In Which God Tiptoes About Our Sensibilities

Hanaan's Diner

Nothing is better than a good religious argument. Not an argument about religions, but an argument in which we have recourse to various "outtakes" from holy scriptures, and use them to fortify our hypotheses and prejudices.

I love them because usually the guy or gal that has memorized the most scripture passages is "the last man (or woman) standing".
And this I like because I take inordinate pleasure in kicking that old notion "truth" in the knickers. Who needs truth or probabilities when you have an absolute heap of scriptural quotes? I surely do not.

So we old TYBALTs  (The Young Bucks At Lunch Together) were down at Hanaan's Diner, arguing with a loose pack of ROMEOs (Retired Old Men Eating Out) about same sex marriage. We were not Tybalts against Romeos, but a mish-mosh of guys on one side and a mosh-mish of guys on the contra side.

Hank Jakubowski said that same sex anything - and a fortiori same sex marriage, although he did not say a fortiori - were forbidden in the Bible. Someone said Torah Kohanim, to be precise; Leviticus. Back and forth, the arguments, heated words, and invectives flew like tzitzit in a gale.

So I waited for my chance. Then I said maybe God did approve of same sex marriage, even though it appears to go against the argument from anatomy, the tired logic of the sword in its scabard argument. I said maybe God was keeping it a secret.
People positively goggled at me.
I said maybe God realized that in the old timey days we were rather crude and intemperate... He was a supreme potter, as it were, and was keenly aware of the rather poor nature of the clay He had to work with. So maybe He decided to say one thing back then, and would let the cat out of the bag (so to speak) in the fullness of its time.

Well, they positively hooted.
Hank Jakubowski said he'd never heard anything so stupid since Jeb Bush said illegal immigration was an act of love, and he said it "L-u-u-u-v!", making it long and sarcastic, and sort of waving his hands as if to depict a flow of rosy petals in the wind.

They said that the thing about scripture is that it was inspired; it was the word of God, and there was no higher editor. There is was, like it or lump it.

When things quieted, I said, "In the Bible, Moses allows Jewish men to divorce their wives. In Matthew 19, I read, 'Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way.' "

Then I said, "So according to the New Testament, God kept the real nature of divorce in marriage a secret for a time."

I added some observations on the so-called Satanic verses in the Quran for Hannan's sake, and for Joe Said's, whom we call Abu Lihya, or "father of the beard";  Lihya, for short. Sometimes Abu Joe. I doesn't matter.

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