It’s a mystery to me how a person can disagree with someone without seeming like an asshole.

I’m sure theoretically it’s possible to have a pleasant conversation with someone who disagrees with you.

Social media makes it possible to filter a lot of what makes us so intolerable in person.

I like realism. When I put stuff out there , I want people who I will never meet in person to know just what a difficult person I am in real life.

But I don’t want to alienate anyone who I love and/or like that.

When I alienate someone, I like to take my time, to make sure everyone is having fun. If you’ve received a form letter terminating our acquaintance, you’ll know what I mean.

But as much as I’ve tried to tone down my excitement, some things cannot pass without comment.

Presenting Exhibit A, Ken Hutcherson. This charming personality has obligingly time-traveled from the 15th Century Spanish Inquisition, to join us here in the 21st century, disguised as a self-aggrandizing media whore who just learned his political expiration date. Click the link, and you can hear him being interviewed by a christian radio host suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Oh, it’s a hoot.

Hutcherson is upset because the Republicans in his state wouldn’t let him give 90-minute sermons to potential donors about how the homosexual agenda is ruining this country. That’s why the voters of Washington didn’t overturn same-sex marriage in the recent elections, he says.

He also condemns churches that don’t help him ‘win back’ the word ‘gay’ and the emblem of the rainbow from the evil, but stylishly-outfitted authors of the gay agenda, who all live in a giant pink human skull carved out of a mountain and painted a fabulous cornflower blue. Hutcherson sums up his raison d’être nicely here:

Don’t forget guys, when you think about pastor Hutcherson out there, think about the gayest guy you know. I am sick and tired of the homosexuals taking words that God has given us, I am sick and tired of the homosexual community taking our rainbow when god gave us that promise that he would not destroy the earth with water again. We have just become irrelevant, we are just sissified, we are evangeli-fish with no spiritual vertebrae and we need to wake up.

It sounds like Pastor Ken needs to relax, maybe take a long weekend somewhere, like in an isolated Log Cabin. It’s a lumber state, where a lot of guys make it their business to know and cherish wood. They can show you the way.

Or better yet, maybe Ken Hutcherson can shut the fuck up. He’s being a word-Nazi, and he’s trying to hog up all the rainbows.

In Hutcherson’s rainbow-gay universe, religion, specifically christianity, has the copyright on appropriate human behavior.

What makes me so angry about this is Hutcherson stakes this claim based on the literature of an emergent bronze age shepherd kingdom. And he’s not alone. A lot of people think that the bible is the primary source of moral behavior. The reality is that whatever instruction on human behavior is found in any religion, is not a cause of human behavior, primarily. It is a function of human behavior, then perhaps a cause.

The new and old testaments at best are the ethos of their times and places. The old testament gives instructions for the proper conduct of genocide and the ground rules of slavery. Its feature set-piece is very specific about worshiping god, but not about anything useful.

He couldn’t give us a commandment like ‘thou shalt not schtup your sister, lest ye bear forth cognitively impaired banjo savants. Selah.’ What, god ran out of ink, or something? Moses have to be someplace; only wanted the ‘nutshell’?

Likewise, if the old testament forbids gayness, that’s largely because it didn’t know that sexuality is socially and biologically determined, that homosexuality exists throughout the animal kingdom, that humanity’s closest relatives, the Bonobos, use sex as part of every social transaction.

Our primate cousins are nothing more than a continuous, live action version of Girls Gone Wild. Male and female, they’re all bisexual.

About seven million years ago, our ancestors started wondering if it was such a good thing to have an orgy every time the in-laws came over for dinner around the termite hill. Too much of a good thing, you know? There were termites not being eaten.

Hutcherson embodied, for me, the elevation of unfounded assertions over reality. This seems to be the M-O of the religious and the faithful.

From alien abductions to Allah to Jesus, it’s fun playing make-believe. But guess what, Hutcherson? Your invisible friend doesn’t have a say in anything real. Tell your god to catch up to the 21st century because we’re leaving without him.

See? I still can’t help being an asshole. But let me try.

On a practical, functional, level our real experience is far more influenced by what we can describe, and predict and agree upon as a kind of commons of reality, than by ancient texts. Humans are complex socio-biological creatures, easily prodded into what are loosely termed as good and evil acts, based on some aspect of our feelings and thoughts. It’s the differential between those urges and the entire complex of our being that makes religion and belief more or less of a good.