Livre d'Or

I think we're in violent agreement here: I'm not complaining here about religious culture insofar as it's divorced from attempts to describe the world. Some anthropologists, like Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer, think that it's a mistake to see any religious language as an attempt to describe the world, but I think if I were religious, I'd find that a bit patronising. Certainly, when I was both believing and observant, I thought my beliefs were attempts to describe the world, though I admit they may not have been: as philosophers and anthropologists have pointed out, those beliefs don't work in the same way as more mundane beliefs.

The anti-gay theists have a rationalisation against the "God didn't make no trash" argument, which is that the world is somehow broken and contains things which God doesn't want but permits for mysterious reasons (free will gets mentioned at this point, as does the Christian idea of the Fall and original sin). I think your own idea runs into the earthquakes objection if you think that God had something to do with the natural world: clearly in that case, God wants earthquakes to exist :-)

I agree that if FundieGod exists, the right thing to do is join the resistance. I suspect we both agree that luckily, he doesn't.