Hergest Ridge

Joe Dallas - the author of The Gay Gospel? How Pro-Gay Advocates Misread the Bible, and Founder and Director of Genesis Counseling - believes that gay Christians practice a theology of desperation: “I am desperate to believe God accepts gays, so I will abandon a certain amount of common sense to believe” (paraphrasing from “It’s a New Day”, aired July 11, 2007 on Omni).

It would be a tremendous feat to quantifying with any accuracy the amount of compartmentalisation required to utter or believe such an obvious fallacy. While math is my thing, in this case the exercise is useless, and I’d rather go rescue a kitten from a tree.

All of religion requires a complete abandonment of common sense. That’s part reason why it’s called faith (read blind faith if you’re one for arguing that everyone has faith of some kind). Not only is common sense absent in religion, religious faith is near universally an act of desperation. To put forth so much time and effort into something so unsubstantiated, unproven, and unlikely, ‘desperate’ is one of the nicest labels I can apply to the practice.

The overwhelming majority of ‘finding god’ journeys I’ve heard in my life went something along the lines of “I was at a bad spot in my life, didn’t think I could go on, but God saved me”. This group of church-goers is likely second only to those that came to religion through family tradition. Isn’t it time we stopped believing that an imaginary friend saved us from ourselves? It’s just not healthy, if you know what I mean.

The thought of Joe running a sexual counseling shop is nearly as frightening as an elderly, celibate priest giving sexual advice to a young couple. The whole scenario strikes me at par with asking a pedophile for child rearing advice. Some things you just don’t do, and asking a priest for sexual advice belongs in the “don’t” category, somewhere between ‘licking a frozen pole’, and ‘making toast in the bathtub’.