Religion

If someone says "I hate homosexuals" that's bad enough; if someone says "God hates homosexuals" that's much worse. It's worse than blaspheming about God in other ways, because hate is one of the most base human emotions.

I actually listened to a couple of Fred Phelps speeches on YouTube once and I was struck by how, to more naive minds, or to people without well developed intelligence, he would be utterly hypnotic, his style was powerful and full of divine drama, but what made it so much worse was that, not only was he blaspheming in a very attractive manner, he was also blaspheming with hate and fear, both very hard-wired powerful responses. He was saying the absolutely worse possible things to the lowest common denominator minds.

BTW, I don't particularly like the word "God", because I think it gets abused too much, too anthropomorphized. I kind of prefer the Kaballahistic notion that anything that might be what a God would be would not be pronounceable/knowable in the first place. I think that idea is inherent in the first of the JUDEO-Christian 10 Commandments: if you think you know God, you are placing a false god, your own mind/knowing, before whatever a God would be, since such an entity would not be subject to/dependent upon our mind's knowing. To me a more appropriate attitude toward anything like that would be: **IF** there is such a thing, it is best addressed as Buddhists do in calm, empty, awareness. And that must be an **IF**, because if you pre-determine the answer to that question you make whatever there is, if there is anything, subject to that predetermined answer. I think the Buddhists say you should give up on even asking the question.

To me, a better word for what many people are mistakenly calling God would be truth, so the caution expressed in the 1st Commandment and in the Kaballah and elsewhere is that one does not own the truth absolutely. It is what it is, not what you exclusively think it is and to think that one does own it as an unchangeable absolute for all persons at all times makes whatever truth one thinks one owns untrue. Absolutism falsifies "truth", because everything is in process.

What we are referring to by means of the word "truth" is a product of perspective. Perspectives can be shared by one person relative to that which is perceived, or a few, or many, but its all relative to what constitutes the perspective and perspectives can be quite different. That's why I can't tell you what you know; you're the one who has to know it. Each of us might share what each of us knows and discover some degree of overlap, but each of us has to do our own knowing (a process) and accept that it isn't absolute. Like Buckminster Fuller said, "I seem to be a verb."