Religion Of Lies (Left Behind Is A Lie, Reloaded, Part One.)

Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.
Behold, I have told you before. ~Matthew 24:23-25

At some point yesterday, Marjorie Taylor Green got into an argument with Georgia election officials on Twitter.

Her account got locked for twelve hours today as a result of that.

She was arguing over the same unfounded claims made by Trump and others since the election, an election in which she won, and you'll note she sure doesn't doubt the validity of her own winning of a Congressional seat. There's a reason for that.

It's all bullshit, really, and nobody knows this more than her.

Everything with these fucking people is an endless bad-faith argument, geared only towards getting them what they want right now, and that's why there's not much sense in trying to disabuse them of their conspiracy theories, false prophecies and lies, even if they did really believe it that shit will be over, forgotten, in a week...or the second the next big thing comes up...whichever comes first.

Behold, I have told you before.

Left Behind was a lie, Y2K was a lie, Birtherism was a lie, Q-Anon was a lie, Trumpism was a lie and the next big thing these fucking people come up with will be a lie too.

But lying is, by and large, something these fucking people feel privileged to do, and do without consequence as their own bad-faith arguments about the First Amendment usually end up showing.

Because it's not about what's right or what's true or what you can feel, see, touch, etc. it's about power.

And that power, at the expense of all else, is what these fucking people really worship and spend their lives in the pursuit of.

And this is what's going to destroy the Republican Party, which may not sound so bad, but I guarantee you that it will be replaced by something worse.

Before 2008 and the start of the Tea Party era in 2009-2010, for the most part these idiots were ignored and nobody took them seriously, they were resigned to petty kingdoms of churches and companies, and not a few state legislature seats. But here's the thing, over time these fucking people built a nominally-Christian Fundamentalist parallel culture that, to be honest, most people would not become aware of until John McCain nominated Sarah Palin to be his vice president...and I'm here to tell you it would take the next decade or so for this shit to fully sink in and be understood by the average person on the street who hadn't been a part of it, or around it, or harmed by it.

And shortly after that awareness was achieved, Trump finally knocked Republican Jesus off his pedestal and with the emergence of Q-Anon, itself a mutation of PizzaGate, this shit began to mutate into something else altogether and became that much more difficult to actually deal with. More to the point, I think that's the reason why it went down that way. It might not seem like much, but religion generally demands a certain level of morality, or after awhile you don't get to play anymore. But I think there's more to it than that.

Religion, for the most part, demands a certain baseline of truth, that is, that at least certain theological beliefs must be shared by all followers of a given faith to a greater or lesser degree. Thus, it gives those opposed an angle of attack. It's not much, but pushing these people to actually follow the things they say they believe works sometimes. On a certain level they know they have to maintain their camouflage.

A conspiracy theory on the other hand, is a slippery bastard. It's hard to engage because its entire basis and nature is a lie. Anybody who doesn't believe in it can simply be rationalized away as part of the conspiracy or something something Gazpacho, and at that point the brakes on behavior imposed by empathy, human interaction and shared cognition begin to break down.

Worse, as Trump became more flagrant in his contempt for laws and norms that went away too, because these people...who even then had begun to recognize Trump as their god...figured he would protect them.

For the record, no, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.

But then Trump lost, and they couldn't save him legally or electorally and couldn't even pull off a coup in a country that'd never had one before and thus was severely unequipped to deal with such a thing, not out of malice per se but because too often, people are usually reactive rather than proactive, and these fucking people failed even when they had people on the inside...and while it's usually sad when a God dies...when a false god falls, it's just funny. 

When you're not one of the ones going to hell for it, that is. And that's why I detest this bullshit so much, because countless people who should have known better were turned into blubbering fools, cultists and nuts over it. I hate that, ultimately, America did this to people, and we're going to have to rethink a hell of a lot of things if we don't want this shit to keep happening.

We're going to have to hold these people accountable, and force them to take responsibility for their actions and their shitty beliefs. And that's what they're afraid of more than anything.

They fear to be held responsible for the lie.

There's a lot of people who, when they die and go into the afterlife, are going to find themselves without excuse...but with their lips flapping incoherently as they try to make excuses anyway, as if they think that God is as dumb as they are.

Pro Tip, ladies and gentlemen, it's generally a good idea to assume that the Creator of the Infinite Universe is at least a little bit smarter than you are.

All too often, the lie has become central to their identity.

And that's exactly why the Bible spends so much time on these particular subjects, and often lays out the punishments for them in such exacting detail...as if that doesn't ultimately end up contributing to the problem in multiple ways on its own, but you have to realize this stuff was written down long before there were even printing presses or such a concept as media, and even longer before radio and television and other mechanisms of constant reinforcement were even close to thought of. 

To be completely honest, either on the scale of the Church or of the village wise-woman, for a very long time, bishops or druids, orators and philosophers and priests and temples were how ideas were propagated...and very often such news as there was, was more about an idea than about what actually happened.

And for all of our claimed social and technological sophistication, we humans spent far more time in that kind of environment than we did in the modern scientific era powered by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

And I'm here to tell you, the desire for the Old Ways remains alive and well, that's what a lot of this conspiracy theory shit really is.

And if we want to keep our modern world, we're going to have to face the fact that conspiracy theories are lies and a lot of these ideas we propagated throughout our history as a species were just really shitty ones.

That's why Left Behind must be shown to be a lie.  That's why we have to keep pounding on the fact that, 2000 years later, there's still no Apocalypse, no End Times, and when an Antichrist showed up, even just in the context of America, the Christians overwhelmingly voted for him.