FacePalm Sunday II: Blood for the blood god, dude. (American Revelation III, Part Three.)

Three weeks from now I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. Hold the line. Stay with me. If you find yourself alone, riding in green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled; for you are in Elysium, and you're already dead! Brothers, what we do in life, echoes in eternity.

~Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the film Gladiator.

Oh hey, Fuck you, Franklin Graham.

Apparently Frank thinks that Coronavirus was sent to punish people for "turning their backs on God."

You realize of course that these fucking people trot out this bullshit argument for all type of shit, including the consensual sex acts between grown ass adults in the privacy of their own spaces, the existence of LGBT people, people voting Democrat, and women being allowed to function as human beings. Yet somehow Frank here has no problem with drunken party girl Jeanine Pirro looking like a pool-party spinster who's lost her margarita.

Seriously, fuck these motherfuckers.

It's Palm Sunday, the whole damned point of Jesus and His crucifixion and substitutionary atonement was to make collective punishment and physical retribution by God unnecessary.

But in a way, this is worse than that.

I'm just saying, if you're going around telling people that God sent the Coronavirus that's disrupted their lives, maybe cost somebody their job, got them laid off or killed some of their family members, you should probably expect to create more Atheists than to be successfully spreading the Word of Jesus.

And as far as I'm concerned, if people are thinking that "Jesus decided to kill the ungodly with this plague" first of all fuck you. That shit is wrong. Second, you might need to take a look at who is actually dying from this thing right now, and what people are saying about where it's going to hit next and who is most at risk from it.

Projections strongly suggest in the coming weeks there's going to be a lot of Southern Baptists in body bags, and I'm just saying, that doesn't need to happen. But to prevent it requires giving a damn about somebody other than yourself.

You might try having a little empathy and basic humanity, too, because we're all at risk and this virus doesn't give a shit about me, or about you and your shitty selfish politics or religion. We're all targets of this thing. The sooner people realize that and stop with the politics and religious bullshit and start trying to protect themselves instead of just wishing death on other people, the better off all of us are going to be.

People are dying out there, and I'm not kidding when I say that when I have brought this up to Christians and most Conservatives, it doesn't even register. They don't care. It's not even that they shrink away or try to change the subject. It's that "People are dying out there" is met at best with a blank stare, and at worst with them getting mad at you for pointing it out.

I'm going to be honest, I haven't even seen any of these fucking people be happy about it either. It's like there is simply no there, there. The people who've spent 25 years talking about the Apocalypse more than anybody can't even seem to register that we're facing a real one here. Except of course that everything is a partisan issue, so this must be too, and everything is about money and status, and that's pretty much the only place where it does register. They could die, and they're more worried about having to be equal to Black people or having to pay more in taxes or people other than them getting money or health care.

I mean, I'd like to say that we're dealing with the worst of humanity here, but I've personally known ex-convicts who committed murder that have better morals than this.

To be the worst of humanity, you kinda have to have some.

And then of course there's the "OMG people are having sex" argument, thank you Pat "Crypt Keeper Pimp" Robertson.

Fucking seriously? How far, at this point, are these people from dancing around a fire shouting "Bunga  Bunga" while waiting for the local illiterate witch-doctor to come out of his cave, wave a magic stick around a few times and give them the courage to go find somebody to throw in the lava lake at the top of the volcano?

First of all, I as a conservative Christian was taught not to pry into or worry about people's sexual matters because it was none of my fucking business. Yes, there were gay people and people having oral sex when I was growing up, too. People have always done this stuff and it wasn't really anybody else's fucking business then, either.  It really is that simple.

One way or another, in the conflict with this virus or after it, politics, religion and conspiracy theories are going to get a lot of people killed. The thing that bothers me, as a former conservative myself, is that the people in the churches could be smart, innovate, socially distance, use technology to connect and hell, maybe even improve their overall experience (not to mention church attendance numbers!) and they are declining to do that, viewing anything other than doing what they've always done...in spite of vast risk...as acceding to some kind of liberal plot.

These people will die in vast numbers, and I guarantee you no one will care less than their own Pastors and politicians and talk-radio barkers. The people who are putting them up to this are sacrificing their own power base to their own primitive blood gods on the altar of their own selfish vainglory, basically because they think this virus will kill somebody else?

Pardon me if I don't get it.

And what is if anything, more sad, is that in the space of, well, since I got up this morning, the conservative talking heads have gone from blaming the "Anti-Christian Left" and celebrating the idea of other people martyring themselves for Republican Jesus...to simply glorifying death as some kind of mystical transcendence for it's own sake.

...

Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. This is not it!

Proximo: All we are is shadows and dust, Maximus, Shadows and dust!
...

Sorry, momentary flashback.

If you think this crap that Bill Mitchell is spouting about death has the slightest thing to do with the Christian tradition as I was taught it, you have another thing coming. Yes, it's absolutely part of the conservative canon (on a small-c basis) but that kind of talk harks back to the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers...who the Fundamentalist Christians of my younger years vilified as homosexual pagans.in print and in sermons by the hundreds.

This guy isn't talking like this because he went out and smoked some weed, got blazed and then ate a fat ass plate of tacos while reading Plato and Socrates. He's talking like this because he sees the writing on the wall and knows the whole house of cards is going to collapse soon, and that the only way people are going to survive is by standing together and supporting each other, which leads to progressive political policy (and yes, there was a time when that could be applied either to Democrats or to Republicans) and he knows...he knows...deep down that this means the end for trickle-down, Reaganomics type regressive economic policies and unregulated capitalism. The virus, combined with Trump's stupidity blew up the grift.

And Bill Mitchell, Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson would all rather that you died than that you realize that and be alive and in full possession of your survival instincts to make that knowledge translate into public policy that works for the average person and not only the moneyed elites. They know, they can see, that Democrats, liberals and people of color and those at risk due to disability or health are the ones following the social distancing guidelines that they manipulated their followers into scoffing at and thus put their own people at greater risk than their political rivals. Anybody who's been paying attention can see there's a wave of blood about to hit the areas that support these fucking people the most.

They'd just rather that you get sick and die before you can do anything about it and thus jeopardize their power and the mumbo-jumbo of their primitive right-wing blood gods that they use to make the feeble-minded follow them.

Blood for the blood god, dude, Blood for the blood god.

Facepalm Sunday I (Part Two)

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