Those Evangelicals

In listening to the media discussing the gay agenda vs. the Christian agenda, I get a mental picture those two exploding helmets they show during televised football games. They appear on the screen, crash together in hi-rez CG goodness, some people passionately express some pretty inane convictions, and we're back to the helmets. (I hate TV sports, but those helmets somehow disengage my hair-trigger eye-thumb reflexes.)

Especially since the same-sex marriage decision in Canada I have found myself watching more gay media. And I actually think we're closer to each other than either side would ever admit. The gay stuff has a leg up because it's more of an unknown novelty, while all people think they're experts on God and religion.

I'm not as free as some respected friends who've gone on record saying Christians should allow gay marriage, because "Well, what's the big deal?" I guess my retort to that would be, "If the deal isn't so big, then why do gay people want it?"

Words are all we have. Symbols are assigned definitions, entirely arbitrarily in most cases, and they form the tenuous shared culture experience that connect human beings together, and we call that language. Changing the definition of a fundamental cultural tenet, like "marriage", is riskier than at first it may appear. As pointed out by several religious thinkers (and here I'm not just referring to Christians, if you're curious), divorce has made what was indefinite temporary. In general that has caused much harm to society, across all generations. It continues to have repurcussions that weren't imaginable. In college-aged students there is little expectation to get married; they've seen their parents' example, and they're not readily buying into the marriage model. So instead we have even more tenuous relationships forming, ones without formal recognition or lasting commitment of any kind, except perhaps to car payments and mortgages. In the span of two or three generations, relationships have become comoditised.

I think there's a historical simplicity to the design of marriage. But if you take it apart to examine it, you realise just how complicated it is. And that's when you realise that have no idea how to put it back together.

However I'm not the type to say we're all going to Hell in a handbasket. Or that the world is about to end. I'll leave that to the other radical evangelists. But when they say it, I'll sort of shrug. "Could be, could be."