Religious Belief or Prejudice

Laws and Regulations

The idea of quantifying sin—one sin is worse than another or deserves harsher punishment than another—is a human conception and often a human prejudice. All sin separates people from God, the very reason why the Old Testament gave minutely detailed laws for every behavior and daily routine.

Women had to separate themselves from society when menstruating. Anyone touching her, her clothes, or anything she sat on would become unclean. In giving birth to a boy, she had to wait thirty-three days before presenting purification sacrifices, sixty-six days after giving birth to a girl. Men aren’t supposed to have sexual relations with their wives during these unclean periods. No tattoos allowed. Rise in the presence of the aged. Anyone still doing these things or many, many more?  

No, we needed to see that our imperfect human condition makes it impossible for us to perfectly follow rules aimed at making us sinless enough to be in the presence of God. The New Testament says the sacrifice of Jesus fulfilled the laws of atonement for sins once and for all and made forgiveness more easily attainable.

 Religious Belief or Prejudice

Jesus said that the only acceptable reason to divorce was infidelity (abuse, addiction, neglect not mentioned), and that anyone who divorced for another reason and remarried committed adultery (considered sufficiently common to be warned against in the Ten Commandments) and caused their new spouse to commit adultery.  

It becomes very clear that the dislike of providing public services to certain groups, gay people in particular, is a prejudice rather than a fear of committing a sin by not repudiating another sin. Who has problems serving people on their second, third, or fourth marriage? Who even asks? And unmarried couples who live together in sin, according to the Bible—anyone talking about sanctions on them?—maybe forbid them a rental contract together, joint bank accounts.

Sounds ridiculous and impossible, doesn’t it? I suspect that in another fifty years—let’s hope earlier—the idea of denying LGBT people services will seem just as ridiculous.