Visitors from Fantasyland

This is a fairy tale. Unfortunately, it also happens to be true.

Independent thinkers are familiar with visitors from Fantasyland, because we encounter them frequently. There are two distinct kingdoms within it: Right-wingia and Left-wingia. Each kingdom shelters its citizens so completely that they know almost nothing about the rest of the world – except what they’re told about it, which is usually wrong. But since they’re also told that they know everything, it’s difficult to get them to see that things outside their magical kingdom may not be the way they’ve been told.

Independent thinkers have a problem with media-generated brouhahas like the Duck Dynasty controversy because they essentially involve everybody else being dragged into a squabble between Right-wingia and Left-wingia. The rest of us don’t want to live in Fantasyland. I think that, to a huge degree, both sides are full of shit. So do most of the intelligent people I talk to every day.

A commenter to my previous post exhibited typical Fantasyland thinking. He couldn’t strain his brain by considering how people outside of Pastor Bubba’s congregation might read Scripture. It’s difficult, however, for anyone who’s actually read the Bible to see how the passages used to clobber gays could ever be taken the way they are by those who wield them as weapons. The spiritual sickness in Right-Wing churches has grown so severe that they don’t want to see those passages any other way.

Those particular snippets — selected, as they have been, to speak to people other than these, people they don’t like — are, therefore, the ones they always quote. Screw everybody else, and Go Them! Their tiny little idol god doesn’t love anybody else but them. Fantasyland has its own religion.

I graduated from a Southern Baptist college, where Bible study was mandatory, and went on, sometime later to teach adult catechism in the Catholic Church. Every day of my adult life, I have read and studied the Bible. Naturally, when I came out a month before my thirty-fifth birthday, I went back and re-studied the infamous “clobber” passages (as do all gay Christians). When people lecture me about “what the Bible teaches about gays,” as if I were an idiot, it’s understandably difficult for me to take them seriously.

Left-wingians think the Bible says the same screwed-up crap that Right-wingians believe it says. Though Fantasyland has long been divided into two kingdoms – once of which accepts the Bible (their messed-up and self-serving interpretation of it), while the other rejects it – their thinking is suspiciously similar. Their kingdom might also, just as well, be known as Either-Oria, because they both take the same sticky, hairy, childish mess of junk to be the full extent of reality. One is mandated to believe one set of things about this blob, while the other must believe a totally different set of things.

They got this way because they’re intellectually lazy – essentially sheeple – and don’t want to make the effort of thinking for themselves. The sociopaths who aspire to rule the world have divvied them up into two different, rival herds. Right-wing sociopaths shepherd one herd, while their Left-wing counterparts control the other.

I welcome visitors from Fantasyland – both wingias – to this blog. But as I do not accept their assumption that I am their inferior, they will come here to debate me following the same rules they expect me to follow. I have no problem, for example, debating my own morality – as long as they are equally willing to debate their own.

It is insulting and degrading to put other people on the spot like that, while expecting to remain comfortably protected. It is also cowardly. It isn’t going to be permitted here.

One of the things I require is that anyone wishing to debate me must subject him/herself to the same standard he/she would apply to me. Jesus said we should do that. Same Jesus they claim to believe in, and in the same Bible. I find it exceedingly odd that these people can apply select snippets from Leviticus to me – the same Holiness Code they violate every time they eat pork chops, shave their faces or wear fabric made from mixed fibers – then turn around and claim Jesus as their Lord. They clearly don’t listen to a word He said.

If they come here to debate me, they also forfeit – forever and ever, amen – the privilege of pretending I, as a gay, libertarian, politically Right-of-Center Christian, do not exist. By endeavoring to debate me, they are acknowledging my existence. They can’t debate somebody who does not exist.

And, as I live in the real world, if they are to travel to this blog, they must leave Fantasyland behind. The real world is such a scary place, to them, that many of them never want to be here. If they’re unwilling to abide by my rules, on my blog, I’ll happily purchase a one-way ticket to send them back.

That way, we’ll all live happily ever after. The End.