"I LOVE VAGINAS!"

So yesterday in the wake of the Ray Comfort thing, two very different people said two very different things that got me to wondering. The first was Ray, who while squirming in the face of Nigel’s heroic and dogged attempt to get Ray to link to, (or acknowledge the existence of the audio from) the debate he so breezily claimed to have won, claimed that he wasn’t going to link because he found the URL, “Jesus Was a Tit Man” offensive. At first I thought that was just about what one might expect form the cheating hack, but then I remembered that this is the guy who got (in)famous for claiming that the banana was so irreducibly wonderful as prove the existence of god. This in turn got me wondering how someone who is so easily impressed, could find the very mention of the human breast - possibly the one part of our primate pattern that allows for no obvious improvement - a cause for shock and fretful piety.

Then, while I was still pondering this, over on another blog I came across a commentary of the Ray debate, which ended with the words “Christians definitely hate vaginas. Are you gonna stand for that?” nintfjr replied “ No I'm not! I'm going to walk into my family's church and shout, "I LOVE VAGINAS!" And I don't care what your 3000 year old nomadic death cult thinks about it!" which in a day full of great comments made me laugh so hard beer shot out my noise.

And the more I thought about this, the more it seemed to me that these two comments illustrate, as clearly as anything could, the difference between us and them. It is not simply that they are bawling children who need an imaginary night light to keep them sane, it is that they really do hate life. They hate bodies, and flesh, and fluids and all the squishy, messy merry go round of dirt and decay that is life. They tremble at the thought of their pure and precious spirits possibly being corrupted by the meat that houses it, and so they seek to suppress and repress and extinguish every flicker of feeling and pulse of pleasure in themselves and others, and keep their eyes fixed upon the messianic hope that one day they will be freed, and their corrupt flesh will reside clean and sparkling in the pure white light love of Jesus.

We on the other hand have no such delusions. We know that we are but a twig on the tree of life, and bare the stamp of our lowly origins proudly, rejoicing in our kinship with tree mold and the microbes on whose planet we live, knowing that our bodies are not just the best tool our minds will ever have, but is what our minds are made of.

As such, and with the knowledge that Easter is upon us, with the concomitant horror of having to spend time with family members we can’t abide, I think it is time to strike a blow for our common ancestors, and if you find yourself stuck next that drunk old Irish uncles, who won’t stop telling Jew jokes, or the high strung maiden Aunt who feels sorry for you because you don’t have Jesus in your heart, follow nintfjr’s lead, and try to work your love for genitals into the conversation. You don’t need to shout it, just drop it in, and come Monday we can compare notes.

Anyway, just a thought.

Good luck out there, and thanks.