Christian Satire, Courtesy of a UK Pastor on the Spiritual Front Lines

I came across this via a post on The End Time. The author is one Andrew Wilson, and it was posted a few days ago under the title "The Case for Idolatry: Why Evangelical Christians Can Worship Idols." I recommend it to you. It rehashes a lot of common arguments that professing christians make in justifying their stance in favor of homosexuality. Note that it is not a sarcastic sneer at homosexuals but a satirical representation of these alleged christians. Their frequent reasoning as seen in far too many editorials etc is reduced to absurdity by substituting the notion of idolatry--made more poignant by the fact that idolatry is at the heart of every claim that "the god I believe in would not condemn [name of favorite sin or family member who is slave to sin]"

I've decided to quote just one section:

With all of these preliminary ideas in place, we can finally turn to Paul, who has sadly been used as a judgmental battering ram by monolaters for centuries. When we do, what immediately strikes us is that in the ultimate “clobber passage”, namely Romans 1, the problem isn’t really idol-worship at all! The problem, as Paul puts it, is not that people worship idols, but that they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (1:23). Paul isn’t talking about people who are idolatrous by nature. He is talking about people who were naturally worshippers of Israel’s God, and exchanged it for the worship of idols. What else could the word “exchange” here possibly mean? ... In other words, when Paul talks about idolatry, he is not talking about the worship of idols as we know it today.

It's genius. It takes the claim that Romans 1 does not condemn homosexuality per se, only that homosexual behavior by heterosexuals is wrong, but homosexual behavior by homosexuals is fine, and shows how ridiculous it is by comparison. But the best and final word on this came from the comments:

James Bejon • 3 days ago   I agree with your reading of Paul, Andrew. It's important to remember that, for Paul, idolatry was inextricably linked to homosexual practices. And Paul's major issue was, of course, with the latter. (See Von Straussenhaus’s important work, ‘Götzendienst, Sexualität, und Ein Haar Ball Großes’.) Idolatry in and of itself wasn't a problem for him.

Did you catch it? It's bitingly insightful. The pro-homosexual claim has been that homosexuality is not what is condemned in the Bible, but idolatry of homosexual behavior. This is supposed to be on parallel with idolatry of food, money, power, etc, things which are not evil in themselves but become so when made an idol. The genius of this commentor was to make the opposite claim for maximum satire: that when Paul condemns idolatry and homosexuality in Romans 1, he's really only condemning homosexual idolatry, not other forms of idolatry. That argument makes as much sense as the reverse.

This by itself is a powerful deconstruction of the faux-Biblical argument to legitimize homosexuality by pretending that Paul is only concerned with idolatry. Decimated, in one fell swoop.

Congratulations, gentlemen.

~ Rak Chazak