Reply #43: You seek very complex answers, grasshopper :D

[Sapphocrat]

I share your indignation and bemusement, but thinking people (like you, me, and 99.9% of DU) will never be able to truly understand how racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., somehow became tenets of Christianity for the Church of the Radically Wrong.

As I continue to mull over the how's and why's of all institutionally-organized hypocrisy, I keep coming back to the same conclusion, summed up perfectly in two little words: cognitive dissonance. (OK, so they're two big words, but still.)

In a nutshell, it's too "soul"-shattering for most people to come to the realization that everything they were taught is wrong. To understand that one's lifelong beliefs are a farce is just too much to take without a complete nervous breakdown -- and so they cling all that much harder to a contradictory and destructive mindset that to any sane person is obviously, well, just stupid and wrong.

I also believe that the more one senses, inherently, that one's "values" are shaky at best, the more xenophobic one becomes toward anyone or anything that threatens to expose those "values" as a sham. Thus, the greater the threat of enlightenment, the more extreme the religious radical.

(Disclaimer: I don't mean Christianity is stupid, wrong, etc. -- I'm talking about the utter corruption -- nay, abortion -- of genuine Christian values.)