God, or Trump? Your call, Evangelicals.

You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you

Help me
I broke apart my insides
Help me
I've got no soul to sell
Help me
The only thing that works for me
Help me get away from myself

I want to fuck you like an animal
I want to feel you from the inside
I want to fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to god

You can have my isolation
You can have the hate that it brings
You can have my absence of faith
You can have my everything

~Nine Inch Nails, Closer.

I have a confession to make.

I'm goddamned sick of people, most especially "Conservative" white men praying and quoting from the Bible and trying to look oh-so-serious and religious when they're doing it, even as they shit all over God and their fellow humans alike.

I'm sick of the same goddamned people...and it's always the same goddamned people...conservative business people and politicians and religious nuts, injecting homophobia and racism and sexism and blind stupid prejudice into government policy and corporate and church culture. And the problem is, unsurprisingly, pretty damned international.

I mean, I get that motherfuckers want to get Man's approval for their various shitty agendas, but given how little Christianity even comes up in these arguments anymore, why don't they just build a statue of a giant white-painted dick surrounded by piles of money and call it even?

The world is changing, people. Nobody actually cares about all the "Traditional" values you said you championed, least of all you or your followers. I paid attention to the events of CPAC this year as I often do, where Comrade Commissar Charlie Kirk of the People's Trumpist Unfuckable Dickbag Brigade mocked Mitt Romney live on stage.

I get that ya'll have this big whack-off fantasy of old school straitlaced white conservatism and Serious Old White Guys making all the decisions and everything in its place and personal responsibility and small government and everybody doing the "right" things. I was a conservative once. For fuck's sake I just finished re-reading a whole bunch of Tom Clancy novels. Mitt Romney, the last pre-Trump Republican presidential nominee, is exactly the sort of character that would have fit very well into one of those books. For fuck's sake, Tom Clancy wrote favorable Mormon characters...and gay ones, among others...when even lots of mainstream Liberal writers wouldn't. Mitt Romney is absolutely the poster-boy of jack-off fantasy conservatism...or he should have been.

Instead we're stuck with people like Mike Pence, while everybody just sort of ignores anything Donald Trump does or says in favor of worshiping the idea of Donald Trump. So in that respect I guess it really is like Pauline Christianity, fucked up on some really bad shit.

Ya know, I even get that Mike and "Mother" Pence could theoretically be the poster-people for this fantasy in a lot more ways than one...but they try too hard, and it comes off as farcical and insincere.

And I bet that "Mother" wishes Mike looked at her the way he looks adoringly at Donald Trump.

And CPAC is, in fact, the banner event of the year for gay prostitutes in the Mid-Atlantic states. And I gather that very little of the butt-fucking that goes on around events like CPAC has anything to do with Evangelical dudes and their girlfriends trying to preserve some form of technical virginity.

And now we're in the position of hoping these goddamned hypocritical sodomite fools who wouldn't even have been let in the front door of conservatism (much less national politics) 20 years ago get the response to a global pandemic right?

(Apologies to gay people who don't spend their lives seeking to harm others because of their own internal issues, the sins of Sodom were about far more than homosexuality...and if you look it up in the Bible they seem to dovetail neatly in all respects with the current "Conservative" program. Cheating others, discourtesy to foreigners and guests, among other things.)

Apparently, 38% of Americans can't even understand Beer...one of the main aspects of the real American holy trinity right up there with Football and guns, so I guess that's kind of par for the course.

I'm just gonna say that it became a real problem when we had people in charge of governing or getting governments elected who decided to get by through manipulating the stupid instead of trying to facilitate an educated society making decisions that benefit as many people as possible...in a system that requires an educated, functional, reasonably mature populace in order to even function.

In other words, if you're too willfully stupid to understand that Corona virus doesn't come from Corona beer...you shouldn't vote, or leave the house without a helmet on. No, I don't give a damn if anybody finds it offensive, I'm a say it, I'd sooner trust the mentally-disabled people the local recycling company hires to do trash pickup around town to make good decisions than I would you.

At least I know from personal experience of dealing with those guys that they're not bad people.

And I'm fucking tired of malicious, willful stupidity and of people turning greed, racism, sexism and whiteness into objects of cultic worship and trying to sit there looking oh-so-religious while they're doing it. This is all stuff that I was taught was wrong, by conservatives of prior eras.

I'm tired of the fact that we have this major global pandemic bearing down on us, that it's likely been here for up to a few weeks in some places and all conservatives and corporate America seem intent on doing is trying to find some way to profit from this goddamned mess while they actively try to interfere with any kind of disaster relief efforts or public health programs that aren't based on profit, you know, the kind of thing that is traditionally the responsibility of the government because nobody else will do it. I'm tired of these people trying to hamstring anything that contradicts their shitty ideology not just because it's an evil, shitty ideology that has no place in government...but because this mess is going to get people killed.

And one hell of a lot of those people will be conservative voters.

I don't know how the fuck these people don't see that.

They believe so deeply in their own fantasies of what their people are like, of the steely-eyed Marlboro Man Conservative...think Mike Pence in his bomber jacket staring grimly across the Korean DMZ...that they simply can't or won't see the silly old man with obvious Mommy issues who refers to his wife as "Mother."

They believe in their own bullshit so much that they don't realize their average voter is far more likely to be the fat guy in a Custodian's uniform who sits there looking oh-so-serious reading the Bible when he's on break...and can't manage a fast walk for more than ten meters without wheezing because he spent too much of his life smoking cigarettes. I'm not sure I can fault him for that, I smoked for 20 years. I smoked plenty of cigarettes with that dude and some of the other guys back in the day, sometimes even during after-work Bible studies and shit. I'm just saying a lot of people make bad life choices or have bad health through no fault of their own. Writing people off because of that is wrong.

That guy probably isn't going to survive. I'd rather he did, not because I like him, but because he's got kids and shit. Because he's a person, because I don't want to live in the kind of society that makes decisions on who survives and who doesn't based on whatever ideological proclivities are in power at the time.

And there's millions more of us who don't and never did or who, like me, no longer subscribe to this bullshit that don't deserve to be put at risk or to die either. We need to make public health decisions based on the realities of public health, and on science...not on what pads the profits of corporations or makes racists, sexists and old white religious nuts feel good about themselves.

But if course, cults don't care about that. Hell, everything is expendable in the service of "Believe in the Cult, or else."

Do you think Trumpism would be racist if Black people were 100% in the tank for Trump the way old white dudes were? Probably to an extent but they sure wouldn't be so obvious about it.

Do you know what happened when Anti-Black racism became inconvenient to Mormon doctrine? The "Prophets" at the top had a few "Revelations" and said a few magic words and phrases and they overwrote the previous doctrine and simply pretended it hadn't happened.

I found out this morning that the Drunk Kitchen lady is gay, which I didn't know and don't care but I happen to have seen a couple of the videos, and that's why I noticed when somebody posted an article, and then I found out that the reason her family won't attend her wedding is they're Jehovah's Witnesses.

Let me tell you why that matters to me, and why I think that's fucked up and that cults and religious fundamentalism of any kind ought not to be tolerated in a free, modern society.

20 years ago, I was working in a Northern Michigan Wal-Mart in one town ,and attending college classes in another relatively nearby town. I worked in Electronics, and there was this girl, tall and skinny, all of 17, who worked right next door in the photo lab part time. She'd been "Dis-fellowshipped" from the local Jehovah's Witnesses cult for the horrible crime of watching secular (that is, non-cult produced) movies. She'd lost her entire family and basically had to get that job so she could eat.

She'd gone from living in her car to living with her slightly-older best friend, the short-haired nerd girl, age 18, a full time associate in the photo lab and freshman student at my school...with whom I was in a psychology class in the following fall semester, as it turned out. The only reason the two girls didn't have to put up with much cult harassment was nerd girl's Dad had caught some yahoo sneaking on to their property, held him at gunpoint and had his wife call the cops, with intent to press trespassing charges. When the State Troops showed up they searched him and it turned out he had a knife and some other stuff and it turned out he was intending to slash tires and shit. He copped to some minor charges and went to jail for less time than he should have, and eventually a web of restraining orders came about on behalf of this girl. Awful lot for a kid to deal with.

What a life, 20 hours a week, adult education classes, and living in her buddy's basement functionally under the protection of her parents...all the support system she had in the world to deal with a lifetime of mental wreckage from being in a fucking cult, and somehow start a life of her own. 

So far as I know, unlike the drunk kitchen lady, she wasn't gay...or at least the subject never came up...but I can't even imagine growing up LGBT under the sort of circumstances that'd toss out a kid just for watching a damn movie.

Both girls had become Atheists, and conservative Baptist that I was at the time I couldn't blame them one bit. The stories I heard made my head spin.

You could see the pain in their eyes, one from having lived it, and the other from having to support her friend in dealing with that hell. The worst those two girls should have been having to deal with at that age was avoiding minor-in-possession charges while partying it up. Instead they had a cult intent on murdering their souls if it couldn't do physical harm to their bodies or their stuff.

And if you think this Trump mess is going to be any different, you haven't been paying attention. Duck into a MAGA thread on social media sometime; There are apparently people who literally worship Donald Fucking Trump. People spew this crap, daily, all over Fox News and social media.

And they're mad as hell that the rest of us fucking don't.

Hell, they're giving their biological weapon of choice...ignorant sick motherfuckers...free airtime on Fox News. Add in an economy largely dependent on massive numbers of low-wage workers and a party full of elected incompetents and appointed toadies trying to downplay the problem, and we have the recipe for an apocalypse, started by a cult, for no better reason than the majority of us don't want to blindly follow their humanity- and science-denying philosophy of greed or worship their shitty little orange god.

Do I think it will necessarily come to that? I don't know.

But watch and see who the people are that seem to want that very thing. Watch and see how many of those people spend their time oh-so-seriously praying and reading the Bible when they think everybody's looking.

Maybe we as a society need to stop and look at the fact that decades of uncritical acceptance of religion has done no good either for religion or society, but rather allowed religion...particularly Christianity and its offshoots...to become nothing less than a nest of vipers, and maybe, just maybe, consider that uncritical adoration of Capitalism has done much the same, turning the business community into a den of snakes as well.

Maybe if we'd start giving a shit about people instead of worshiping fantasies and ideas, we wouldn't have this problem, or it wouldn't be such a grave threat, or it would be being more effectively dealt with.

I think it's time we start valuing life more than we value money and religion, instead of just pretending that we do.

'Cause I'll tell you one thing, coming from the standpoint of a former conservative Baptist myself: If we don't we're going to have one hell of a lot more Atheists before this is over, and I guarantee you the people who think it's a great idea to be seen praying before making bad public health decisions will absolutely try to blame everybody but themselves.

And you can't even, realistically, tell who or what the Evangelicals are actually praying to anymore.

God, or Trump?

Keep glorifying this damn goon, or protect our own people...all of them.

Humanity, or the Trump Cult.

Cults, or the truth?

It can't be both.

And the sad fact is that given the choice between their hatred of the poor, homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. and Christ, one hell of a lot of these people will not choose Christ.

Give them a choice between Christ and Trump...and too many have already chosen Trump.

And the next thing they'll want to do is make sure you go to hell right along with them.

Think on that.