And yet intuition still outperforms reason in many areas of human reason.

That’s no challenge to reason. The issue is when intuition and reason reach different conclusions…

No pursuit is without its zealous excesses. Speaking of treating people like cattle, the Catholic church as a whole isn’t to blame for what happened at the Magdalene asylums. If you’re willing to recognize that, then perhaps you might see “the scientific community” through more than one lens.

Then Jesus himself is imperfect, because Jesus seemed to have no problem with the idea that His coming replaced the need for certain rules, while not replacing the need for certain other rules.

But Christians do not believe this is a problem. They believe, rather, that different types of law exist on different levels and/or serve different purposes. The coming of Jesus meant that certain sacrificial and ceremonial rituals were no longer necessary – correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t he explicitly address the part about stoning adulterers? – but that doesn’t mean we can just pick and choose any rule we like.

Ultimately, in Christianity, there is a certain amount of having to deal directly with God and your own conscience in understanding. This is inevitable (I believe it is inevitable for any religion) because that which is beyond our comprehension is, well, beyond what we’re capable of talking about. When I was a teenager I was very bothered by the various contradictions I saw in the Bible; later, as an adult, I realized it is experience itself that is paradoxical, and I realized that those seemingly contradictory passages in the Bible contained the wisdom that enables a person to know how to deal with the reality of the existence of unanswerable questions.

Humanism has come along and created higher standards for journalism, without realizing how these higher standards are based on their own understanding of the world as inherently and completely material and scientifically discoverable. Their notion of what details are important to record – and why – is different from the way ancient Biblical writers thought and wrote. Their notion of how one thinks about problems is materialistic. They do not seek wisdom; they seek material fact and reject the entire idea of seeking for wisdom as “superstition”. The scientific method has on many occasions led people to ignore wisdom in favor of details. Sometimes those details lead right back to where a wise man would have started in the first place. Consider how science has so often treated sick or disabled people: ignoring what the sick or disabled person thinks or feels, and focus on measurement and external observation to understand sickness. They did that with cancer patients in the 1950s through the 1980s, until studies showed that treating cancer patients like cattle got worse results than treating cancer patients with dignity and respect. But the same scientific community is still treating cognitively and mentally disabled people like cattle – because people with things like autism or depression still don’t benefit from dignity or respect, I guess.

And yet intuition still outperforms reason in many areas of human reason. By “intuition” I mean our subconscious pattern recognition abilities (that “sixth sense” or “hidden voice” that warns you of danger in time to get out of the way “in time” – while your reason will spend a week and a half figuring out what happened, after the fact). So why should those who are open to the possibility of such a thing as a “holy spirit” feel constrained to limit ourselves to reason, when reason has been shown so many times to be way behind the curve when it comes to figuring out what’s going on?

There’s a place for reason, and a place for literal journalism which is based on materialism. But whether or not everything in this world is material, it is demonstrably true that not everything in this world is measurably material. For those things that are at the edges of what we are capable of understanding, there is no way to use literal, journalistic language to describe these realities. There is no way to describe these realities without resorting to figurative language, and without struggling with issues of interpretation and re-interpretation.

Now: people who actually know their Christian doctrine can go ahead and rip apart all the parts I got wrong

I’m reminded of a commentator on a Southern Baptist website who wrote, “I can’t reconcile how someone could feel he or she was born with strong homosexual feelings, love Christ and yet take on the limitations of what seem to me to be straightforward biblical teachings. That’s …agonizing, and I don’t really understand it.”.

And this is the weird thing: “Straighforward biblical teachings” should at least be understandable to the average person. So often I hear it said, “OUR ways are not GOD’s ways,” as if God was some sort of inscrutable alien being.

Consider The Golden Rule: We do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Put all the religious dogma and ritual aside, and this is what our laws boil down to. We don’t lie or bear false witness because we won’t want people to lie to us. We don’t steal from other people because we do not want people stealing from us. We don’t betray the trust of our spouses because we wouldn’t want them doing the same to us. Same goes for killing and a variety of other “bad” behaviors.

And yet somehow there seems to be this sheepish adherence to a double standard for Gay and Straight people. If you’re Straight, it’s all so wonderful to be able to find a compatible person of the opposite sex, court and get engaged and marry and live happily ever after. But if you’re Gay, all of that is completely out of the question. Don’t even bother trying to find a compatible person. Lesbians and Gay men are precluded from any hope for romance or commitment. Gay people are simply told: “Gosh, sorry about that. You make us uncomfortable; acknowledging your existence means we might have to revise what we’ve been teaching all these years – meaning, Whoops! No infallible Magisterium or “literal” Bible… so you’ll just have to sacrifice your life and any hope of finding somebody to love. Tough luck, kid. God said it, I don’t necessarily understand it, but there it is.” How could this be considered a good value judgment?

Fortunately, the reason increasing numbers of Americans (including our President) support marriage equality is because they have learned to make better value judgments. The reason couples choose to marry is to make a solemn declaration before friends and family members that they wish to make a commitment to one another’s happiness, health, and well-being, to the exclusion of all others. Those friends and family members will subsequently act as a force of encouragement for that couple to hold fast to their vows. THAT’S what makes marriage a good thing, whether the couple in question is Straight OR Gay.