MAY 1976

HIGH GEAR

Page 9

PAGANISH

By LEON STEVENS

From time to time articles appear in gay and feminist publications advocating alternatives to Judaism and Christianity. This is another such article.

Some years ago the British Broadcasting Co. assembled a comical "consumer's guide" to the world's great religions, listing the pros and cons of each. It was designed for an ob-.. jective consumer searching for a suitable faith. Although the BBC guide was intended as humour, it might well be taken seriously by gays, or for that matter,

anyone.

Many gays cling to religion as a source of stability and an emotional balm for consciences ravaged ironically by that same institution. This powerful need for stability and for compensating guilt has resulted in the phenomenon of the "gay church" or "gay ministry." The philosophical basis of gay ministry is essentially an extensive rationalization of scriptural references (or lack of references) to homosexuality. The tragedy of gay theology is its glaring but necessary bankruptcy of scholarship.

These include rather primitive attempts, for example, to "prove" that the rapists of Sodom were not really homosexual, that Levitical injunctions against homosexuality actually banned homosexual acts between straights and not "natural" gays, or that circumstantial evidence "confirms" that Christ, Moses, and a host of positive patriarchs were doubtlessly gay.

The Old Testament is among the oldest and unabashed proponents of mass murder and genocide. After departing Egypt, full of innocent dead first-born children, "Yahweh of Armies" leads his feudal pillaging bonds to the Fertile Crescent where they are instructed to exterminate the inhabitants, including children and pregnant women, of every city they reach. (The Book of Joshua makes Auschwitz appear rather

The success of gay dignified). The Semitic war-god Christianity lies in its ability to then leads his people to an soothe confused sensibilities. Its historic blood-bath including failure rests in preparing inmass decapitations of nondividuals för inevitable believers, internal wars and disillusionment and in savagery, ceremonies filled with cheapening the outward comblood-letting, and blood spatplexion of gay activism in the tering. In fact, Yahweh does not eyes of an articulate public.

The question incessantly posed by the center-left of the Gay Movement is, "Why put up with Judeo-Christianity at all?" Why should 20th century humanism be compelled to stoop to the eccentricities of warlike neolithic tribes? Biblical injunctions against homosexuality are only a small part of the inhumanity promoted by the patriarchs of antiquity. The Mosaic pentateuch elaborately denigrates women through degrading ceremonies and incriminating myths. Its institutionalized slavery created a caste system and furthered economic exploitation,

or

balk at the human sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter. An inconsistent vengeful titan indiscriminately plagues destroys unwitting citizens to punish the sins of kings carrying his wrath "to the second and third generations of those hating" him.

The New Testament crudely attempts to blend Hellenistic mysticism with tribal ritual. Rather unsuccessfully. If there is anything "decadent" about Greek and Roman Civilization it is not the columns of Pheidias nor homosexual philosophies but rather the New Testament. While the barbarism of Christianity held little appeal for ld little appeal for

the

and

Greek Roman civilizations, the rampaging Vandals Visigoths and Vikings found it compatible with their late stone age cultural development.

It is unfortunate that, like barnacles on an ocean liner, the myths and prejudices of ancient marauders have been able to permeate the modern world borne along by Western technology. Even the vicious treatment of homosexuals in the

Communist Bloc was inherited from Judeo-Christian "morality." (through Stalin, a former divinity student and a fugitive from a backward Caucasion tribal society).

Western Humanism has enabled a comparatively small minority of intellectuals and pragmatic merchants to escape the awkward banality of European religion. The geometric growth of science in our era made Judeo-Christianity a clumsy and stubborn source of embarrassment for contemporary thinkers.

Due to the relative lack of imagination in the transient warrior lore of the Old Testament and the rather uncreative deliriium of apostolic revisionism, Judeo-Christianity is not only primitive, but aesthetically wanting. The "poetry" of the Psalms and other writings show only the vaguest attempts at crude

alliteration and assonance and are dependent on redundancy and monotony for bulk. Even such ancient works as Beowulf and Gilgamesh show a higher level of literary development. In short, the Judeo-Christian scriptures are hardly representative of a "super human" or "divine"

source.

Many of the world's major religions, whose writings and philosophies were formulated during the finest hours of their

respective cultural developments, show much deeper and more sophisticated insights into human nature and the totality of the universe. Hinduism, for example, exhibits a remarkable capacity for symbolizing and unifying the forces of nature and the directions of human thought. Classical Greek religiosity also demonstrated enormous flexibility and universality. Greek gods showed the most spontaneous human traits including hate, love, jealousy, joy, heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, transvestism, and bestiality. In many cases, a single god such as Zeus or Apollo demonstrates all of these capabilities in the few myths which we have inherited. So much more relevant are these myths to human experience than those of Judaism or Christianity that they have coexisted with them and even overpowered them over the centuries rig right

down to the present.

Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism all demonstrate a far more advanced and polished appreciation of cosmic themes and directions than does the pathetic comedy of JudeoChristianity. Not only is the Herbraic and Christian religious tradition simplistic; but it is fraught with paranoia and psychosis which it has foisted upon those ethnic groups which have been so unfortunate as to inherit it.

If there is anything the Gay Movement does not need, it is the brimstone, the millstone, the flies, the frogs, the flood, the blood, the Apocalypse, and the guilt trips which disturbed and terrified late stone-age men had to offer.

In fact, there are many stoneage cultures which can surpass Judeo-Christianity in awareness and comprehension. For example, anthropologists recently discovered a tribe of pre-stone age people living in the interior of the Phillipine's largest island which had no religion and attempted to extract some crude religious concepts from them. When the chief of the tribe was I asked if his people spoke to trees or rocks, he replied rather modernly, "No. We don't talk to rocks, do you talk to rocks?" It's about time we in the Gay Movement stop talking to rocks. too!

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