Saturday, July 10, 2004
(1:19 PM) | Anonymous:
Clemency
I have been made aware and alert, this morning, by the 4 conservative email lists I still, despite my attempts to quit, am subscribed to. They have made me aware and alert about a matter which probably spells the start of the end times.See, it appears a pastor in Sweden was arrested and given a month in jail for speaking out against homosexuals (you'll have to scroll down slightly). The pastor described homosexuality as "abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumor in the body of society." He then went on to call homosexuals "perverts, whose sexual drive the Devil has used as his strongest weapon against God." He then warned that Sweden faced total obliteration due to the lifestyle of homosexuals.
I've only been able to find this reported on right-wing sites, and the original source seems to be Ecunemical News International..even when I searched Swedish papers with my Swedish to English translator I got after much searching long ago to allow me to read hockey reports from sweden. So, this may very well be an urban legend. However, the only response I've seen has been one of shock and awe. Most commenters on all the sites seem to echo this one from the above site: "Apparently I no longer live in a free nation, and what I believe in has now become against the law to speak."
I'd just be interested to see what others of a different mindset think. For myself, little did I know that the core of Christianity,the "mere" Christianity I believe in consists of saying that homosexuals are tools of the devil and a cancerous tumor. Silly me, I thought maybe Christianity was centered around loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength as well as loving your neighbor as yourself.
You can coat it in biblical language all you want, but I don't think there's anyway to fit what that pastor said into those two greatest commandments. "I love you so much I don't want you to go to Hell" is perhaps the only way I can see, and I hardly see how you're going about convincing someone you love them by calling them a cancerous tumor to society.
To be honest, I'm a bit conflicted as to whether this is a good way of dealing with the problem. It's likely the guy isn't going to spend more than a week in jail if the prison system in Sweden is anything like the US..but I'm not sure forcing people to quit spreading such hate is really a way to change hearts, as it seems to have just made a martyr out of the pastor, Ake Green.
