Opus 2025-420: Sugar Coated Evil

I had a conversation recently with a very nice lady.  She seemed to be gentle and kind and wanting the best for everyone.  She was soft spoken and I’m sure that she could have given you a good presentation on how we should love our enemies and how God is love and so forth.

She was what I am calling sugar coated evil.

The issue that got us going was homosexuality.  She had a friend, possibly just an acquaintance, who had been to seminary and was giving her some song and dance about how the Old Testament was geared for those days and had nothing to do with us today.  She had several examples, but the one that stood out to me was the condemnation of homosexuality in the Old Testament.  She seemed totally unaware that Paul also addressed this in the book of Romans.  She mentioned how Jesus never talked about it.  She was listening to this seminary graduate.

All I could really tell her that she could hear was, “You’ve been lied to.”  I don’t know if she heard even that.  I don’t know if she understood what I was saying.  I’m relatively sure she didn’t accept it.  I turned to Romans and read verses in chapter one where Paul is very specific about homosexual behavior.  I told her that in some of the list of actions that will keep us out of heaven he also addresses it.  The only answer she had was that if they were born that way, and God made them that way, then it can’t be wrong.

I pointed out to her that God made me also and I’m certainly not perfect.

We ran out of time, but I see this kind of thinking going on when we deal with Islam.  Islam is not a religion of peace.  There may be some uninformed Muslims whom we would consider moderate, but generally speaking they probably don’t have any idea what the Quran says.  I who cannot read Arabic and have no indication of what it actually says, can read in the different translations that it is not a religion of peace.  And yet we have all these people who want to believe that it’s just a few radicals that are causing the problem.

I would say that they are “sugar coated evil”.

People like to act like they know what they’re talking about but they are generally lazy and don’t want to be confronted by what makes him uncomfortable.  I have yet to meet anyone who has read the Quran.  It is readily available in many translations and can be read in your spare time.  I read mine on a month of vacation in preparation to have to teach it in seventh grade history.  It didn’t keep me from doing anything I wanted to do on vacation.  The same is true of such things as the Communist Manifesto.  The information is available, but people are too comfortable to access it.

Beware of the sugar coating.

homo unius libri