First and third letters too sincere for me to read more than a paragraph... Second letter is a glimpse of what Daniel Freykis would say if he were literate.

I get a little thrill out of the idea of being "in the lifestyle"… it sounds real swingin’, like I’m part of a sexy and sophisticated danger club or something.

Tonight, I will not be shopping for groceries. I’ll be “in the lifestyle� and shopping for groceries. I wonder how that’ll affect what I buy.

Uhg, this is the crap I grew up with and still get slipped every now and then. And my mom wonders why I live so far away and don't call that often.

The best part of the first letter was that she referenced not just the Bible but also Mel Gibson.

And I consider myself both a feminist and a socialist, but I have no idea who Artemis or Belial are -- or for that matter, Shekina. Help, please?

Yup, it's the goddamn feminists worshipping Artemis instead of Shekina that have fucked everything up for normal, Jesus-loving, faggot-hating people everywhere. Fuck you, Artemis! You go, Shekina! Rah, rah, rah! Let's kick some fucking ASS!

so wait, his punishment is to spend the next 3-5 years at camp with a bunch of other fags?

okayyyyyy

Hatred knows many forms, none more ironic than the guise of Jesus.

I don't know exactly private, but I think it would be a sin to stop too long at the cucumbers. Keep moving.

What's that bumper sticker again? Oh, yeah...

"Jesus, protect me from your followers".

Jesus is coming.
Everybody look busy!

Wasn't Artemis the twin sister of Apollo? She was a hunter I think...my Greek mythology is fuzzy.

Jesus also said:
Luke 12:49-53 "I am come to send fire on the earth; … Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."

Luke 14:26 "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

Very nice.

Artemis was Apollo's twin sister, Belial is a high-ranking demon in hell, and Shekinah is the "female god" principle in esoteric judaism.

my favorite bumper sticker currently is "Born Right the First Time".... heh heh

Dan,

Ted Haggard has no need to work, so a pay check or salary is not an issue.

Once a person has $5 M to $10 M, work becomes totally optional, especially if they have a decent financial advisor and accountant. You can bet he fleeced his glassy eyed supplicants for that amount if not millions more, so I wouldn’t worry about Ted’s wife or kids (at least financially).

From letter one:

The God of Christianity is not like the Buddha where worshippers pay for some incense, pray to win the lottery and then wait for some miracle to happen.

Huh? Well that made Buddhism come clear to me. All that ancient Indian elightened guy wanted was for his followers to win the lottery. Of course.

I don't think we get to ask how Ted is making a living or what his therapy looks like. He's not Jack Abramhov. If he's pushing papers at some Christian ministry in Colorado Springs, or living off severance pay, or off investments, it makes absolutely no difference. He's a public figure, yes; but he's employed in the private sector.

Ted Haggard's going to commit suicide in approximately August 2008.

I think the first letter is right. I think God has a plan for you, Dan: keep sucking dicks and educating people what is good and safe when it comes to relationships and sex. Hopefully, he has a plan for you to become a guru and found the first Gay church.
What about writing a Bible reinterpretation in favor of gay love over and above hetero love? I think that could be done, at least when it comes to male gay love. I'm sure you could get a lot of money out of it. Fags have spiritual needs too.

A certain contradiction in that first letter really strikes me, because it's one I see at the heart of so much religious thinking. Eve has to straddle such a fine line in order to argue that God would've cured Haggard if Haggard had genuinely sought a cure, while also preserving God's omnipotence by rejecting the idea that "we ... earn[] our salvation," by pointing out that miracles are rare, and by allowing that "Disasters, tragedies and sufferings will continue to happen everyday." She's coming up against a fundamental problem, here: one of the main roles religion plays is to give life meaning and order, but if a particular god-concept seems to give life too much meaning and order, it won't be convincing any more, because people do notice life's tendency toward unfairness and chaos. And as the lives of other people become more accessible to us through modern media, we see ever more of that chaos, and ever more vividly; back when Catholic theology was being developed, people couldn't flip channels between the genocide in Darfur and some receiver praying in the endzone because God helped him score a touchdown, thereby witnessing the way life's resistance to meaning, order, and fairness tends to render ridiculous any assertion to the contrary.

So why is God willing to grant touchdowns to receivers but unwilling to grant heterosexual monogamy to Ted Haggard (or safety/life to Sudanese)? Eve's letter suggests several possible explanations: Haggard didn't really put his heart into his request for God's help, instead resting complacently on the laurels of his faith and choosing himself over God. She says, "he can rise again if he really wants to, by the grace of God. And God will forgive him if he truly feels sorry for his sins." In this account, the power is in Haggard's hands, and he has no one to blame but himself if he chooses not to exercise it. But Eve's letter reflects a second alternative: God works in mysterious ways, so that we "can never fully comprehend or fathom" the plan he has for us.

These two explanations for God's apparent selective help-giving have really different thrusts: the first seeks to empower Christians by making it seem that anything is within their grasp if only they are truly good enough, while the second seeks to empower God by protecting him from becoming some sort of divine vending machine, where all you have to do is put in your $.75 of faith/works and, yes, you will get whatever help you've asked for.

Eve would probably rather the "mysterious ways" explanation be used for God's not helping the Sudanese, rather than the "ungenuineness" one -- it's nicer to think of the deaths of 200,000 people as fitting into some incomprehensible but essential providential order than it is to think of God refusing to help a Sudanese woman when she desperately prays not to be gang-raped and murdered because her prayer is selfish or ungenuine. But is there any real reason that we can't flip the order? Who's to say that the stunning revelation of Haggard's hipocrisy doesn't fit into God's providential plan, while the genocide in Sudan is due to the selfish "me-ism" of the Sudanese? The latter idea would strike many modern religious folks as repugnant -- and I'm glad of that -- but not so long ago, it wasn't at all uncommon to think of God as righteously striking down the undeserving racial/religious other. It's a trait of today's kinder, gentler religious impulse to assign the "mysterious ways" explanation as widely as people now do; nevertheless, the frequency with which that explanation is strategically withheld indicates how far we have to do before religion is truly gentled.

Catholicism does have an ancient tradition of wrestling deeply and richly (though not successfully, to heathen eyes) with the contradictions that theology inevitably raises. But Eve doesn't see the way her own reason undercuts itself, the way her efforts to have an empowered (but still likeable) God and an empowered humanity work against one another. She's selling short that Catholic intellectual tradition.

I'd love to see religious discourse rise beyond platitudes and inescapable catch-22s to recognize and engage with contradictions like this one. I mean, come on: saying that Ted Haggard's inability to keep his hands off the lads proves that his prayers to God for help were ungenuine is as circular as saying a woman's failure to sink proves she's a witch. His prayers weren't answered because they weren't geninue. And how do we know they weren't genuine? Because they weren't answered! Despite what Eve says, trapping someone in that kind of double-bind is anything but compassionate.

Not that compassion is necessarily my top priority in Haggard's case. One does love to see a sower of wind reap the whirlwind every now and then.

Not to worry about "poor" Ted; he's published about 20 books, including "The Jerusalem Diet: The "One Day" Approach to Reach Your Ideal Weight--and Stay There" (a spiritual gem, I'm sure!) He, the wife and the kids should be find, financially, for quite a while. Emotionally? Well, that's another matter....

A in NC,

Excellent analysis, though the answer is strikingly simple:

Religious fundamentalists are caught in what psychiatrists call a “self-reinforcing delusion.� The more you try to reason or argue with facts, the more it confirms their own logical impasse.

It’s terrible for them and us: They’ve discovered the recipe for everlasting misery.

I'm a little old lady in Texas and I don't know much about homosexuality, but why would I? What possible difference could it make to ME if a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman? How in the world would that affect MY life? Too many people are so busy butting into other people's business (no pun intended) when they should be minding their own lives.

What an uproar over such a meaningless thing. What matters is that people LOVE each other and are happy. Some folks just can't stand that as they're so sour themselves.

MerryMarjie--you're my hero.

Artemis was Jim West's sidekick played by Ross Martin opposite Robert Conrad on T.V. and by Kevin Kline opposite Will Smith in the 1999 movie.

I hope that clears that up.

A question for you Christian literalists out there: the Bible tells us that God is male and that man was created in God's image. This must mean that God has a penis (unless God is a vast celestial eunuch). Tell us please:

What is God's penis for?

The whole Pastor Ted saga shows that God at least has a wicked sense of humour.

John C, I'm scandalized by the lewd implications of your question. God's penis is for peeing out of and absolutely nothing else ... got it?

John: obviously, god's penis was originally for the Big Bang.

Now, I suspect he uses it to keep himself amused while we screw up his perfect creation...

I suppose the point about Artemis is that we women are worshipping pagan ideals rather than Judeo-Christian ones, but you'd think this Eve character would pick a better pagan goddess. I mean, Artemis is associated with chastity and virginity...why not Aphrodite (sex!), Athena (wisdom-- certainly don't need that), or even Hera (sheer bitchiness)?

lol @ 27, btw.

...Wow. I swear we're not all stupid like that. There are those among us who do get that the religion has weird contradictions, but the point is that our faith is based on not being a bitch (nearly everything Jesus says in the Gospels boils down to: Don't be a bitch, and treat others the way you want to be treated).

At any rate, being an apparently twisted Lutheran homo myself, the first letter informing us that my man Luther jacked everything up rather irritates my sensibilities, but I shall attempt to be nice.

Peace.

First of all,let me say that I'm a Lutheran pastor. Hi Ivy. Second, our sexuality is a gift from God. All of us, gay, straight, etc. are who we are by the grace of God. If someone has a problem with that, they need to take it up with God.
Anyway, A in NC, you are asking the right quesitons and making the right point. I ask some of the same questions, and still don't have an answer. What catches my attention with so many of the religious fundamentalists, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Evanelical, is how often they blame the "insincereity" of the individual if things don't go the way they think they should. What a picky God they have..."Call upon me in the day of trouble and I will deliver you...if you are sincere enough." I don't think that is what the Bible says.
BTW, John C. God is not male. God created "man and woman" in his image...

There's a cut-off age for Speedos. It was ten years ago.

Scot,

If God is not male why did you use the pronoun created man and woman in "HIS" image? Why not HER or ITS?

You all speaketh so much shit!

"nearly everything Jesus says in the gospels boils down to: Don't be a bitch..."

This is false. Hardly anything at all Jesus says in any of the gospels is to do with not being a bitch, or loving one's neighbour.

Jesus was a first-century Jewish male as were his followers and the gospel writers. Very little of what Jesus is reported as saying can with any degree of certainty be attributed to Jesus. Compare for example, the scene in the garden of Gethsemene and the court scenes - the narrators of those scenes are explicitly not present when Jesus is speaking.

A quick look through any gospel will show you that Jesus talks endlessly about the imminent arrival of "the Kingdom of God" and his own status as "Son". The gospel writers, part of a persecuted sect, are of course quite interested in the end of the world (eschatology) and so are the persecuted audience they write for. He does not give many ethical instructions at all, and when he does, they reflect the concerns of a first-century sect being persecuted from their own side, from whom they have split, and from the occupying Roman powers. Marriage, dietary laws, rendering to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and so on are what a first-century Jewish audience are interested in, not loving each other and all their fellow men.

Theology eh? Interesting stuff if you can be bothered spending 3 years doing a degree in it.

First-century Jews? Tough, demanding crowd. They really made you work for your shekels...

Life at the end of the empire. Such fun.

Yes a tough crowd, but there are liberal doses of dramatic irony for them.

The disciples, in particular their leader Peter, are consistently portrayed as dim, misunderstanding the person of Jesus, the meaning of miracles etc.

But yeah, I guess you had to be there really.

This, from Eve's letter, really struck me: "God knows what is best for us and sometimes we don't always get what we pray for because what we really want may not be good for us but God will only gives us what is best for us."

I came to that same conclusion after spending years trying to pray away the gay. I even did a Novena to St. Jude, Patron of Lost Causes, having written down the prayer on a small piece of paper that I carried around in my wallet for nine days. Nine times per day for nine days I prayed for a cure; for added insurance I used tick marks to ensure that I didn't miss a single prayer. On the tenth day I woke up to a new day--still gay. For four more years I strived to become straight, and even attempted to join the Catholic version of Ex-Gaydome. At that same point in my life I came upon a resource for coming out, an option that I didn't think would ever be mine. Unable to discern the right path I prayed one night to the point of tears, begging God to please send me in the right direction. Call it prayers answered or coincidence, but the priest suddenly ceased returning any of my phone calls, while the director of the coming out resource ramped up his support of me throughout that entire coming out experience (which happened to be the name of the workshop!). Ten years later, I am still a person of faith of the God that knows what is best for me, and my partner and I will soon be celebrating our tenth anniversary. I can't imagine what today's life would be like had I gone the other way.

Jesus is cumming ! And his dick is as big as his daddy's ! Damn, how am I gonna be able to sit on those hard pews at church next Sunday ?!?!