27 Oct 2007
God Wants to Touch Your Privates

While perusing the feeds this morning, I happened across a review of Barbara Victor's The Last Crusade: Religion and the Politics of Misdirection over at Bartholomew's Notes on Religion. The review gave a tantalizing hint of the take that some contemporary evangelical Christians have on circumcision - something I had little suspected, and had to find a web reference to confirm:

On March 14th, 1994, Hayford spoke at a regional Promise Keepers conference in Anaheim, California. During his message, Hayford gave three reasons why God required circumcision in the Old Testament:

[l] God wants to touch your very identity as a man. [2] He wants to reach out and touch your secret and private parts. [3] God wants to touch man's creative parts.

Apparently Rev. Hayford is considered a pretty much mainstream Pentecostal (if there is such a thing), and I would be reasonably certain that he shares the classic disdain for homosexuality shared by classic Christianity, seeing as how he counseled Ted Haggard after his "fall". How can he not see the contradiction here? If a man wants to touch another man's "secret and private parts", Hayford would no doubt condemn him. If a man wanted to cut the end off another man's secret and private parts, I'm sure that Hayford would be appalled and wish the offender jailed. But Hayford's god doesn't follow these rules - it's not only OK for him to apparently harbor homosexual urges, it's justified and, in fact, required!

This is what can happen when you have the divine utterly cut off from the universe and existing outside of it: the "creator/created" dichotomy. Heathen deities are part and parcel of the fabric of the universe itself, and are generally expected to follow the same "rules" and suffer the same consequences for their violation as the rest of the world. While we have no proscription of homosexuality per se, Odin is sometimes castigated in Heathen circles for his alleged ergi (unmanly, sexually receptive) practice of magic, and some go so far as to say that these actions on his part contribute to his ultimate downfall at the Ragnarok.

We expect the same standards from our deities as we expect from each other, no matter where we stand on the great issues of the day. And we expect our deities attitudes and behaviors to change over time, and not to be ever unchanging, or changing on mere whim.

This is why it's so hard to pin a contradiction on a heathen: we are broad as well as deep, and have no need to justify the continuation of ancient practices beyond our own preference in practice.

If Odin showed up and wanted to touch my secret and private parts, I'd tell him to piss off... and still call myself a heathen in the morning!

08:27 /Asatru | 2 comments | permanent link