Light and Darkness, Part One.

I don't preach a social Gospel I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread. ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

"Their foot shall slide in due time..." Thus began one of the most famous sermons in American Christian history.

You ever wonder why things are so fucked up right now? Start with that.

Calvinism. The idea that Man is either totally depraved, or totally virtuous, and that you don't get to choose which one you are. Meaning of course, that those who are able typically claim the mantle of "Salvation" for themselves and then say "Fuck you, I've got mine."

A lot of evils have risen from this idea, the Puritans, much of Europe's whole history of religious wars following the Reformation, Colonialism, Slavery, Segregation, Apartheid.

When the whole damn point of your religion is to be able to find a way to say to a person "I'm going to Heaven, and you're not." I'm not sure you can really call that Christianity anymore.

Dualism, certainly, On/Off, Dark/Light, Saved/Unsaved, Mine/Yours. It's a great, easy way for the simple-minded to look at life, sure. But it's not Christianity...the Great Commission of which is that the Gospel should be preached to all nations, so that everybody gets a chance to go to Heaven.

Dualism by itself tends to focus on the Yes/No, if/then aspect of that, rather than the fundamental inclusiveness that it implies. "Sign on the dotted line and you're in." is basically what Jesus said.

"You have to read this End User License Agreement first" says the Dualist.

"No! You have to read the EULA the exact right way and then be afraid you've accidentally violated it for the rest of your existence." says the Calvinist.

And that right there is exactly the root of the fear that consistently underlies much of American Evangelicalism...even though these days, I'd be willing to bet not one in five of those people could tell you what a Calvinist even is.

But conservatism sure has boiled down to the fear that somewhere, somebody these people don't like is being treated as their equal.

Fuck that. That shit is not what I was taught.

I saw the clearest example of Dualism From Stupidity that I've ever seen in my life, this morning. Right there, in the screen-cap above.  Oh no, don't get me wrong, I've been seeing idiots ask the question "Why do Atheists hate God" forever.

No, this fucking fool seems to think everybody is either a Christian or an Atheist. As if that's not the most insulting possible take to the vast majority of humans that have ever lived. Jews and Muslims believe in God, Sikhs are Monotheists, most forms of religion believe in or at least acknowledge some form or forms of divinity. That's the very opposite from what an Atheist is.

Non-belief isn't hate. Gamer that I am, I don't hate Dragons or Goblins or Orcs, I simply know that they are fictional/mythological creatures that don't really exist.

Atheists are pretty much the same way about gods.

"Why do you hate us?"

Asks the Lady On Twitter/ Ida being one of the people that I follow on Twitter. She's a lesbian, from Norway. So basically she starts off on the wrong foot with increasingly insular American Evangelicals...who view Europeans suspiciously and have done so since at least the late 1980's and any serious moves toward European unity...which they explicitly view through the lens of Daniel and Revelation and atavistic fears about ancient Rome that probably have been in the DNA of Christianity all along...and if you factor in Puritan anti-Catholicism and often anti-Semitism as well?

Yeah, that crap is as American as the Pilgrims, Plymouth Rock and Thanksgiving...the Romans and Jews being the swarthy people who persecuted and crucified the Puritans white Jesus and all.

Never mind that without Catholicism, Christianity as it is now would not exist. Who in the hell do they think determined what went in the Bible, or codified the beliefs of Christianity?

Never mind that there were plenty of white Romans, the modern concept of "Whiteness" didn't exist, but that's never stopped racist idiots from trying to impose it on history. Heaven isn't heaven if everybody gets to go. History isn't real to them if everybody gets to be included. Yes, these people really do think it's all about them.

And never mind that Jesus was a brown-skinned Middle Eastern Jew.

And it only gets worse when people aren't aware or conscious of this stuff. It's even worse when paranoia and exclusivism start to take hold. That's when the atavistic fears take over and the Christians and "Conservatives" and Republicans start sounding like they want to live in bunkers with their Bibles and their guns eating survivalist taco meat in the dark and shitting on their own shoes.

Throw in some racism, and that's when things start to get both really toxic and increasingly weird.

"Joe Biden is a socialist because he's a Democrat and he's not Black, so he's bringing down the white race."

You know, not to sound that way but these people are literally starting to sound like how they stereotype everybody else...especially people of Color and the young." It's not hard to imagine this idiot saying "The Man is just trying to bring us down, yo."

It's funny how these fucking people were perfectly fine with "The Man" when they felt that their power was not contested. It's funny how, now that they see on a daily basis how hoarding political power isn't the same thing as having leadership or setting the tone...now that their spell over the masses is broken and they can see that everybody else wants a share in America too...these fucking people have shifted from "Standing athwart history yelling stop" to "Stop America, I want to get off."

And that's absolutely going to end in blood and fire, because to them America isn't America if everybody gets to have some. This is explicit in these fucking people's responses to health care issues or student loan forgiveness. They'd rather burn it all down than see somebody get something better than what they had. Just goes to show you that Ayn Rand has more power over the Conservative mind than Jesus Christ could ever dream of having.

Joe Biden is hardly a socialist. He's about as conventional of a Democrat as you can find...and he's the guy even a lot of Never-Trump Republicans are hoping gets the nomination. But of course these fucking morons have bought into the idiotic Fox News-generated narrative that you're either a Trump-Republican or a Socialist. They're increasingly buying into the loony online-Right's narrative that it's either White Nationalism or Death.

Notice how they keep picking ever-more extreme dualistic positions?

Anybody want to ask the government of Rhodesia or the South African Apartheid regime exactly how that worked out?

Oh, wait, you'd have to rummage around in the dustbin of history for awhile first, wouldn't you? And with damned good reason, I might add.

That's where this kind of Dualist bullshit...and then using said bullshit to justify acting like an asshole...ends up every single time.

But of course, every idiot on the planet thinks "Oh come on...it'll work out differently when *I* try it."

Bullshit.

It works out the same way every single time with these goddamned bullshitters.

Pick a sacred cow, and I can tell you how they don't believe in it and why. They don't believe in the Constitution...because it doesn't give them power forever and then sanctify that power. They don't believe in the Bible for much the same reason. Deep down, they know it's not really all about them.

These people always believe that they have to perfect the world so that Jesus will come back. Or they have to perfect the nation because something something gazpacho.

Never mind that the Bible says things of this world are, by nature, not perfect...or that God works on His own timetable and Man has no influence. It's never about any of the things they say it's about. It's really all about them and that other American social neuroses of "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me and how great I am!"

Yeah, right. Fuck these people. Kris Kobach apparently wants to run for Senate and can't even spell his own name right. Hmm, that could be a sign that it's time to hang it up and go home, dude.

But he won't...just like Roy Moore...because whatever his own Party tells him, he's convinced himself that he's one of the Saved, Sacralized ones to whom the rules do not apply.

Never mind that he lost...in Kansas.

I saw this yesterday, the US women's soccer team won against the Netherlands and thus won another consecutive World Cup. Good for them, I rather like this team and their attitude, personally.

Fox News, for whatever reason, decided to make a real effort at filming the reactions of people in other countries to this...and ended up with a bunch of French people shouting "Fuck Trump" on camera.

I'm not gonna lie. I thought that was fucking great.

But seriously, what do you think these fucking people are going to do, as they are confronted with more and more evidence that the rest of the world does not accept their self-selected claim to power?

They're going to start lashing out, eventually, and the rest of us need to prepare accordingly.

Over the weekend, billionaire Jeffery Epstein got arrested for child sex trafficking, and this afternoon I've seen assorted posts about the kind of sick stuff that's been found in this guy's house. All because this motherfucker, like too many of these fucking people, saw women and girls as sexual objects rather than human beings, as things to be exploited rather than as people.

The fact that this guy, who has all these ties to all these other powerful, rich motherfuckers, is sitting in jail right now, probably has one hell of a lot of them sweating.

Because the very idea strikes at the heart of their power.

And that's just it, isn't it? The gospel to a powerful person is power.

Not the power to do this or that constructively or destructively. Not power for a purpose...just power, simply for the capability of having it. And often, the only things they want to use it for are pleasing their dicks or fattening their wallets.

But the gospel to a hungry person is bread, the gospel to an LGBT person is leave them alone and let them live their life without religious harassment. Etc. Etc. As far as I'm concerned, people should have the right to be able to live their lives free from these goddamned moneyed or power-hungry or religious predators, and it's as simple as that.

If that's some kind of revolutionary statement, too damned bad.

We, as a species, had best realize this and damned fast, for the sake of our own survival. If our country dies or our planet dies...the chances are very great that not only will the powerful and the wealthy die right along with the rest of us...but they have an excellent chance of being further ahead in line than most of us

I don't care about that. I'm not especially driven by spite. I'd just like to live in a world where I'm not held hostage to some powerful utter moron's Bronze-age philosophies or Dualistic thinking or mental issues or racial or social insecurities. One hell of a lot of these people need to get themselves a decent therapist and leave the rest of us the fuck alone.

Why is that so much to ask?

It's not always a question of light or darkness, on or off, or whatever. There's plenty of other choices, plenty of shades of gray. A lot of people know this, but it turns out that moronic, simplistic my-way-or-the-highway bullshit is often more profitable than the truth. So that's what those people do.

I'm a person, not a shadow dancing in the firelight. If people wonder why I left conservatism, it's because somewhere along the way ideas like capitalism or metrics like how many judges they had became more important than people.

And I'm not an idea in somebody else's head either. I'm me. If you don't like it, too bad.

Yeah, Drew, I'll bite. I'm not an Atheist...but I still don't care for your god.

Because your real god is you, asshole.

Part 2.

Part 3