Imagine! Tolerance! A controversial concept in Christian la-la land, all because of the bigotry and hatred people find in their bibles.
While I agree that the current uproar over
We Are Family is pretty disgusting, I'm not as convinced that it is actually religious in nature as much as a general symptom of the dumbing of America. In this and some other cases the medium is a mixture of religion, politics and commercialism.
People like Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Gene Scott are simply using religion in the same way that Billy Sunday and all the other hucksters did. They have the ultimate commercial venture, selling a product with an even lower product cost than M$ Windows. They sell confrontation.
You can see this in today's Talk Radio venue as well as Fox News. It is the same coin as the Televangelists. There are no discussions, no debates, rather what is delivered is the verbal equivalent of the WWF.
I would ask all of the folk out there to invest a little time in examining some earlier interview format programs. Two past ones in particular, the one hosted by Steve Allen and the one hosted by Dick Cavett; and the current Charley Rose program. In each of these the host plays a minor but significant part as moderator but the goal is to get the guest to fully express his or her opinion.
Contrast those with any of the current crop, Rush, Montel, Springer, Stern or any of the others. What you find today is that the concept is to outshout the guest unless the guest is following some predetermined party line. The majority of the content comes not from the guest but from the hosts.
Religion has always been used as a medium for hate propaganda. It is a viable medium because the audience is preconditioned to accepting the position presented. It is AUTHORITY writ large. But that is not an indictment of religion but an indictment of bigots and shallow thinkers.
Aslan is not a Tame Lion