Well that should disturb us, how can someone claim to not like someone they don’t know for a start. It’s also the least “Christian” thing I’ve heard in some time. Maybe I have higher expectations than they do, but surely just being a human being is sufficient to not dislike people you don’t even know.
It’s even more disturbing every time someone you know (who is an xtian) waves at you & smiles, even though they have told you that you’re going to hell. It’s just fucking sick and demented that they’re smiling at you and saying hi while entertaining dark thoughts about you burning alive over and over in some kind of fucked up torture dungeon in their mind.
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I suspect they are clueless as to how ghastly such pronouncements are. If they’re greeting you like nothing happened they likely see you as a conversion prospect, and the main tool in their toolbox is the fear of hellthreat. I remember thinking of it as not an actual problem because you can obtain the get out of jail free card so in a weird way that you’re going to hell is good news, because you can be “saved” from it, after all. And … in the abstract at least, they often consider themselves to be as much a sinner as you, just forgiven.
Still … back in the day I couldn’t really bring myself to “witness” to people, and always found ways to weasel out of any organized efforts of that sort. It seemed way too impertinent and presumptuous to me. And the couple of times I got roped into “visitation” activities where you would knock on doors, Mormon-style … I still cringe at the idea 50 years later.
The only hell threat that I fear is being forced into their religion, having to attend church, and being forced to pray to a god that doesn’t exist. That is plenty of hell right there.
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Yup. It eventually arrives at that, for a few like us. The scary part is that for most of them, they never get fed up. I can’t tell if it’s because of Stockholm Syndrome or that they get more perceived positives than negatives, even when one of the negatives is that bad. Or, I suppose … why not both?
I have, in recent times, drawn a comparison between whiny, obnoxious, entitlement-riddled reich whinge Christian Nationalists and two particularly odious individuals, namely Cameron Hooker and Dennis Rader, in no small part due to their fulminating misogyny, the inhuman glee with which they now openly gloat about destroying women’s rights, and in extreme cases, no longer even bother to hide utterly vicious rape and torture fantasies. The “manosphere” is littered with these Screwfly Solution specimens, and there’s a huge overlap between being a disciple of Andrew Tate and being a disciple of Rethuglicunt Jeebus.
But, the Dennis Rader tendency in particular, extends beyond misogyny, and a frightening yearning to act out obscene and sadistic acts of sexual criminality without consequence. In the case of the Stephen Millers of this world, it also extends to yearning for Inquisitional torture to be visited upon anyone outside the narrow doctrinal pale, and in the instance of such individuals, leads to a natural comparison with the likes of Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
It should not surprise anyone, that this sort of specimen should not only delight in ending lives via hideous and bestial means, but should also enjoy the thought of that fate being continued, and indeed amplified, in whatever mythical ‘afterlife’ these creatures imagine to be real.
The emergence among the incel brigade in particular, of a perfect storm of psychosis involving misogyny, extremist religion and even more extremist reich whinge politics, has been brewing for some time, amplified deliberately by a suitably duplicitous species of political careerist. To borrow and modify a line from a song by the Human League, the narcotic that forges this union is a substance known to all - it’s quite simply hatred. A hatred that has become especially venomous, in the form we see becoming entrenched as an endemic disease in the USA. One that is being eagerly exported by the requisite Typhoid Marys.
Though readers of the requisite mythology should also not be in the least surprised, that said mythology lends itself so easily to being pressed into service, to provide purportedly ‘divine’ support for the politics of hate and murder. Witness, for example, the manner in which, immediately after the first appearance of the Ten Commandments in Exodus, the authors of this mythology then devoted over 260 pages thereof, to gleeful depictions of brutal, genocidal Lebensraum wars. Wars that were, in addition, asserted within those pages, either to have been directly ordered by the cartoon magic man in question, or given silent assent thereby. The hideous instance featured in Numbers 31:18 being a case in point, a case that in addition, features the exhortation to kidnap underage girls as rape slaves, and butcher their parents and elder siblings. With this sort of background, it is hardly surprising that the murderous find ready support for their yearnings within those pages.
Likewise, as I have noted here in the past, the real central message of that mythology is best summarised as kill all who do not conform. Past mythology fanboys eagerly latched onto that message and, during the 1,500 years of European history that featured raging wars centred upon attempts to enforce religious conformity, revelled in the accompanying bloodshed. Not to mention, of course, the more Earthly opportunity to settle scores and mete out sadistic ends to people they hated for reasons other than divergence of faith.
Those doubting the thesis I present in the above paragraph, need look no further than the following passages: Exodus 23:24, Deuteronomy 7:5, Deuteronomy 13: 6-10, Deuteronomy 13: 12-15, Deuteronomy 17:2-5, 2 Chronicles 15:13 , Jeremiah 12: 1-3, and Luke 19:27. Yes, even the New Testament, frequently touted as the peace and love part of the Bible, does not escape the pernicious presence of the “kill all who do not conform” anti-Commandment.
Mythology fanboys do not, of course, like being reminded of any of this in the slightest, and the ones who rail loudest against such a reminder, tend to be, quelle surprise, the ones secretly yearning to be the next generation of inquisitors. The specimens in question forget easily, how it is difficult to reconcile their own rhetoric, and their public displays of enthusiasm for, to name one example, the ICEstapo obscenity being played out in the USA, with empty platitudes and hollow assertions about “peace” and “love” purportedly emanating from their cartoon magic man.
But the fluid nature of the mythology in question, and the ease with which it can be used to support diametrically opposed views, is of course one of the main engines of schism. It’s the reason we have the Quakers on the one hand, and the Christian Nationalists on the other, and the best part of forty thousand ‘denominations’ of which these are merely the endpoints.
Hitchens’ famous dictum that religion poisons everything, is being played out in nightmare fashion before our eyes. One of the unintentionally hilarious spectacles being provided as a side theatre, accompanying the central real life Grand Guignol horror show, emerges every time a Christian Nationalist is observed railing against Islam and its alleged evils, while seeking to inflict far worse upon others, in the name of the twisted version of Baby Jesus concocted by the guns, gang rape and lynching South.
Of course, race (and the ideological hydrofluoric acid of the accompanying sexual politics), underpins the emergence of this current cancer, but the process of metastasis has long since transcended the merely racial, and now infects domains that do not, in properly constructed societies, have a ‘racial’ component at all.
Years ago, when avidly pursuing my science education, I regarded politics as some sort of swamp to be avoided. It is with irony that I now find myself becoming a political commentator of sorts, sadly out of frightening necessity.
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This is a very accurate and cogent analysis.
I would say it is the central message of a particular interpretation of the mythology, only because …
… the first thing many Christians will counter with is to point out that all but one of those verses are from the Old Testament and the passage from Luke is more about what the king-figure (god-figure) demands as a return on investment than about retribution – although it’s in there. At any rate: they will say that we don’t live under the Old Testament, but the new. Of course they are happy to use that argument to wiggle out and then turn right around and invoke the OT when it suits them. Still, many Christians, even fundamentalists (pre-MAGA anyway), would say that the atonement provided by Jesus spares us God’s wrath. No, they’re not thinking this through, true – because if God is “the same today, yesterday and forever” then it’s still a huge problem that he’s a genocidal asshole in the OT, change of “economies” or no. But … I will credit many Christians with not invoking the cranky OT Jehovah as a model for today. My problem is that it’s there, latent in their holy book, and who is to say they won’t decide to put that front and center at a later date? That is what has happened with the fundamentalists in this country, after all. In my day, they were relatively restrained, but now they are loud and proud. And the Bible gives them cover.
Bingo once again.
My former sect used to consider it a “swamp to be avoided” and I was surprised to find out recently that they still hold to this view, and have distanced themselves fairly substantively from US fundamentalism, at least on paper (e.g. changing their legal name to remove the word “fundamental”). I suspect however that unofficially an awful lot of their members are Trump lovers and a lot of their pastors are tepid at best in urging restraint, because they hasten to add that they have not departed “doctrinally” – and their doctrine enables all this crap. My own brother is at least privately approving of Trump and blathers constantly about the evils of “woke ideology”.
I don’t believe that a thinking, non-delusional citizen of the US can avoid becoming politically aware and involved, even “radicalized”, in the face of all this perfidy and rot and collapse.
We’re in a nasty phase now where Trump and his top people are bleeding from a thousand wounds. It provides hope of a sort, but it also means they are at their most dangerous and desperate. The coming months, up through the mid-term elections, they will try everything possible in a desperate and ruthless attempt to hold onto power.
And we can lay a great deal of this, both directly and indirectly, at the feet of Christian fundamentalism and its current “Christian Nationalist” expression.
Why? It sounds very Christian..or Muslim…or Jewish… In the never ending battle over who has the superior sock puppet it seems to follow that a quiet sense of detachment and superiority are inevitable.
With out that, it’s just an argument about music or sport. There really needs to be some future retribution for anyone not in on the “truth”.
All I can do is wish them a long life in a Medicaid bed. Maybe God will visit on Wednesdays…
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