Fred Phelps (of godhatesfags.com, godhatesamerica.com, and various funeral protests) has a couple new crusades :

We’ve been [up to New York] three times since Sept. 11 picketing with big signs that say “Thank God For Sept. 11″ and that the FDNY is a fag fire department because they’re laced with fags and their fag agenda and their chaplain was fag priest named Mychal Judge. And any outfit that’s that dumb or evil — I mean an out-of-the closet fag priest?! And they bragged about it! And they need to be picketed. And they’re not heroes and we got signs that say all that. When St. Patrick’s Cathedral was honoring them on a Sunday not long after Sept. 11 and they had all those fire trucks lined up there and they’re praising them to the high heavens then we were over there with signs saying that they’re not heroes and they’re all bound for hell. Now, that’s the way you preach.

Well, I don’t know if [Mr. Rogers was] gay or not but he’s one of the foremost proponents of ‘It’s OK to be Gay.’ And from the church he got ordained by and the Presbyterian church he goes to in Pittsburgh which is one of the few boldly fag-promoting churches, that’s one of the few.

You’ve got a guy (Mr. Rogers) who has got millions of children’s ears and he says he’s gonna shoot straight to them about the weighty matters of life, death, divorce — and then he steps gingerly around the fact that if you mess with that fag lifestyle you gonna split hell wide open.

Look, he went straight to hell. If everybody in the world is holding some candlelight vigil and catawalling about what a wonderful guy he was using the event of his death to preach propaganda lies from the devil and hell, why should it seem strange for an old time Baptist preacher to say ‘Wait a moment please?”?

He’s in hell. And if you’re putting out cartoons depicting that he’s in heaven, you’ve got no basis for it. Do you want to make the argument that he’s in heaven?

Needless to say, the views of Fred Phelps are another example of people taking religion too seriously. Although the mainstream (ie. sane, normal, loving, etc.) religious folks would argue that the religious fervor of Fred Phelps (and his spiritual brethren the KKK) is based on misinterpretation of the bible, it seems to me that Phelps is doing what any other religious leader does : taking parts of the bible literally and out of context in order to further their own religious goals.

There is no definitive interpretation of the bible. God never sent Moses down the mountain with a study guide (or a translation guide for that matter). It’s ludicrous to think that a book that has many different authors and was written thousands of years ago would have a specific interpretation. If the bible can’t even get the details of the crucifixion correct (Did Jesus or Simon carry the cross? What was written on the sign on the cross? What time was Jesus crucified? What were Jesus’s last words?), then why is it proclaimed to be the literal word of god by its followers? For a book that’s hundreds of pages long, it’s rare to see more than 2-3 lines being quoted at a time. Of course the reason for this is there’s enough crazy bullshit in the bible to support any radical agenda.