I am a Christ follower. I believe every word of it to be true and authoritative in my life. However, WBC perverts what the bible says. They completely miss the whole point of the scripture. I understand the frustration and anger against Christians because of them. It angers me more than anything when I see the sick things they are doing. I know that comments on blogs are the worst place to try to convince anyone of anything, but I just wanted to let you know that true Christians are just as angered as you are about what WBC is doing (I cannot believe that they are believers because they live and act so contrary to the bible).

The message of the bible is one of love, not hatred and condemnation. It tells us God’s redemptive plan through history. People were created, they fell, and were separated from God. God was not satisfied with his creation being separate from himself, and in his mercy, brought about a way for man to be back in a right relationship with him. He gave them the law (you’re old testament verse is part of it) to show them their wickedness, the law was never ment to bring them back to him, but to show them their separation from him. He created the sacrificial system to show people that their sins must be paid for, that they are deserving of punishment. Then he sent his Son down to earth to live a perfect life, being fully God and fully man, and died on the cross, taking upon himself God’s punishment for the sins of all mankind. And he rose from the grave 3 days later, and charged his disciples to tell others the good news, that God’s great plan had been fulfilled. Now, being a christian is accepting the sacrifice that Christ made and surrendering your life to his control. That is the true message of the bible.

Haha sorry I just attempted (and rather poorly at that) to summarize the entire bible, but it is my hope that your hatred of WBC will not be spread to all of Christianity. I apologize for the actions of those falsely bearing the name of Christ. We are not all judgmental, legalistic gay haters. My apologies for the length of this comment, I failed miserably in my attempt at brevity.

-Chris McGill

@Chris: I could not agree with you more. The God we serve is one of love and compassion. Not hate. WBC should not be justifying their hatred with Christianity. My hope is that non-believers realize that WBC does not represent Christ’s love.

I myself will be praying for WBC, and for understanding

Good post and good question. I afraid quite a number of fundamentalist Christians fundamentally concur with the WBC on principle but disagree on strategy and some of the details. The WBC are bad PR for fundamentalists with their strong language and deliberately provocative methods. And the WBC separate themselves from most fundamentalists by insisting that dead soldiers are divine retribution for America’s tolerance of homosexuality. But many of those same fundamentalists would be perfectly comfortable assenting to the no-less loathsome assertion that dead AIDS victims are that divine retribution instead.

And this is yet another excellent example of how religion causes pain and contention in the life of humans. Is only a matter of time before the shouting starts and someone casts the 1st stone.
Amen.

A lot of people fail to consider that Christianity is no longer under the law of the Old Testament.

In the English Standard Version in Romans 7 in the chapter entitled Released from the Law it says:

4 Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. 5 For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. 6 But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

The above doesn’t mean that gays don’t have to change. They have to be born again like everyone else. Cf. John 3.

The failure of a group of Christians to interpret God’s Word and follow Christ’s command to love their neighbor doesn’t negate the truth.

We’re all sinners and all have fallen short of the glory of God.

Your first human right is your right to be born again that Christ died on the Cross to purchase for every man, woman and child ever born.

Funny how the world likes to overlook this great spiritual right to put ahead lesser human rights.

But God’s priorities are greater than people’s.

Blessings on everyone reading!