an abortion is viewed as the murder of a person.

The mythology is powerful enough that its advocates think they can ignore the laws of nations and impose their will on those who disagree.  Basically, they have initiated a holy war–us against them, good verses evil, we are right and you are wrong–the same primitive absolutism and lust for power over others that produced the Crusades.  Moralists have declared war on reason.  With aborted fetuses enblasoned on their shields and chastity belts secured, the armies of God, like ancient pestilence, are marching to stop       forbidden sex and to ensure all products of ill advised copulation be born.  The births proclaim the truth that the only reason sex is lawful at all is to make God’s babies.

According to the theocratic understanding of biology of the anti-choice movement, at the moment the sperm penetrates the egg, the mythical “soul” is placed in the zygote, presumably whether it is in a uterus or a petri dish.  That which God has infused with soul may not be removed by the mere mortal choice of not wanting a baby.  This notion of a soul inhabiting a collection of cells that may, barring accident, abortion, or whatever, become a child is rather new in mythological thought and bears analysis.

There must be a soul bank somewhere for the almighty to draw from to implant the soul moments after male orgasm (female orgasm is unnecessary for this or any other reproductive function, and is therefore discouraged), or the heavenly power must create new souls in a soul shop for all of the fertilizations.  This would cause the creator to work after midnight most Friday and Saturday nights and thus violate the day of rest established by God for the Sabbath.  Even a large soul bank would need replenishing, because surely no rational God would have planned for sufficient souls to overrun the resources of his creation like maggots on a dead possum.  And people do die, and new souls are needed.  The anti-choice forces reject the idea of recycling the souls through reincarnation.  It is really quite confusing, until, upon reflection, the answer becomes clear:  the anti-abortion movement is a tool of Satan.

 

Consider that Satan wants to create as much chaos on Earth among humans as possible, to make people unhappy and to grab souls for himself.  The Satanic solution is to prohibit abortion.  Force the heavenly powers to work sabbaths and all to crank out souls for  crack babies and AIDS babies, incest and rape conceptions, souls for babies who aren’t wanted, aren’t cared for, aren’t educated, babies who can create crime, war, disease, poverty, famine and all of the evil and sin Satan needs to destroy the beauty of the Earth and shatter human aspirations for peace, love, and contentment.  As further proof, remember that an innocent soul not tempted to sin goes directly to his creator God (perhaps after a period of dry cleaning), a better place than prison, hospital, or hell.  A soul aborted is a soul lost to Satan, but one unwanted and forced to be born can produce unspeakable evil, to do glory to Satan and mock a caring, benevolent God.

This mythical interpretation is obviously correct.  Consider that all of the Satanic anti-choice fetus people prayed that an American president not be elected who believed a woman has a right to reproductive freedom.  They abraded their knees and polished their prayer beads to beseech God to elect a bigot president.  The very heavens rang with the noise of their prayers and rantings.  God either did not listen, or disagreed with their position.  Their candidates were defeated, and pro-choice was affirmed as the law of the land.   Never has the will of God been so clearly seen.  God saw through Satan’s motives and rejected the prayers of those who would let Satan get his paws on God’s little souls.

Totally undaunted by this most obvious expression of the divine will, the unwitting forces of darkness have increased their efforts to control those who disagree with them.   Indifferent to the laws of God and man, and the rules of basic humanity and courtesy, they have engaged in a reign of terror against doctors, facilities, and personnel dedicated to following the law and assisting women who don’t want a conception to become a child.  The tactics have included bombings, threats, harassment, intimidation, assaults, and now, finally and predictable, cold blooded murder.  A gently healer was shot in the back by one of Satan’s converts who wanted to stop the doctor from helping women.  The murderer’s fellow travelers have raised funds for him and have implied, and sometimes stated, that the murder was morally correct.  There was despair in heaven and rejoicing in hell.  Satan had succeeded in making evil appear to be good.

But God is not mocked.  He who sits in the heavens will laugh them to scorn.  Satan’s siege against dignity and humanity will be long, but reason will prevail.  If it does not, these demonically possessed people will kill everyone who disagrees with them on abortion, and then turn their efforts to those who believe in evolution, who read forbidden books, to all of those who do not want to be ruled by evil people purporting to speak for God.

Defend our constitution.  Speak out against wrong misguided mythology.  You must.  For your own safety’s sake.

Don’t tell them about the I.U.D.  It has been sluffing fertilized eggs for years, and has thus far escaped their notice.

 

Edwin F. Kagin (c)

 

Atheist Edwin Kagin on Sex, Genitals, Morals, and God

From the Archives.

Good thing this is all settled and over now and that

there is no longer a problem, huh?

ON GENITAL BASED MORALITY (GBM)

Morals are manners, and manners are subject to change.

Mrs. Carolyn Benton Cockefaire

As this blasphemy goes to press in early February of 1999, the next to the last year of this millennium, a sideshow skirmish in the American Religious Civil War (ARCW) whimpers to an end.  This fanatic digression from reason (fortunately doomed to failure–for now at least) was flamed by attempts of the storm troopers of the religiocencratic forces to kick out the President of the United States because they deem him immoral and unfit to govern because of what he and a human of female persuasion did with his and her genitals, and that he then allegedly lied concerning the doing thereof.

Voluntarily, with the consent of the victims, our nation has managed to become a joke among nations because the piously powerful refuse to recognize or admit that human beings are sexual beings, and not necessarily monogamous ones.  In furtherance of this fool’s folly, they ground their understanding of morality on a vain attempt to define humans as somehow outside of the natural world (the only one we know) and apart from other living creatures with whom it is imperfectly shared.   If humans were monogamous, they would behave in monogamous ways, as do monogamous animals.  To cope with not being monogamously made, rules have been invented requiring monogamous behavior from non-monogamous creatures. These made up rules, that human nature deplores, are defined and presented as the unchangeable moral law of god.  In consequence, pretentiously pious persons lie about sex and delude themselves about morality by genitally defining goodness, and damning, as morally defective, all who dissent, detract, or disobey–including our head of state who also just happens to champion a variety of humanistic causes his detractors undauntingly damn.

Incredibly, the miserable monolithic moronic moral code of those ethical paupers who would destroy us and our democracy in the ARCW is based on genitals (not to be confused with gentiles).  This is indeed curious in that sex (not gender–gender is a term of grammar), would be hard pressed to get along without genitals.  Where there is sex, there are genitals.  It’s god’s plan; “male and female created he them.”  The god the stories say ordained procreation wisely gave created creatures the tools with which to procreate.  These tools of god’s plan are the very genitals conjugally challenged sufferers of moralist madness abhor.  Rejection of dreaded essential genitals is the center, the very essence, of their nutty notions of moral law. This idiotic and evil short circuiting of reason, this delusional deduction of dunces, may be understood as Genital Based Morality (GBM).

GBM is an infantile system of primitive simplistic thinking, involving magical make believe, and is thus quite easy to understand. Abortion, homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, unmarried sex, oral sex, sodomy (maybe Gomorra), non-monogamous sex, “adult” videos, nudist clubs, nude beaches, nude dancing–anything that  touches upon, views, uses, or has anything whatsoever to do with, genitals, is immoral and bad.  See how easy it is.  Further inquiry, reasoning, or evidence is superfluous and irrelevant. If it is genital, it is bad.  Barbie and Ken must not have genitals lest they display the ultimate reality of being human, and thereby educate, confuse and corrupt little children who should be taught to believe the world works in ways other than it does. Legislatures and judges should let a relgiocrazy kill their kid by denying medical treatment, yet prosecute nudist clubs for permitting people to walk around in the uniform of the day of Eden. Steal from widows and orphans if you must, so long as you don’t do the dirty in forbidden ways, or watch others do it, or pay for it, or, god help us all, enjoy it.  Rather think of England and canning apricots than be damned by those damned genitals causing forbidden thoughts or, in cases of extreme sin, actually giving their owner(s) forbidden pleasure.  GBM subordinates every other consideration regarding personal and group thought and behavior to this prime (not primal) directive.

How did we come to this unhappy state?  Scene shifts to downtown Baghdad, Iraq.  Where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet.  Garden of Eden.  Year the first.  Setting of a bronze age myth that has done much mischief whenever and wherever believed.  Adam and Eve were set up by god.  They were naked.  They didn’t know this was bad because god didn’t tell them. God knew it was bad, but they didn’t.  So there they were, the first nudists, as innocently unclothed as the heathen participants in the first Olympic Games,  put naked in paradise by a voyeuristic god in a place where snakes talked and had legs and told the truth about knowledge not killing people.  Then Eve got Adam, per snake advice, to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of which god had told them not to eat.  And he did, and she did, and women have been blamed for this ever since, for god was displeased that they had disobeyed, listened to that snake, and acquired the nasty knowledge that the only human genitals on earth were shamefully exposed.  God then killed some innocent animals to clothe our first parents so they would not be in a state of shame with their genitals showing.  Some believed this story and taught others to believe it.  Some believe it today.  Thus was Genital Based Morality (GBM) born.  We don’t know what god wore

It is unclear just how A & E could have been expected to know it was wrong not to obey god before they had knowledge of good and evil.  But religion need not be rational. The lesson is that knowledge is bad, and that nakedness is shameful.  With full knowledge of their shameful state of genital visibility, Adam and Eve were booted out of Eden by a loving and all knowing god, a god without whose knowledge and approval no sparrow falls.  Ever since, those predestined to sin by this same all merciful god have been damned to eternal suffering for sinning.  GBM has never claimed to be logical or fair.  Neither has god.  Actually he/she has, but this claim is not supported by the record.

Secular humanists, and others who think an ethical system should extend beyond the groin, are condemned by those who see themselves as righteous and saved.  The self-righteous contend non-believers cannot be good people, for such sinners lack a proper sense of shame and guilt derived from an alleged moral base. This fantasizes an objective, defined, findable, and absolute moral authority that tells good people what is right and what is wrong, a moral compass without which there can be no values.  In this understanding, it is a lack of belief in “natural law” (a misunderstood term) that has spread from godless humanism to science, to classroom, to generate the corrosive moral rot that is wrecking our society, denying us the intervention of a displeased god, who we offend with abortion, homosexuality, unwed sex, pornography, and god help us all, evolution.  Oddly, all of these but the evolution thing seem to have something to do with sex.  Come to think on it, the evolution stuff does too.  The bottom line says if you aren’t guilted out by GBM you are a bad person who is going to spend eternity in Hell.

GBM is a relatively recent religious repression. Apart from the Eden tradition, religious teachings of the past (including lots of really sexy bible stories they don’t tell you about in Sunday school) haven’t made anything like this much of a fuss over genitals.  Indeed, they seem to have been rather favored–both kinds (genitals, not religions–there are lots more than two kinds of religions).  The ancient Greeks made much larger than life models of them (genitals) and put them (the models) on display at public theatres.    Such a display in modern moral middle America would get you sent to the cooler in seats of learning like Cincinnati.  Genitals probably haven’t changed much, but attitudes toward them have.  The fault is neither generic nor genital.   It is the miasmal  moral morass of garbled glib guilt gilded gibberish packaged, proclaimed, and peddled as the will of god given unto lesser mortals by those who interpret the truths of natural law.  You know, people like Dr. Laura, Henry Hyde, and the bigots who run “Right to Life,” claim to be “family friendly,” seek “answers in genesis” (not genitals) and, because of the GBM that guides their petty lives,  want to kick our President out of the White House, as the naked A & E were kicked out of Paradise (not to be confused with Club Paradise) because they acquired knowledge and an awareness of being attached to their genitals.

Those waging the ARCW claim our head of state lied under oath about his private conduct with his privates.  Ah, wonder if they know of the manner of swearing when one swore a mighty oath before the holy Patriarchs of the bible?  Abraham and Jacob’s method of swearing required the placing of “his hand under the thigh.” This involved, I swear, the person giving the oath putting his hand on the genitals of the one to whom he swore.  This practice gave weight to the oath.  Don’t know why this method was adopted, or when it was abandoned (am just glad it was).  At least GBM had a real, if different, meaning back then.  Maybe the President was attempting the reintroduction  of this ancient practice.  Don’t know how women took oaths, or if such was even permitted.  After all, who could trust any woman after Eve?  My Helen has a bumper sticker that says, “Eve was framed.”

Genitals were so important in the bible that trimming the male version via circumcision was a religious requirement.  And it is written in the word of god that a eunuch cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, nor can one who has had his “stones crushed,” i.e., had his testicles smashed.  Doesn’t seem right or fair somehow, but it does show how much genitals meant to those who penned those bronze age writings.  Jesus later suggested that it would be better if a man cut off his genitals.  Some early church fathers, like Origen, did just that.  Don’t know if the “crushed stones” rule applied and kept him out of heaven.  That would have been a shame indeed.  After Jesus, genitals did not seem so highly regarded, but they were made even more important by being used to define all aspects of the moral law–by becoming the basis of good and evil.  Maybe Jesus started GBM.  Whoever did was probably scared of women.

The pre-GBM bible book, the Song of Songs, sometimes erroneously called the Song of Solomon, has quite a bit to say about genitals.  It is Jewish, and pre-Christian.  Puritans, not daring to recognize it for what it is, say this bible story is an allegory touching on Christ’s love for his church.  It is actually an erotic work (seems Egyptian, really) about a man’s lust for his sister, touching on his desire to climb her branches and, like a young roe,  graze about her breasts and genitals.  Christ’s love for the church, indeed!  How much in general genital denial these clever clerics be, especially those proudly proclaiming the cults of celibacy and cloister.

Consider as an alternate approach, one in marked contrast to modern GBM, the ancient Egyptian creation myth.  It was a bit different from the one taught in Christian Sunday schools.  The great god Rah ejaculated (yes, from his genitals) the stars and all that is–sort of a climactic cosmology.  The Egyptian version of the Holy of Holies held a statute of the god with erect phallus.  Priestesses and priests held sacred ceremonies reenacting, with the pharaoh, the living god, the comic climax.  Now how’s that for a religion?  Gives a whole new meaning to the idea of handmaidens.  Archeological evidence of these religious beliefs and practices were suppressed by modern puritans who displayed some of the sacred religious art of the Egyptians with an informational museum type sign placed, like a fig leaf, over the essence of the religious symbolism of the pictorial depiction of the turgid pharaoh, the living god.  Only by moving the sign could the true meaning of the mysteries of Egyptian religion be revealed, truths once commonly accepted and viewed openly by all, including little children who were not taught to be embarrassed or shamed by genitals.  After all, reasoned our unsaved predecessors, where would we be without them?

Then there was sacred prostitution.  And there were seasonal approved-by-prevailing-local-religions orgies to teach the crops and herds to reproduce and grow, and to encourage the gods to let them do so.  The great men of the bible had many wives, with no complaint from god.  When king David was old, they put two young women in bed with him to keep him warm.  Lot’s daughters got him drunk and seduced him.  If a king could not get an erection, it was felt he could no longer rule.  No impeachment plot nonsense over sex then.  Genital shame is a modern Christian phenomenon.  GBM has replaced ethics.  Denial has become duty and holiness has been traded for honor. Repression has pushed reason from the banquet table of life.   Moralists who think everyone should follow their GBM are generally good persons in the worst sense of the word.  If they tell you they are “born again Christians,” thank them for the warning.  They are usually more tedious and venal the second time around.

Do you find all the moralizing and genital ranting going on these days just a little silly?  Good.  It is.  GBM denies the realities of the world. The preacher doesn’t tell on the deacon when they meet in the whorehouse.   Everybody lies about sex.  Under oath too.  Ask any divorce lawyer.  This is because of GBM and the failure to admit that we, who some say are made in the image of god,  are not all monogamous creatures, and monogamous or not, we tend to like sex (the exceptions to this are beyond the scope of this discourse). This causes problems when a moral code is imposed and accepted that denies our mortal nature.  Our kind would have become extinct long ago if we had followed such a moral law and actually repudiated the idea of deflowering virgins. Enforcement of rules that try to cancel out the very chemistry of life will be about as successful as attempting to plow the sea or baptize a cat.

So we laugh when moralists like Dr. Laura get caught with their pants down in indiscreet photos–from a less famous time–posted on the internet, or when those who accuse the President are found to have themselves tasted forbidden fruit.  Hate and hypocrisy are the twin tyrannies that fuel GBM.  Surely there is more to living a good life than making ethical judgments based on genital repression.  Consider, dear reader, if you would care to spend eternity in the company of those who do.

If history teaches anything, it is that moral judgments change.  This applies to everything from sexual behavior to smoking in public (some say they smoke after sex–others say they never noticed).  Today’s customs can become tomorrow’s perversions, as we make taboo the thrills of our fathers, or heap honor on persons and ideas they hated.  Things change.  That’s the one universal truth.

And there are, to be sure, decent monogamous (not to be confused with monotonous) humanistic humans.   There are also humans who can eat spaghetti with chop sticks.  This does not mean we should outlaw forks.

Edwin Kagin ©

 

 

 

Two Poems by Atheist Edwin Kagin on Abortion and the Anti-Choice Movement

THE RIGHTS OF THE UNCONCEIVED

 

Let’s add to irrationality

To nonsense unbelieved

And urge, against free human choice,

The rights of the unconceived

 

The unborn, however unwanted,

Have protestors who defend

Who will not take their misery home

But make sure their paths begin

 

The maimed, the pained, the hopeless

Have rights of tragedy unrelieved

Yet we ignore a great moral sore

The plight of the unconceived

 

We must have laws with iron braced jaws

To insure new lives are received

It should be a crime at any time

To deny life to the unconceived

 

Should fertile lad and fertile lass

Henceforth with any passion pass

Consummation must be achieved

To insure the rights of the unconceived.

 

 

Edwin F. Kagin (c)

THE CASE OF THE FROZEN EMBRYO

Bye baby banting

Soon you’ll need decanting

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

A biology student named Delf

 Scientifically played with himself

And when he was done

He labeled it “Son”

And filed it away on the shelf. 

 

Anon

 

Nonsense struck another blow

In the case of the frozen embryo

A Judge has ruled them human life

And awarded custody to the wife

In the divorce it was her wish

To get the goo from the petri dish

Where the little ones were conceived

Where marital passion was relieved

The children went to a frozen tomb

To await resurrection in some womb

There will have to be child support

Ordered by paternity court

To keep the frozen kids alive

Until it’s time they should revive

But it really must be nice

To keep your babies lives on ice

Frozen solid until you say

You are ready to let them play

But there must be other fears

For those who wipe their icy tears

If they should be flushed away

Or allowed to thaw and rot one day

Would a murder charge obtain

Against the one who sent them down the drain

And what should their birthday be

Those conceived in petri

Do the cold days of gestation count

For little souls who just want out

Of a limbo that won’t start

The beating of a little heart

Of course there is no heart to beat

Or even tiny fetus feet

There are no bitsy toes on embryos

And what sex nobody knows

So you cannot even name

Those cells that all look just the same

Ah, the problems that occur

When rational thought and reason err.

Edwin F. Kagin (c)