Amos 5King James Version (KJV)
5 Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel.
2 The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.
3 For thus saith the Lord God; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
4 For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
5 But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought.
6 Seek the Lord, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel...
Anyway, I report for the pre-shift meeting and before I even get there, my boss tells me where I'm at. The Slot Palace. OK, great, back out to the car to drive over there and then I have (on a normal night there) a long night ahead...because it'll get pretty slow.
While driving over there I pass this huge red tour bus...Safeway tours, it said on the side. What was notable however was that the name appeared in two languages, English and a complex slew of Chinese characters...and the flag on the back was Canadian. Cool, I thought, not a lot of idiocy regarding diversity and multiculturalism in Mr. Trudeau's Great White North.
(I have to wonder if my own country will survive long enough to reach that point where an American greyhound bus might have Arabic or Chinese letters on it to go with the English ones, and I wonder now, without it seeming so far-fetched, if what comes after might do a better job of handling the simple truth that we are all human beings, and all equal...equally saved or equally damned...in the eyes of our Creator...depending on whether or not we accept whatever Truth it is that He has for us?)
Around that same time, the above Bible Verses stuck in my head...enough that I felt compelled to look up Amos chapter five when I went on my first break after an uneventful first couple of hours, and read it.
7 Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,
8 Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name: 9 That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.
For those who don't care to follow the link, a Texas Baptist Church choir basically sang a song of praise to Donald Trump. Like he's Jesus or something:
(Sorry, but my theological background is originally Baptist, so this offends me on a literally theological level. I'm about to get a little ranty and most likely I'm going to lose my cool and cuss up a storm before it's over because I'm sorry, that's what people with my level of Baptist influence, who grew up around carpenters and sailors and who've lived a rougher life than they should've and seen a lot since do in this case.)
The short version could best be summed up as "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!"
But then, my mind flashed back to what I'd just read...
10 They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.
11 Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.
12 For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.
If that doesn't sound like the Republican Party and about 36% of America right now, I don't know what the hell does. Our elected officials want to take health insurance away from 32 million of their own citizens, and massively drive up costs for all the rest. We've denied entry to the country to robotics competition teams from Afghanistan and the Gambia (although the all-girl Afghan team's robot is going!) and though most of the Muslim Ban stuff was not allowed to go into effect...we're still not allowing people's grandmothers into the country...
Any of this sound fucked up to you yet?
....AND then we have Baptists, singing songs of praise to Trump?
Sorry, but this is starting to sound an awful lot like one of those overpriced, extremely terrible End Times Apocalypse novel series one would find at the local Christian bookstore...only worse and it's reality. It's almost enough to make me wish I didn't know that the Rapture was a false, unbiblical doctrine based on escapism and revenge fantasy...
13 Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.
14 Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.
15 Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.
16 Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing.
17 And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.
18 Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.
19 As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.
20 Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?
The End is coming, people. It won't come in nuclear fireballs or the flash of lightning seen from east to west that Matthew 24 says the Lord's return will be like. No, the End comes when day by day, our country and its government lose a little more credibility each time the President says something stupid, ungodly, or both. The end comes from pulling out of the Paris Accords climate change pact (which many cities and states have pledged to continue to follow, in effect, setting their own foreign policy...which in my view, they are right to do) and from pretty much every state so far refusing to fully comply...and many, including many conservative states...refusing to comply at all with the President's bullshit "Voter Fraud" voter suppression commission....and yet again...they are 100% right to do so in order to protect the interests and privacy of their own citizens. At this rate, the End of America will come by disunion simply because of utterly incompetent leadership...and we will deserve it...
Why?
...Because people who should've known better sang praises to this asshole like they thought he was Jesus Christ in a bad orange wig.
Because white privilege, and white supremacy...were more important to a lot of people than decent governance. Because people would rather want horrible things about their neighbors to be true...and act as if they were...than go and talk to those same neighbors and risk finding out that those things were false...and most of all? Because people have lost the ability to discern the truth from a lie...which is also something that the Bible speaks of in the End Times.
21 I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.
22 Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.
23 Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.
(I think in this case, He is speaking to you, First Baptist church of Dallas, Texas. Maybe it might be a good idea to have more homeless people and fewer oil billionaires in your Congregation, you might get closer to the Truth.)
I started out as a Christian, as a (moderate) conservative, and when I first registered to vote I did so as a Republican. I can't tell you how angry and disappointed I am, that I see those words all becoming synonymous with what the Bible or even my old Baptist church back in the day would have called doctrines of devils and houses of demons.
Go ahead, tell me where the Bible advocates exaltation of the Self, greed, hate, racism and mindlessly following after vapid pop-culture icons, I'll wait.
Probably for a damned long time...
24 But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
25 Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?
26 But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.
27 Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts.
To quote a signature line from a favorite science fiction series "All this has happened before, and it will happen again."
The authoritarian bootlickers and the bullies and the idiots and the rich con-artists will have their fun for a little while, a while that appears to grow ever so slightly shorter by the day, and then there will be blood. People are only going to put up with this shit for so long. That's what a good portion of these Trump idiots want. They want to fight the rest of the world with their guns and get saved by the intervention of White Republican Jesus. I just don't think that's going to work out the way they think it will.
Not least because their version of Jesus is fake, made in their own image.
When the bill gets settled up after, you best be sure you were on the right side.
Pro-tip: Historically, the right side is not the one that sings songs of praise to buffoonish false Christs and wannabe-dictators.
Think about that for a second.
By the most basic standards of Christian conduct as outlined in church tradition and the Bible, Trump fails.
Who ever thought that electing a non-Believer to lead this country would make it more "Christian?"
And then the guy allows Christians to sing praises to HIM?
Think about it. Just set aside all the dogma and all the politics and what you thought was gonna happen and think about it.
You know it's wrong, don't you, really?
Exodus 20:3King James Version (KJV)
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
