I'm generally a pretty liberal 'believe whatever you want' sort of geezer, but there are times when I am left rather baffled. My work involves quite a lot of reading up on the religious attitudes and perspectives to various aspects of human sexuality and reproduction and some of them are really quite disturbing.
Take, for example, the old testament view on menstruation - Dig Leviticus 20:18, which says sex with a woman who's menstruating is all evil and nasty, which is valid enough, I suppose (although I'm not sure why you'd want to punish people for it) but then there's the rather more unpleasant sentiments in Leviticus 15:19-24 which essentially says that any man who goes near a woman who is menstruating has whatever the religious equivalent of cooties/lurgi is, and has to go and sit in the corner of the playground until his friends think he's clean again. Now I know that Leviticus is sort of like the dusty attic of Judeo-Christian religions, where a strange elderly relative sits and denounces everything, but seeing as people take some parts of it very seriously indeed, it worries me what else they're going to take as, if you'll excuse the pun, gospel.
The stuff I read, that is completely in earnest, means that when I come across something like this on one of my searches I'm honestly not sure whether it's a joke or not (it is). Which of course wrongfooted me, so that when I read this I thought that I was reading The Onion, but no. Sadly not.
-Ben
