BBC Sherlock: [some rather badly -organized thoughts] on Sherlock as a man trying to become a God

Earlier today, over at Tumblr, I groused a bit about a tendency I've seen lately to only bring up religion in the context of homophobia. Specifically, you have a gay couple facing some kind of pushback rooted in a belief that homosexuality is wrong, and religion is often brought in to frame the issue. This isn't bad on its own, because (sadly IMO) homophobia and religion sometimes goes hand in hand.

My gripe is this is seems to be the only time religion came up in these stories, leaving the impression that religion was only about hating gay people. Even when I was involved in a much more conservative expression of American Christianity, this wasn't really the main point of the religious activity. So yeah, the fact that religion only came up in the context of why John and Sherlock are going to hell for loving each other bothered me a bit. I understand where it's coming from in a lot of ways because the show isn't one where we see a lot of religious practice. Instead of a funeral officiated over by some kind of a priest, we get John and Mrs. Hudson standing by his grave, and in an episode framed around a wedding, the closest we get is an (I think?) Anglican priest standing on the periphery in some photos taken outside the church. For example:

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So I think people discussing Sherlock have a lot of very good reasons not to bring in religion in other contexts. And to be completely fair, it's not like organized religion has that great of a track record in the Holmes originals: the only two examples of religious figures I can remember are the priest disguise Holmes takes on in "Bohemia" and the corrupt priest who works with the villains in "Solitary Cyclist." In both cases, the priests (or people posing to be priests; even in the second case there's a question over whether the priest actually deserves that label) seem to be fraudsters who use their position to take advantage. I can definitely see why a lot of people working in either 'verse wouldn't be keen to talk about religion - this just isn't the kind of story that lends itself to discussing those issues, on the surface at least.

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I'm working on a fanfic story, specifically editing it after 3-4 days away from it and seeing all kinds of things that I would have been oblivious to before. Some scenes need expanding, other lines are superfluous, awkwardly using the same adverb twice in close proximity, etc.: the kind of self-editing I think most experienced fanfic authors do, particularly ones that write slowly and try to craft their stories carefully. The important point is there was some sort of a break involved, the intellectual equivalent of a palate-cleanser between meal courses.

I've been doing some online tutoring and editing of high school essays, and one of the hings that keeps coming up is people don't write drafts anymore. It's not so necessary with the way word processing makes editing possible in a way typewriters and long-hand simply doesn't. But it strikes me that if you don't follow the basic draft process at some point if you don't take time off between writing what you think the final word of a story or essay is, a few days, and then rereading + editing it before submitting it, something really very important is lost.

Or maybe my brain's just slow and needs a chance to reboot. This could very well be me.