Religious people believe that an infallible God made everyone. At the same time, they rail against people who weren't made the way they were made. If God creates every human, and does everything for a reason, why do religious people get so irrational about those God created to be gay, lesbian, kinky, trans or bi? If they believe in an all-powerful God, why do they reject His variations?
I think attitudes towards human differences and variations were fundamentally different before industrialization. Industrialization created a new phenomenon: the ability to reproduce things that were identical down to the last detail. When all products depended on individuals to hand-craft them, variation was the norm. Just as no two quality Persian rugs will ever be identical -- because normal human labor inevitably produces variations in stitchings -- pre-industrialized products were expected to show nominal variations, even when carved by the same carpenter using all the same tools and materials.
Nowadays, factories and manufacturing devices are only as good as their ability to eliminate variations from products. We all want the exact features, working the exact same way, as the next person gets. We want predictability, because it is the best guarantee of reliability. It satisfies our competitive urge; it makes us feel equal. There's nothing wrong with those feelings either.
But somewhere along the way the whole notion of variations as a natural part of life was misplaced. In 1790 when a little girl received a doll, its facial expression, clothing, and other aspects were likely one-of-a-kind, even if the doll was professionally made in a factory which created numerous examples of a specific model. Today, if you give a kid a doll whose features are different from her friends' Barbies, you can expect to hear her bawl that it isn't good enough or it isn't REAL. We have all come to believe that there are states of perfection to which all things must adhere in order to be "real." We pay higher and higher prices for the privilege of owning that parcel of reality. In the end, what we are really paying for is the illusion that we are exactly like other people, because we have all the same products they have.
Has this psycho-social transition affected more than economics but even the belief systems of the religious? Have they bought so far into industrialized society that they see people as widgets, with God the foreman, consistently disappointed that His identical creatures go to hell the minute they're outside the factory door?
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