Revelation, But with idiots, Part 2

He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God? ~Micah 6:8

So, this happened several days ago. Some dumb-ass Republican legislator in Pennsylvania decided to act out and "Pray to Jesus" for "forgiveness" as the state's first Muslim woman legislator was sworn in, evidently repeating the name "Jesus" 13 times. Funny thing but the Bible has something to say about that.

Evidently, this incident even made a number of other Republicans uncomfortable. It's old hat for me. After we split up, My Pentecostal ex-wife would act out like this (and the more publicly, the better) at least once a month for around two and a half years. The key here, is not to encourage this crap. Yet I've personally seen none other than Franklin Graham do exactly that.

Listen here, Republicans, this is the kind of drooling idiocy ya'll have been encouraging for 30 years. That sound you hear right now is the chickens coming home to roost.

This is America, a Muslim person has every right to be here, and yes, to run for office if they want.

Listen here, Christians. This lady doesn't need to be in government, she needs therapy and/or a church that doesn't fill her head with false gospels and nonsense.

Let me ask you this: If the Lord requires that you do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God...how does flipping out in public like this even close to accomplish any of those things?

How does actively, maliciously lying about abortion, and doctors, and accusing Democrats of supporting infanticide do anybody justice?

It's called lying, and it's against the Ten Commandments. I get that conservatives, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, etc. don't like abortion, hell, I get that ya don't like Democrats.

20 years ago I was one of you, though nowhere near as extreme as seems the norm today. I get it. I know this because I was there.

So how does lying, fundamentally spreading untruths, and breaking the Lord's own Commandments help, here? How does taking the risk of getting innocent people killed for no reason benefit anybody?

For that matter, what in the hell do these fucking people have against women's bodily autonomy, freedom of choice, and reproductive health?

What's the end goal? What is your objective? Have you considered that how you achieve something is just as important as the end itself?

'Cause if the end goal is looking like a bunch of idiots who are easily led and slowly turning from the worship of Christ to that of Donald Trump...well that looks to me to be the way this is going and I want no part of it.

Ya'll aren't going to make the country more Christian, or more conservative this way. Hell, you're not doing yourselves any damn favors.

There was a Trump rally in Grand Rapids, MI, last night, a good couple of hours from my house. As such things go it was nothing unusual, bullshit, smug triumphalism, more bullshit. I get it, ya'll like when this motherfucker lies to you. If that's your thing, I don't care. Except that this fucking liar is running the country and so threatens me and a lot of people and things that are important to me, so that very much is my business, and my problem.

The basis of this Q-Anon shit, functionally, is that every conspiracy theory is true and somehow to magically restore things Donald Trump and Jesus and something something gazpacho are setting up what can only be described as mass extrajudicial murder of Trump's "enemies" and that somehow after this everybody will live happily ever after in some kind of right-wing police state and there will be no Democrats, or something.

Now, as with most conspiracy theories this one has a lot of logical holes in it, like there's supposedly 60,000 sealed indictments (which are needed for an orgy of extrajudicial killing why, exactly?)

There's too many failure points, too many areas where too much is required to be airtight in an administration that's about as airtight as the plastic bag my ferrets just shredded.

But, the truth is, these people are cultists and they can't or won't see the obvious truth here.

I'm just going to point out that the historical record on cults and how well they tend to work out for anybody in the long term isn't great.

What's going on here, is that whoever is behind this crap is going to try to get their followers to kill people, sooner or later. That's how this always works out.

In so doing, those followers will damn themselves, and run a real risk of damning the rest of us too, if this kind of shit blows up too bad.

Wouldn't it just be...I don't know, easier...to try and get along?

Maybe it's just me and maybe it's just that I was raised up and educated and taught the Word long before our current age of dysfunctionality...but "To do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God" seems easier than following the hyper-emotional torrents of hate and rage that are what passes for conservative "philosophy" today.

The Truth, as always, is usually pretty simple.

Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey.

And it's hard to make money off the truth.

But here's the thing...

And note that I say this as somebody who's been an Agnostic Theist rather than a Christian since 2007.

When you die, you will not be judged by Donald J. Trump, nor by your fellow Man, and it's safe to assume that whoever judges you probably doesn't agree with anything you said in life nor care about your politics. In general, assume an arbitrary system that doesn't care what you think. Assume they know everything you did, why you did it, and are prepared to render judgment accordingly.

I honestly feel that before this is over...and honestly, probably before (or maybe even in place of) the next election, I feel like these matters are going to come to a head. These fucking people themselves seem to be the ones demanding it.

They're going to lose. Why? Take your pick: Cultural, Demographic and social change, immunity to facts, knowledge and truth. The fact that they've gone too fucking far, the simple obvious truth that they're outnumbered by people who to one extent or another don't agree with their bullshit?

But it doesn't have to be this way. It really doesn't.

What I want to know is why in the hell these fools are so hell-bent on setting fire to their country, their futures, their very lives...for Donald Trump?

Why?

It doesn't have to be like this, and you damned well know it.

Part One.

Revelation, But With Idiots, Part 1

As for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. And they asked him, saying, Master, but when shall these things be? and what sign will there be when these things shall come to pass? And he said, Take heed that ye be not deceived: for many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye not therefore after them. ~Luke 21:6-8

It's been 16 years, as of today, since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the beginning of the war in Iraq.

I have friends who were over there, some of them did not come back whole, or at all.

It was a war that started with a lie, that worked out badly, and that more than any other since Vietnam, has gnawed at the soul of our country, its politics in general and American conservatism in particular. I'll have a lot more to say about this over the next few days. But there are some specific points I feel the need to make first.

See, I understand that politicians and shit want to get things, alright?

But it's how you get things that matters. It's things like that, that tell me not much of what Trump does is going to outlast him for very long, one way or another. This whole mess has Republicans living on borrowed time, and especially lately they seem to be lashing out at each other and the rest of us in sometimes bizarre ways. I mean, seriously what the fuck?

OK, I get that Donald Trump didn't like John McCain for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is John McCain was That Guy. Naval Aviator, War Hero, Senator. Basically, RDM Battlestar Galactica Saul Tigh John McCain was the man that Donald Trump could and would never be and Trump knows it.

But that sure as hell doesn't explain some random idiot leveling this much bile at the man's wife, for no fucking reason.

John McCain, and more to the point Sarah Palin, is exactly how we got Donald Trump. McCain was That Guy, Mr. Big Talking High Principles Very Serious Dude until something needed to get done and then he'd do whatever he had to, kiss whoever's ass, shank whoever needed to be shanked, until he got it. That's the reason he gave us Sarah, shitty pragmatism trying to get the ladies to vote for him. No, I didn't vote for the guy. Sarah was a big part of why.

But anyway, it "logically" follows that Trumpers hate McCain's guts and those of anybody associated with him because Something Something QAnon Gazpacho.

I swear it's like these motherfuckers think there was no Republican Party, no America, before Donald Trump got elected.

I should point out that deranged conspiracy theories were an even bigger part of why I stopped voting Republican.

Now conspiracy theories and utter fake bullshit are half of what's powering this mess.

I saw yesterday that Tomi Lahren, of all fucking people, referred to Mitch McConnell as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) because the Senate's opposition to Trump's "State of Emergency" over his wall bullshit passed. Well, too damned bad, Toony, nobody asked you.

They had two whole years to get this shit done before...why now?

And why are they making a point of hating on basically everything that has gone before? Even Fox News can't keep up, and their (in the minds of Trump Supporters) perverse desire to maintain profitability in the face of (for those of us who believe in reality, understandably) skittish advertisers has Trump Supporters even willing to turn on them. Personally, I think Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson are both shit, but what do I know?

I don't get it. I see this crap as evidence of my old theory that endless unfocused anger and outrage starts to eat your soul after awhile.

But it's more than that.

I hate a lot of things about Trump and his supporters, but at the end of the day it's the boundless fucking ingratitude that just grates on my nerves like that asshole Captain's potted palm sitting there in the sun on the deck of the USS Reluctant before the enraged Ensign Pulver flips out and throws it overboard.

That's about where I'm at with these motherfuckers, too. I try to keep my own negative feelings focused on specific things, and to maintain a bipartisan sample of information in order to avoid becoming like them...but there comes a point where you just have to rip the chain out of the wall and throw that stinking palm tree overboard.

Or flip over the table, scatter the coins and whip some motherfuckers, but I digress.

Outrage, legitimate anger, revulsion, what have you...does no good if it isn't eventually acted upon in some way. In point of fact, it's that people are doing this that's part of what's driving the damned conservatives so nuts. Republicans losing the House in November was people acting on their feelings of anger and revulsion over this mess. That's good. More of that, please.

Now, I'm not sure how, but they seem to have arrived at the conclusion that They Are Right and should not be challenged...which makes no fucking sense for any point of view. Anybody, Left, Right, Center or quantum fourth-dimensional, can be wrong. Wrongness anymore seems like a defining feature of the Conservative movement at this point, and I say that as somebody who was a Republican right up until the end of August of 2008.

But let me tell ya what, I'd give my left nut to be back to dealing with that Republican Party, and not this one.

How did we get here? Constant outrage-generating bullshit, war as an instrument of...oh, I don't even know what the fuck anymore but accepted by the Washington Consensus as a fact of life...drugs and feel-good bullshit and silly internet distractions as a substitute for actual conversations, edifying pastimes, human contact and serious introspection, the decline not so much of Christianity but of any truth that was at the core of it in favor of whatever makes the Pastor money, and more generally the discarding of truth in favor of convenience or profit in secular terms as well. What else? The endless proliferation of Fuck-You-I've-Got-Mine as a belief system. Calvinism, Ayn Rand, the Prosperity Gospel...hell now it's just a general ragey feeling that if you're a white man you should be some kind of rich and famous mofo whether you have anything to be that way about or not and an all-around desire not only to give the world the finger but to be seen doing it and lauded for doing so.

This is the direct result of living in a country where there is an entire generation reaching the age of majority now, that has never known peace. We have soldiers deploying to Afghanistan who weren't even born yet when 9/11 happened.

Think on that, think how fucked up that is.

Consider this sign, picture taken by Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station.

"And Our President." Ours, not yours. Not you, Black folks, Latinos, Muslims, or non-Trump-Supporting Americans. Only we get to have a President. America for this subset of a subset of Americans Only.

I'm Saved, screw you.

Fuck you, I've got mine.

This is the end result of every Evangelical in America thinking they have some kind of personal relationship with Jesus, writ large...except now they think Trump is Jesus...and the more this looks to end in failure the more they double down.

These people think heaven is only heaven if they're the only ones who get to go, and they routinely whack it to thoughts of shooting down their neighbors. Never mind that most of these people would shoot themselves in the foot or shoot the guy in front of them right in the ass at the first loud noise or piss themselves in fear the second somebody shot back. They think they're the tough guys with all the guns and that they have their literal god-on-earth to lead them.

Fairly sure the Mango Messiah has never fired a weapon in his life and never taken a command course of any kind beyond watching The Godfather repeatedly and that the man is nothing but a bullshitter and ravening bundle of insecurities who's desperately afraid of being found out for the cowardly bullying liar that he is.

And yet people believe in this motherfucker more than they believe in 243 years of America as we've known it?

It's not so much the Son of Man coming in the clouds with power and great glory leading armies of angels...as the Orange Man, carried on a litter by the cast of Fox & Friends, seated upon his Golden Toilet, iPhone in hand and leading people who think Calvinism is a belief system about some silly kid who talks to and has adventures with his stuffed tiger.

Welcome to Revelation, but for idiots.

Part Two.

"Crusaders."

“'When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”

~Leviticus 19:33-34 (NIV)

Last night (my time) there was a terrorist attack in New Zealand. Right-wing terrorists shot up two Mosques in the city of Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island.

It was on the news pretty much all night.

Among other things that have come out, apparently the shooters were inspired by Donald Trump, and one hell of a lot of American and European far-right anti-Islam nuts, assorted "Shit-posters" and Youtube racists.

Fucking seriously?

The fact that we're still dealing with this shit in 2019 pisses me off.

I mean, I know the internet is a fucking cesspool most days, but for fuck's sake this shit is starting to seem like some kind of a jackpot for terrorist radicalization. I'm not talking about Al Qaeda or Daesh here, although they do the same shit. I'm talking about angry white assholes who sit behind a computer all day, mad because they can't find a girlfriend or they aren't famous or rich despite the fact that they don't leave the house or have the personality or the skills to get that way but somehow that's everybody else's fault.

Oh yeah, sure, they're toxic little assholes who for the most part don't do much more than spew nihilistic bullshit and talk about dumb shit and video games on social media all day. But they think they should get rich doing it...and of course a very few do.

But you have to leave the house, and for the most part these days not act as if other human beings are your personal property or sex toys, in order to have much of a decent life.

That is, apparently, a bit too much work for some people.

Some people just keep at it until they end up going down largely revisionist historical rabbit holes of racism and fake history of the sorts promoted by people like Dinesh D'Souza and Paul Joseph Watson, that claim stuff like that Romans were all white people or that Native Americans didn't have a civilization and that effectively seek to legitimize all the horrible shit that was done in the past because right-wingers can't seem to face the facts that some of their ancestors and the rich elites that supported it all are responsible for some pretty shitty things.

Dinesh in particular is an interesting case, especially considering that he's from India, and had he been born during the Raj (which he seems to idealize for some reason) he'd have been a customs inspector or a soldier or a telegraph operator and nobody would have ever known his name. He sure as hell wouldn't be some kind of famous conservative author and all-around bullshitter. He'd be sharing his crackpot theories with friends over drinks in the European style pubs reserved for those Indian people who were Christianized or of partial European heritage and that's about it.

But see, you can't tell that to these people.

And let me tell you why.

Do you know why these fools end up fixating on shit like the Crusades? Also, in so doing they often end up with a ravening and absolutely senseless hatred of Islam. But see, the truth is most of these goddamn fools have never met a Muslim, much less been done wrong by one personally.

I've known a few of these morons.

People will tell you that these idiots like the idea of Chivalry and gallant knights and grand holy quests or that they want to fight for some idea of Christianity.

Nope.

That's not it, not deep down, not really.

The absolute, utter cornerstone of a hell of a lot of this right-wing bullshit, from fetishizing the Crusades on down to veneration of the Lost Cause narrative of US Civil War history and Confederate flags all the way to the current Right-wing lionizing of Capitalism in the face of rising Democratic Socialism and the serious fear of losing power and having to pay higher taxes is that Every. Single. Last. One. Of. These. Motherfuckers. Thinks. They're. Going. To. Be. King.

Every last one of them thinks if they can just go back to the way things were back then they aren't going to be some loser with a shitty part-time job who spends most of their day sitting at a computer and eating Cheetos.

They think they're going to be the romantic image of the brave Crusader knight on horseback, not the peons hauling the baggage train or the common men-at-arms who had to walk from the Bosporus all the way to Jerusalem while lugging their own weapons and gear, nor the Turkish woman who got raped, sodomized and then murdered simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They think they're going to be the "Southern Gentleman" in the plantation house, not the slaves in the fields...and of course they think that the Confederates were the Christian faction...not because they actually were or because the writings of Robert E. Lee seem to espouse Christianity as anything more than a justification for what was already going on...but because they are desperate to see themselves as righteous.

They think if they just believe in it all hard enough, they'll be the big banker, the corporate raider, the Wolf of Wall Street...not the working-class family left with an underwater mortgage and ultimately out on the street.

The racism, the white supremacy? It's simply a means to an end to justify their position and reduce competition for jobs and profits. The common narrative is that in the triangle trade and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, racism was the mother of that economic system.

No, it's the other way around, economics was the mother of racism...and racism was also a divide and conquer tactic on the part of wealthy land-owners who feared that black and white workers might unify and drive them from power.

I'm serious.

The Crusades, likewise, weren't about fighting for God. They were about wealth and land and removing hordes of angry, ambitious young men who might make trouble from Europe and pointing them at somebody else.

It's always the same shit with these people. It always comes down to the profits, not the prophets.

Take a look at this.

At least one of the weapons used in the attack was painted up with the names of battles, and people considered to be anti-Islamic, and with racist slogans.

The battle of Lepanto in 1571 was part of a war that grew out of disputes over maritime trade routes and the security of major Mediterranean port cities. So yeah, money.

The battle of Tours was actually defense against the Muslim raiders out to pillage a monastery...the kind of defensive war these idiots claim to aspire to...but it was also the foundation stone of the empires that eventually became modern France and Germany.

Charles Martel, the Frankish prince who led the army that defeated the Muslims, is comparatively a footnote unless you're French. But, his grandson, Charlemagne...became the first Holy Roman Emperor. That empire, or shades of it, and the intertwined Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties that led it at various times dominated Europe from the close of the Dark Ages until the French Revolution on the one side, and the end of World War I on the other.

So yeah, power.

The "14 Words" racism and the cute little manifestos are basically a distraction.

Because while everybody wants to be King...only one guy gets to be that guy. Spoiler: It ain't You. It ain't Me. Chances are unless we get smarter as s species, it's whatever lying bullshitter convinces the rich people he can get them the most money. See Also: Trump.

So here, have some racism and religious intolerance as a consolation prize. Fuck you, I've got mine, thanks for coming out.

You can paint that shit as white as you like and identify with it all you want, but it's still shit.

You can dress mass murder up with all the cute slogans and political bullet points you want, but it's still mass murder.

Meanwhile, 49 people are still dead, almost an equal number wounded, and hundreds more suffering from the pain and loss and shock of it all.

There's a common thread with a lot of these foreign far-right killers and monstrous wannabes.

Anders Behring Brevik in Norway idolized the American far-right.

So does Geert Wilders in the Netherlands (and his lack of political success only seems to enrage him more.)

So does Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel...and he, like Trump, is being investigated and may be indicted.

So did the assholes that did this crime. In his manifesto, the leader of these killers claimed to idolize both Candace Owens and Donald Trump.

Let's do the world a favor and stop exporting hate. If this bullshit is your identity, find a better one.

Happy Endings, spiritual and otherwise.

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. ~Matthew 7:15

Last weekend. a tornado outbreak hit the Southeastern United States, most especially Alabama and Georgia. The town of Beauregard, Alabama was hit particularly hard. Evidently, because Alabama is a state with a lot of Trump Supporters or something something gazpacho, Trump decided to make a personal visit, and I guess he ended up autographing people's Bibles.

Now hold on, what the fuck?

I'm serious, this makes no damn sense to me. It's your holy text, not a damn copy of Sports Illustrated. This whole bit strikes me as a perfect example of the spiritual confusion that grips modern American conservative Christianity...unless of course it's never really been about the things that they say it's about.

Which...if true...would make these people false prophets, hypocrites, liars...among other things.

But, quite honestly, to the average Evangelical (much less their leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr.) Trump seems to perfectly well embody something. I mean, I've been out of that mess for years, so it's not my problem...but from what I have been able to gather as an outsider, churches other than Pentecostal or Prosperity Gospel ones often struggle, whether they're backed by a denomination or not. My old church had trouble finding (and keeping) a Pastor for years after the one who was there when I attended retired. From what I can tell as an outside observer there simply is no money in it unless you want to believe in fake signs and wonders or tell people that God wants them to be rich. Given how much I had things like the importance of Biblical truth, decent behavior, marital fidelity, and simple stuff like work drilled into my head it mystifies me that these days, no one seems to care about such things...or at least almost no one in the conservative Evangelical subculture that I left does.

Except...

Then I think back to my ex-wife, her church, and her family...and I'll tell you straight up that no, not all of those people were bad. But here's the thing. My ex-wife, despite all her religiosity, loved to fuck and loved to party. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week, she would go out drinking and sing Karaoke and party it up. Some of the people she did this stuff with were church people. Yet every Sunday she and her Karaoke friends would be right up there every time there was an altar call. My ex didn't like to work...in fact so far as I know she has not held a job since 2007. Yet she's been married at least twice since me, she has (or at least had) a house, and I have no idea how she paid for all this. I'm a be honest, I have no idea what she does all day and living like that...or with somebody who did...would drive me crazy.

In 2008, my ex-wife spent hours trying to convince me to vote Republican because she thought Sarah Palin should be President. I kept trying to point out that Sarah wasn't the one at the top of the ticket, John McCain was, and that I wasn't going to vote for any ticket that included an obvious dumb grifter and wolf-in-sheep's clothing like her anyway. My ex bugged me about it right up until Election Day.

Such was the state of Evangelicalism a decade (or going on two, now) ago and it didn't change much over the nearly 10 years that I had some kind of regular contact with my ex. I can imagine it's only gotten worse since.

Also, last week, Robert Kraft got busted in a human trafficking sting at some skeevy South Florida massage parlor, which is naturally owned by some lady who is evidently part of some Asian Republican political group and associated with a lot of the major players in Trump-world including Trump himself, plus the current and former governors of Florida (one of whom, Rick Scott, is now one of the state's two Senators) and Facebook and Twitter have been full of jokes about Happy Endings and "Rub and Tug-Gate" and even Republicans, or at least the "Never Trump" ones...are busy mocking this shit.

However, I've not heard a word about this crap from Evangelicals, and Republicans seem curiously silent about it too.

Okay, whatever. People have their priorities and I'm sure nobody can comment on every single scandal in the unending Human Centipede of Trump-related scandals. Just keeping up with it all requires a superhuman effort at times.

But you know what?

I can't help but think back to getting sex from my oh-so-religious ex-wife on our first date and many times before we got married...and for that matter many times over several years after we were divorced as well. I can't help but think of the easy carnality of a lot of the "Christian" women that I knew at the time, and how some of them were more than willing to crawl into bed with me long before the dust had settled from my breakup with the ex. I had given up on Christianity at the time, or did at least for awhile. But ya know, I came to realize that a lot of the men I was aware of were just like me...but without having gone through all the pain that I had. It turned out that I knew a lot of guys who fucked around on their wives...and a lot of girls who fucked around on their husbands, too.

That...bothered me. It was, in fact, a deciding factor in my eventual complete exit from Christianity several years later.

Today, I'm sure, a lot of these white supposedly-Christian and "Conservative" men likely aspire to getting hand-jobs from pretty Chinese prostitutes in seedy massage parlors.

Something in my brain wants to ask "Well if that's the case, why did you get married?" Of course, so far as I can tell all the compacts and holy contracts and sacraments that make up so much of Christianity these days are simply things that nobody has any intention of upholding. They've simply become a box that has to be checked to get Man's approval so that these fucking people can then go out and proceed to act like their God and all of His commandments don't really exist.

Far from teaching people to master carnal desires and human nature, Christianity has become mastered by them...which seems to be Okay so long as Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. continue to accumulate money and power...so I suppose it should be no surprise that Evangelicalism has become little more than the Trump Cult.

I don't like Trump. I have in fact hated him since at least 1989 and I've never cared much for celebrities in general, at least not the kind of petty, venal idiots that American media and pop culture seem to love to follow around with cameras and otherwise gravitate to. I'm tired of all these gold-plated assholes.

But ya know, it bothers me when people talk about Trump as "Our" President, usually with the king of emphasis that means "Ours not yours, ha ha." Also, meaning like he specifically belongs to their group or something. The level of co-dependence/identification-with to the point of ownership just bothers me. Trump is a human being, if a shitty one, let him be that, and leave it at that.

These people proclaim Trump their God and pleasure as their sacrament, the more debased and selfish, the better.

But when they die it's not him they're going to be answering to nor how much they got to enjoy themselves at the expense of others that they're going to be judged on when they die.

And they will die, just like all the rest of us. Indeed this whole mess is largely driven by fear of death, and fear of change, and fear of the other.

And so, they also hunger for the Rapture, the Apocalypse and the second Coming of Christ...as if He would not catch them masturbating (or being masturbated) and be like "Hey, yo, I didn't want to see that crap." But of course, like any teenage boy or sender of unsolicited dick pics they think they're not going to get caught. Somehow, they seem to think (despite all the Biblical statements to the contrary) that Jesus is just like them and would put up with all this silly bullshit.

But when your spirituality is basically masturbation and telling yourself how great you are, what the fuck else can anybody expect?

These people are so damned self-centered that they want the world to end because they think that would mean they don't have to die. (And, also, these people that follow after all this silly bullshit think they're going to get to spend Eternity in heaven gloating while you and I are the ones who go to hell...come on, really?)

I have this creeping feeling that this party is going to end soon...and while it won't be good for anybody, it will be worse for these fucking people.

Have fun with that when your new god falls, Evangelicals.

Q-Berty

Think about this; think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that. ~George Carlin

OK, seriously, we need to talk.

There's something going on here that bothers me.

I want you to read the snipped bit of gibberish to the left here and think about it good and hard, and then if you can, tell me why civilized people should put up with this silly bullshit.

I saw last night that there's some Q-Anon book called "An invitation to the great awakening" currently at #56 on Amazon's top 100 list.

The gibberish is an excerpt from that book that I snipped off of Twitter the other day.

Go ahead, read it, it's a compilation of conspiracy theories, drooling insanity, fear of modern medicine, ghoulish fantasies and lurid sexual stuff, written by some idiot who apparently has a seething hatred of decent movies...and the writer of this crap has the nerve to accuse anybody else of being in a cult?!

This utter drooling insanity is, last I heard, selling better than a number of literary classics, but not as well as Green Eggs & Ham. I do not like this, Sam I Am.

But what can you expect, when last week Laura Ingraham had a supposed farmer in her audience who apparently didn't know dick about the anatomy of Cows?

This right here is the fruit of Anti-Intellectualism, Creationism and Conspiracy Theories, not to mention drooling stupidity and rabid religiosity that, mind you, seems to pay absolutely no attention to the source material. Hell, I think you'd get a more scientific understanding of how a cow works from the Bible than you would from a goddamned Fox News show! This is the end result of performative moronism and willful ignorance being raised up as a virtue for fun and profit by corporate goons, religious hucksters and right-wing politicians.

This is what you get when Christianity in America can enthusiastically rattle off its favorite Bible verse, but no one has been taught to understand their meaning, let alone to establish literacy in the evolution, history and themes of the subject matter at hand. In point of fact, the reverse has happened and a fierce intellectual incuriousity has taken root.

Or as I've been saying for over a decade now "If you don't know anything, you can believe whatever you want." That certainly seems to hold true of the average old person who watches Fox News.

American Christianity, at least in its Evangelical and Fundamentalist varieties and conservative iterations, is far less doctrinal or theological than experiential these days and of course all that is highly subjective. It's the beliefs and the doctrines and the theology that provide a positive force of group cohesion, If you take that away, very quickly things degenerate into who can put on the biggest show to get glory from idiots and to secure Man's approval for whatever their shitty agenda is. People who are grounded in feelings rather than facts or truth (either or preferably both literal and spiritual) tend to end up being easily led by whoever can put on the biggest display of emotionalism or tell them what they want to hear. In the end people basically end up worshiping some combination of their own brain chemicals and endorphins and their own uninformed opinions while somewhere along the way the Truth gets left by the side of the road to die...at best.

And at worst, it gets twisted into nothing more than an excuse to do what one wants anyway, or at least to openly fantasize about it in front of a crowd of dumb motherfuckers. I'm not quite sure why Jerry things Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would either show up at his house or want his cows. I'm rather inclined to believe, on top of that, that if Jerry Falwell Jr. actually owns any cows he's probably not the one who takes care of them. I'm likewise not sure what, if anything, Jerry thinks is good about killing Muslims. After all, there is that pesky bit in Exodus about "Thou Shalt Not Kill." 

Who would Jesus murder?

Last I checked, Muslims worship the same God, believe in a lot of the same things, and while I'm at it, American Muslims (and this includes several friends of mine) used to mostly vote Republican before Republicans repeatedly stabbed them in the back after 9/11. The interesting part here, is that if you look at it objectively, Muslims have far more in common with Christians than they don't. 

Of course, and speaking from personal experience here, if you're a former Republican and you currently vote Democrat...these motherfuckers today will just assume you never were a "real" Republican in the first place. It's all starting to strike me as extremely childish and self-serving. Republicans are basically like that teenage boy who keeps getting caught masturbating and of course he thinks the problem is the people who keep catching him, rather than that he can't keep his hands off his own junk.

This crap has turned into one giant circle-jerk of stupidity and the longer it goes on, the less I want any part of it. What gets me is that there appears to be a movement within Evangelicalism that thinks Trump was raised up to be King of the United States of America...ya know, the nation that was founded with the very purpose of being against kings in the first place.

But of course, if you don't agree with these assholes, they think you're persecuting them and Help! Help! They're being oppressed! Never fucking mind that not one damned one of these sons of bitches has the slightest idea of what living with day-to-day persecution looks like.

But that's Okay, Republicans believe in liberty, don't they? Well, funny thing but it turns out they have kind of a funny definition of that, too. See, in Republican Land, you and your kids have the liberty to die of perfectly well preventable diseases, some of which had been damned near unheard-of in this country for decades previously.

But that's Okay, too. Rand and his kids have all been vaccinated, Fuck You, He's Got His. 

And, sick as it is, that's a comparatively enlightened view compared to one hell of a lot of these fucking people.

Personally, I think I'd prefer the "false sense of security" of knowing my neighbors had been vaccinated, to the very real fear of living through a Third World style disease outbreak. I'm just sayin' I don't want to live in the kind of country where I have to step over dead bodies just to go somewhere. I don't know what's wrong with these people or where they get their ideas of what freedom constitutes or what liberty means, but if that's it I'm not interested. Certainly, none of their definitions of freedom or liberty match what I was taught and I used to be a conservative.

What the hell good is it to be free, if you're dead and you can't enjoy it?

Seems like an obvious question.

In Republican-Land and Q-Land...what is one Free to do?

The main ideal on their part seems to be that you and I and most other people...are free to die.

Certainly, such seems to have been the case in the past.

That's so much freedom I think it deserves a new name. I say we call it Q-Berty.

And I think it needs to be said, AGAIN, that on a certain level the people that these current Republicans seem to hate most are other Republicans, especially anybody who has gone before, and anybody who had any element of humanity in their actions or their conduct. 

For current "Conservatives" it's honestly like they think there were no Republicans before Trump.

That orange jackass is what they want to be. That's the ideal they've decided on.

I used to be one of these people. I was...hell, in some ways I still am...a conservative. That's why I detest this garbage with every fiber of my being and why I am unafraid to say so.

The more I think about it, I think it's the deliberate and uncaring ingratitude toward previous generations that offends me most of all. In fact, they have the same attitude toward future generations, and I think that's even worse.

If this performatively cruel and stupid nationalistic bullshitter and his demonstrative simple-mindedness are your thing, you deserve what you're going to get and you deserve to get it good and hard.

But ya know what, a lot of us don't, and didn't sign up for this horse shit. When the dust settles, when this is over, we're going to remember and we're going to act accordingly, without the conspiracy theory mash-ups and the word-finder bullshit. But you know what? At our worst, at our most angry the rest of us still remember concepts like freedom and liberty for what they mean, not what we want them to mean and not just for "Us"...and we're still going to have to be able to look at ourselves in our bathroom mirrors and shit.

So yeah, don't worry, conservatives. When all this crap is said and done and the rest of us are picking up the pieces and ya'll get to pay the consequences for this orgy of Stupid you're still going to get treated better than ya'll would treat other people...or even your own. Not that you deserve it.

And don't worry, Trump Supporters, we don't have to make shit up about what you're doing.

This crap needs to end, and it needs to end now, before it gets a lot of people killed for no reason.


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