The Planet Gliese 581g May Be the Second Biblical Earth

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
About a year ago I wrote a column about the decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America to accept gays and lesbians into pulpits.

I titled it “Commentary On The Best-Selling, Least-Read Book In The History Of The World.”  Now, after a year of watching churches vote to see if they want to stay under the sex-drenched umbrella of the ELCA or the pure white heterosexual canopy of cherry-picking churches, I firmly believe that the earth is saturated with five-percenters.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that five percent of our population “is and always will be totally crazy.” These are people who burn Korans, carry AK-47s at political rallies, watch reality TV shows, and “joke with the flight attendant about a bomb in the plane’s restroom.”

These people are not mentally ill, according to the NIMH, they are just crazy. However, the NIMH says that 26 percent of Americans have a diagnosable mental illness in any given year.

The Institute did not go into detail on the enormous distance between crazy and mentally ill.

The number of gays and lesbians in any society has been estimated at between five and ten percent of the population. For statistical purposes let’s settle on the conservative figure.

That means when the Vikings played the Lions two weeks ago there were at least 2,350 gays among the 47,000 fans drinking beer and acting crazy. When the Twins got blasted by Toronto the other night, at least 2,000 gays were at Target Field. Can you imagine that when Glenn Beck had tea on the Washington Mall a couple of months ago before an estimated 300,000 worshippers that about 15,000 were in their own private mental closets? 

So with the 15,000 crazies that were already there in colonial and Uncle Sam uniforms, it made for an unusual political gathering of the ten percent.

Getting close to home, I see the North Dakota State Bison had 18,000 fans at the FargoDome when they played South Dakota. Not all of the 900 gays in attendance were from South Dakota.
Is God and/or a Gay Your Co-Pilot?
 
At any one time during the day we average about 5,000 passenger jets in the sky flown by 10,000 pilots and co-pilots. Of that number 500 are gay and lesbian. I mention the lesbians because more and more commercial pilots are female.

I wonder if Senator John McCain checks out the pilots of the jet he rides home to Arizona. He voted against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” because he is worried about “cohesiveness” in foxholes and PXs. I wonder if he worries about cohesiveness in the cockpit.

After all, the female pilot may have been a fighter pilot flying missions in a war zone.

I think it’s hilarious that 225 passengers in a jet will trust a lesbian to get the plane on the ground safely, but some will think she shouldn’t land safely in the pulpit. There goes that five percent again.

When I go to church on Sunday at Cormorant Lutheran there are usually about 200 in attendance in the sanctuary. That means there are ten gays and lesbians in there someplace. My God! That’s almost an entire pew!

I see that ten Lutheran churches in Minnesota have voted to leave the ELCA because of the gays-in-the-pulpit rule and their “literal interpretation” of the Bible.

Riverside Church of Wannaska has an average of 74 people in attendance. So just a half a pew are gay. I see Bethany Lutheran of Menagha and Lund Lutheran of rural Detroit Lakes have joined the ten who are seeking more “moral” pastures, forgetting that even five percent of the sheep in pastures are gay.
Why Do Atheists Score Higher on Religious Knowledge?
The Pew (not church furniture) Forum on Religion & Public Life recently released a survey on Bible knowledge, core teachings of different faiths, and major figures in religious history.

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, Jews and Mormons tied for second, Protestants came in third, and Roman Catholics were dead last.

I would have liked to participated in the survey because I have such a checkered religious past. I was raised a French Catholic in Little Falls and I never, on pain of being cast out into the wilderness, crossed into the sanctuaries of the German Catholics and the Polish Catholics. That bigotry crossed over into private lives. I even took a French Catholic girl to the prom.

Now I am an ELCA Lutheran on Sunday, an atheist on Monday, an agnostic by Tuesday, a pantheist on Wednesday, a Wiccan on Thursday, a Tennessee Snake-Handler by Friday, and a Druid on Saturday night. Although the Druids tromped around Stonehenge thousands of years ago, they were just approved as a religion in England. They worship natural forces such as thunder, lightning, and the sun.

The survey revealed how little people know about their own religions. About half the Catholics did not know that the church taught transubstantiation, the turning of wine and bread into Christ’s body and blood. More than half the Protestants (including those in the ELCA!) could not identify Martin Luther as the inspiration of the Reformation (remember the 95 on the door?). No need to go on.
The Saga and Tragedy of Lissa Young
Lissa Young, the daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, wanted a military career and wanted to fly airplanes, so she was thrilled when she got an appointment to West Point. She was the first woman to serve as a deputy brigade commander, a distinct honor at West Point.

After graduation and a tour of duty, she returned to West Point as an instructor. A successful teacher, she was also a skilled Chinook helicopter pilot, and had been already selected for promotion to lieutenant colonel because of an exceptional 16-year career.
But a soldier saw a private e-mail to her partner and she later admitted to her commander she was a lesbian. She was discharged and lost her pilot status. She immediately took a job with Raytheon, a prime defense contractor, and helped establish air traffic control systems in the Middle East theater of war. 

But she didn’t like the corporate world and still wore her “wings” she was awarded as a pilot. She is now working on a doctorate in education and hopes to get a job teaching—at West Point.

And this is where the planet Gliese 581g, a planet attached by gravity to its sun, Gliese 581, comes into play. Gliese 581 is 20 light-years away from earth (remember the formula?).

Gliese 581g orbits its sun as earth orbits “our” sun. Our astronomers have figured out that it is the right distance from its sun so that it is in a “habitable” zone. It has the right stuff to have water on its surface, and has enough gravity to keep an atmosphere close by.

Astronomers have been looking for an exoplanet (one beyond our solar system) that might sustain human life. In Gliese 581g they claim they have found a pretty good candidate. If theory becomes fact, what would the discovery of life on another planet do to our religious beliefs about the Bible and Genesis?  We just don’t know much as we travel to the stars and beyond.

The evidence is fairly clear that homosexuals have been part of the human race since the first humans walked upright over 65-million-year-old dinosaur bones.

If you believe that every single word of the Bible has been written or defined by God then there is no hope that you will examine scientific evidence with a critical eye.  You have made your choice if you side with literal interpretation. You have chosen the Bible over thinking. That is your choice, but don’t try to shove your thoughts down my throat.

Why are there 171 current translations of the Bible written by thousands of men over the last 1700 years? Much of the content was passed down for centuries by word of mouth. Try the old parlor game of lining up 10 people, and have them repeat a sentence to the person next to them—and then check the sentence when it reaches the last person in line.

Is the Bible perfect in every way? Are the documents used to record church history perfect in every way? The Bible and documents were prepared by humans, hardly the perfect repository for religious thought.
Let’s Give a Test on the Life of Lissy Young
The foundations for the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality are usually quoted from Leviticus 20-13, Kings 14-24, Romans 1:26-27, and 1 Corinthians 6:9. 

Leviticus usually heads the list with this statement: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

But Bible thumpers are quite selective…

::How many married couples do you know of that have been executed for having sexual intercourse during a woman’s period? It says so in Leviticus. I’m a news junkie but I could have missed the announcement.

::Leviticus also has prohibitions against round haircuts, tattoos, wearing polyester and cotton at the same time, eating pork or shellfish, working on the Sabbath (there goes capitalism!), and last but not least, getting your fortune told. There’s another prohibition which is never mentioned in polite society in the fall: “Thou shalt never play with a pigskin.”

::If it is discovered that a bride is not a virgin, she is to be executed by stoning. If a married person has sex with someone else’s husband or wife, both adulterers must be stoned to death. Deuteronomy has all sorts of rules never mentioned on Sunday.

::Mark 10:1-12 isn’t covered much either. It commands that divorce is strictly forbidden and no one is allowed to marry a person who has been divorced. Mark is evidently hung up on sex because Mark says the Bible requires the widow of a man who has died childless must have intercourse with each of his brothers until she bears her dead husband a male heir. It would make a good “All In The Family” reality show.

::The Bible also demands that if a man gets into fight with another man and his wife seeks to help her husband by grabbing the enemy’s genitals, the woman’s hand shall be cut off–and no pity shall be shown her (Deuteronomy 25:11-12). Good Heavens! It sounds like what happens at World Wrestling Entertainment bouts.
Can We Trust People Who Think Joan of Arc Was Noah’s Wife?
Ten percent of the Christians interviewed for a religious survey thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Now that is ugly. A few thought the epistles were the wives of the apostles.
In checking with Bible experts, I found that Jesus says nothing about same-sex behavior and that all the Jewish prophets are silent about homosexuality. They also say that only six or seven of the Bible’s one million verses “may” refer to same-sex behavior in any way—and that’s a stretch.

When Matthew Shepard was killed in 1998 in that famous Wyoming case, a North Carolina pastor published an open letter to his congregation about the trial of the killers: “Gays are under the death penalty. His blood is guilty before God (Leviticus 20:13). If a person kills a gay, the gay’s blood is upon the gay and not upon the hands of the person doing the killing. The acts of gays are so abominable to God. His word is there and we can’t change it.”

The Bible also says it is OK if the husband has sex with a prostitute—but it is not acceptable for the wife. Polygamy is OK. After all, kind, wise, baby-splitting Solomon had a thousand concubines. Forcing people from foreign countries into slavery is OK—but don’t do it with your own people.

I wonder about the background of Deuteronomy 23:1 where it says: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.”  Did the good ol’ boys think that was where their brains were? 

I do know that some wit a few years ago said that the human male body contained only enough blood to operate the penis and the brain–but not at the same time. Parts of the Bible that emphasize sex provide ample evidence it’s probably true.

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