The Maker of Billions of Galaxies has a Grudge Against Gays

The inexplicable pettiness of the Christian god

What are the odds that the ultimate source of nature and ground of all being could be both more otherworldly than we can imagine and as petty and churlish as a country bumpkin?

The God that’s Vast and Puny

You find both convictions attested in the first chapter of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. There Paul says that “what can be known about God is plain,” since God’s eternal power and divine nature have been “clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (1:19–20). Elsewhere, Paul says that in this God, “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,” and that God is “before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:16–17).

Yet in the next breath in Romans, Paul goes on to rant about how God punishes those who are without excuse, who fail to credit God despite that obviousness of this deity’s supremacy. God lets these nonbelievers destroy themselves with their vices and “dishonourable passions.”

For example, says Paul “the Apostle,” the females among these ungodly pagans “exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (1:26–27).

The real question is how it’s possible to believe God could be at once so large and so small. Unlike those whom Paul says have no excuse, Paul is fortunate that he has one because the cosmology he had to go on was as smallminded as his tribal, patriarchal morality. For Jews of his period, the center of the universe was the flat Earth and above and below were cosmic waters, separated by the Earth and by the dome of the sky. The stars were just lights embedded in the dome.

So that’s how Paul got away with his paradoxical, seemingly ludicrous conception of ultimate reality: despite its monotheistic advances on polytheistic small-mindedness, Judaism and Christianity were still anthropocentric. Thus, these religions reduced God’s grandness to the parochial preoccupations of ultra-conservative goat-herders and nomadic desert wanders. The downtrodden folks who first worshipped the God of the Bible were beholden to their traditions to cope with their past subservience to occupying regimes, and with Roman persecution and the slaughtering of their charismatic leaders.

Paul’s god wasn’t large at all but was small enough to fit the narrow perspective of a first-century Jew from Asia Minor.

The paradox arises with greater urgency for those who are truly without excuse, for the Christians who read the Epistle to the Romans two millennia after it was written. These Christians understand what the lights in the night sky really are, and they realize that modern cosmology dictates that God as the creator of the universe would had to have created at least 125 billion galaxies, comprising trillions of stars and planets.

How, then, can our late-modern Christians speak in the same breath, as Paul does, of a deity so large-minded and inhuman as to have created literally trillions of planets that have nothing to do with human concerns, and yet so small-minded as to care so much about humans’ sex life?

Why isn’t the incoherent declaration that the creator of the known universe “hates gays” — as conservative Christians are wont to say — just laughed off as being as silly as Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical Jabberwocky poem?

The god these conservatives have in mind isn’t a real being. What they contemplate, instead, is effectively the equivalent of a giant projection screen on which they vainly paint a picture of themselves. The screen is the placeholder for the X that’s the source of the natural universe. Picture a screen that towers over galaxies. But these Christians aren’t content with the mystical, humiliating, subversive implications of the astronomical depth of such a source. They rush, rather, to fill that screen with embodiments of all their petty prejudices and predilections.

Their god is somehow larger than we can imagine and puny enough for any rational person to dismiss it with a clear conscience.

The Folly of Pauline Bigotries

Just spend a few minutes reflecting on the smallness of Paul’s god. This god considers homosexuality an “error” deserving of punishment. We know what should still have been plain in Paul’s day, that if heterosexuality can be instinctive rather than freely chosen, the same could apply to homosexuality, to a rarer but still inherent sexual orientation. Today we say that sexuality is partly genetic.

Strictly speaking, an error, however, is a slip of the tongue, a weakness of memory, an overloading of the attention span causing your hand to move left when you meant to move it to the right. An error or even a “passion” or fleeting emotion is undeserving of scorn or divine punishment. What deserve praise or punishment are the choices we make.

A gay person can choose what to do about his or her sexual orientation, but not whether to be straight or gay. God would had to have created all inborn sexual orientations, so if anyone would deserve to be punished for the existence of homosexuality, it would have to be God.

Perhaps Paul would say the honourable option is to renounce homosexual leanings, to fit into heterosexual society. Some homosexuals make this choice, confining themselves to “the closet” to avoid being persecuted by bigots like Paul and by the conservative Christians who take comfort from his ancient tirades.

But even Paul realizes that heterosexuals don’t find themselves on any moral high ground here. Paul points out that because God was about to break into nature and terminate the flow of human history, all sexuality is futile. What’s the point in being heterosexual and starting a family if the final judgment of humanity was upon Paul’s generation?

This is what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:29–34: “the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none…I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man is anxious about worldly affairs, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided.” Thus, “he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (7:38).

In grappling, then, with the magnitude of his eschatological fiction, Paul follows the logic partway and realizes that human sexuality in the end time is foolhardy. But a sharper mind would have wondered why God would still forbid homosexuality under those circumstances. If the world is about to end, why cling to the tribal biases or to the laws of the material world that are about to give way to the inhuman beyond, to the transcendent Creator that will shortly nullify the natural order and human dominion over the planet?

Knowing that God would eventually terminate human history in an act of divine judgment, why would God have concerned himself with such petty, animal matters as sexuality? If God is so puritanical about sex, why did he create a spectrum of sexual orientations? If he’s so sexist, why did he create both sexes? (If God created flawed Adam first, who felt lonely and wanted a helper, compelling God to create Eve out of sympathy, why did God create flawed Adam?) Most decisively, if God’s obsessed with sex, why did he create trillions of planets where no sex occurs?

Indeed, if homosexuality comes across as embarrassing, fruitless, and dysfunctional in societies in which heterosexuality is the norm, isn’t sexual reproduction just as silly and dishonourable, given the cosmic insignificance of our entire species? Why be proud of romantic love, sexual pleasure, and family life if all distinctly human ways of thinking and feeling are accidental outgrowths on a planet that’s estranged from an outrageously vast and inhuman cosmos? Why overestimate the merits of our kind if doing so only sets us up for humiliation with a bout of objectivity?

You see, though, how easy it was many centuries ago to maintain that God’s as bigoted and as sanctimonious as clever, desert-dwelling mammals that are proud they learned how to talk and to write. The Earth seemed to be of central importance, because everything known by the five senses revolves around it and us. If our planet is the only one that exists, and we seem to rule the planet, then of course the Creator might plausibly share human interests.

None of that’s tenable anymore; none of Paul’s ravings merits philosophical scrutiny. Paul’s vision of the universe’s ultimate source is preposterous and laughable. Rather than the tribal prejudices swallowing large-minded mysticism and an honourable philosophical perspective, the latter two ought to dissolve the former. Rather than reducing the sublime X to just another petty, patriarchal conservative, we ought to elevate our mentality by contemplating the arbitrariness of our social convictions and the amorality of natural regularities.

We ought to weigh the merits of our sexual practices on the cosmic scale, the counterweight consisting of those trillions of planets where our history counts for nothing. Only then, when we’ve cleansed our mind of profane belittlements should we think of setting forth our religious thoughts in writing. And such cosmicist scriptures would sound nothing like the Christian’s vaunted Epistle to the Romans.