Surprise, surprise! I just got into yet another argument on Youtube. This time, it was about the Pope. On a video that was uploaded a couple months back, I commented that what the Pope said about most American Christians was true to what Jesus said. I agreed, because quite frankly Jesus agreed, with the Pope that Jesus does not like people who oppress the poor, who judge their neighbors, and who hinder their neighbors' ability to live their lives through legislation designed to force people to align themselves with Christian morality. I also agreed with the Pope that Jesus says that greedy people and the super-rich are NOT automatically virtuous and wonderful people.

Well, this comment didn't set well with a lot of devout Fundies, who in my country tend to be the right-wing fanatics who want to bring a Christian theocracy to the United States under the false assumption that they're "bringing us back to what America originally stood for." And they've been quite vocal about it. The comments became problematic to the point where I bowed out of the comments section about a week into the commenting, but last night some of the new comments that hit that section (because I was the original commenter and therefore Google notifies me of every single comment in that thread whether I like it or not) were BS, and I, being the type not to take bullshit kindly, got on the case of a few people. Because even though I'm no longer a Christian, I do agree with a lot of what Jesus taught, and seeing him misrepresented by people who claim to be his followers makes me want to stand up and say "no, that's not what he said, please stop attributing things to him that he never said."

So I got this one guy who seemed somewhat okay, and he explained from his viewpoint why I was wrong about what Jesus said. He sounded somewhat okay, even though he went the condescending route at first and claimed that I had misinterpreted the Bible. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him continue, because he seemed more civil.

Well, he told me that "loving thy neighbor" doesn't mean that you should allow gay people to live in your neighborhood without calling them sinners. He also told me that because, in a future time period, believers are supposed to "judge angels" that therefore Christians have the right to judge everyone else in the here-and-now. And finally, he said that when Jesus talked about rich people, he wasn't actually condemning rich people, because the "Eye of a Needle" wasn't referring to an actual needle's eye, but rather to a gate in a city that was so tiny that a camel had to duck down to enter it during a siege.

So my response was a really long (and I mean VERY LONG) post where I soundly proved him wrong. For one thing, when Jesus said "love thy neighbor" he made it clear that love is not conditional upon how they live their lives, what they believe, what their sexual orientation is, and so on. For another thing, when he said "judge not," he made it clear that "judging angels" was not something believers could do in the here-and-now, and if you know Christian theology well enough, you'll know that angels are less important in God's eyes than humans. So if Christians can't judge angels, it's obvious they also can't judge other humans.

And finally, I pointed out to him that there is no evidence for the existence of a "needle gate" as he claimed that there was. I also pointed out that when Jesus mentioned the "Eye of the Needle" in Luke, he was actually speaking in the context of a rich young ruler asking him how he could gain eternal life, and that because of context, Jesus himself was in fact referring to the eye of an actual needle, and not a mythological gate.

Shortly after I finished that rebuttal, he became viciously angry with me. Called me a serpent, called me a bitch, told me he was going to "nuke [me] with the Word of God." Heh, so much for civility.

But then came the best part: his response, which I half expected to be filled with actual quotes from the Bible to support his own claim. No such fucking luck, though: he just went on a long-winded, foul-mouthed rant in the comments, calling me a serpent several times, saying that all gay people are abominations to god, and never once quoting his own holy book. Heh, so much for "nuking me with the Word of God."

Unless he actually is God, of course, in which case his comment even without Bible quotes would be the "Word of God."

Oh, and he called me a servant of Satan, too. And people like that wonder why people like me leave the church in droves and start believing in polytheism or other such things. rolls eyes