I wish to commend Kent for his letter regarding the upcoming vote on the nature of marriage. It takes courage to think freely and to speak openly about the issues that touch us personally.
There are many among us who still live in a “religious closet” because we, though thinking freely within, do not dare to speak openly without about our disappointment with religion in its various apparitions.
For many of us it has taken years to free ourselves from the scourge of religious dogma, doctrine and tradition, just like it took us many years to recognize the harmful effects of the miracle cure for pests found in DDT.
Our most arduous trial is to cast off the shackles which have kept us in bondage to the so-called Holy Books. To believe that Scripture, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim or other, is a revealed and infallible word of a deity which cannot be questioned by us humans under penalty of eternal damnation is to me an immoral and perverse proposition.
To worship a set of books as if they were the very word of god, is tantamount to idolatry.
It has made a written page a graven image of god. And isn’t it ironic that one of the commandments in one of the books pronounces that we humans should not make a graven image of god! I wonder how it is that the People of the Book, so adamant about following its every word, do not follow this commandment?
Like Kent I like to think freely and speak openly about issues which have been kept in the closet for too long and invite others to do the same!
As a footnote, if marriage is for the sole propagation of children to spread the good news of God, woe to the woman who marries past menopause and to the man who has sex with his wife when she is beyond childbearing! Maybe we should include a prohibition for such behavior in an amendment?
Jake Hjorth
Grand Marais
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