The Pope has a Penis

While I was scanning medical records at work today, I listened to this tasty morsel on NPR's religion podcast. Parent's of an Oregon teen are being tried for homicide after their son died of an undiagnosed renal disease. His parents believe in healing by prayer and did not take him to the doctor.

Okay, so I said yesterday that there are no bad Christians, just bad people, and I believe that. I also believe that people are not good because they are Christians, they are good people who also happen to be Christians. Acting with kindness and deference to the feelings of others is a learned skill - a skill that many never perfect regardless of their beliefs.

However, I do believe that organized religion attracts more than its fair share of psychos, and for good reason.

As it says in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 20-25:

²⁰Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²²Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

This passage demands that I discard my earthly reason for God's reason. So where do I turn? My intuition? My gut? My heart?

Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

If I cannot trust my reason, and I cannot trust my intuition, and the bible is full of nuances and passages with a lot of room for interpretation (a fact easily proven by the wide variance of interpretations available) I'm left with little choice but to trust my local "man of God." Only one problem: he's a man. And he has a penis.

The pope has a penis! The pope has a penis! La-la la-la laaa laaa!!

Dan Savage occasionally posts on Slog a little appetizer called "Youth Pastor Watch". Dan conjectures, and I tend to agree, that men who place themselves in positions of power over teens - a position that requires a lot of talks about sex, and saving yourself for marriage, and "how far is too far?" blah blah blah - are at high risk of being sexually-repressed deviants.

I encourage you to go read all of them, but this post from last September caught my eye. I'll wait here while you go and read it.... Tum tee tum... I'm eating a burrito that Jason made for me and boy it is tasty! ....Tum tee tum.... Are you done? Good.

Okay, so this is disturbing, obviously. And this is not a representation of all youth pastors. It is the minority, but this is the Achilles heel of youth-pastorship. And the reason is right there in bold halfway down, "they trusted him because of his affiliation with the church."

It is not hard to learn to say all the right things. Anyone who grew up in church knows exactly what to say when called on in Sunday school. The creepers can slip between the cracks, and when a nutball has the power of interpreting the word of God, he practically has the power of God.

I hope those people start taking their kids to the doctor.

See you Saturday for more words like penis.

-KL

p.s. Feel free to comment. I love to know people are reading.