This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Living in the City of Sodom
We all know the story of Sodom, right? God tells Abraham, I’m gonna destroy this city. Abraham says hold up, what if I go find some righteous people? God says, sure, find me like fifty of them. Abraham does his best, comes up short, then says how about twenty? God says fine, twenty. Abraham comes back again and says, maybe ten? God says go find me ten righteous people in this awful place, and I won’t destroy it.
And then finally Abraham comes back and says alright, you win, burn it down.
Cue the fire and brimstone.
It’s one of the few instances in the Bible where God seems really intent on making the case that destroying a whole city is morally justified. The point is, supposedly, that it’s possible for a place to become so evil, and so corrupt, that the only viable option is to blow it up with a volcano.
Probably best if we don’t take this too literally.
But it’s worth considering what the people in those cities were doing that made God so mad.
For a long time, Christians used this story to justify a violent rejection of homosexuality. To the point that they turned Sodomy into a euphemism for, sorry to be blunt, butt sex.
Which means that for a long time, and even still, an embarrassing number of people believe that God destroyed Sodom with fire and brimstone (aka blew it up with a volcano) because he just hated gay people so much.
Side note: Is it any wonder so many people have rejected this version of God?
But if we’re not blinded and stupefied by this persistent caricature, then we might be able to find out what this story is actually saying.
If you go back and read the verses that describe the “sins of Sodom,” you don’t find anything about butt sex, or any kind of sex. What you find is a scathing indictment of inequality. What made God so angry that he blew up the city? Failure to care for the widows and beggars. Failure to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Failure to provide for the poor.
When God told Abraham Sodom was unsalvageable, what He meant was that there was nobody there who gave a damn about anybody but themselves. They were a bunch of selfish, prideful pricks who either ignored poor people, or intentionally exploited them.
And so he wiped those bastards off the face of the earth.
Which means we should probably correct our definition of sodomy. It’s not butt sex, it’s entrenched inequality.
Uh oh!
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