Temptation (American Revelation VI: Part Three.)

Thou Shalt Not Kill. ~Exodus 20:13

Eight people, including six Asian women, got murdered in Atlanta, Georgia yesterday, by some pasty white religious nut who was mad because of the "temptation" posed by massage parlors?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but is not murder a more grievous sin than getting your dick jacked off? I'm fucking serious, here. Answer the question.

And perhaps more to the point, can anybody tell me why, during the press conference, the cops rather strangely brought up that this creepy uncooked pizza-dough looking motherfucker "had a bad day."

I've had lots of bad days and I've never wanted to kill a bunch of people because of them.

This guy killed eight people for no damn reason, I don't give a shit what he thinks and I'm not afraid to say so. Plus, he's probably going to have a lot more bad days now.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's going to come out that this dude was a far-right nut of some sort, a fundamentalist Christian, and likely a misogynist, a racist, and a Trump supporter as well. Certainly, if he was anything else, that would have been all over the media to the point of ridiculous by now. But he "had a bad day" and "Police still aren't sure it's a hate crime." What the fuck else could it have been?

Daily there are new reports of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who people with a certain mob mentality unjustly blame for COVID-19. This ridiculous bullshit was egged on with malice aforethought by conservatives in general and people like Donald Trump in particular for much of the last year and it's still going on, if on a smaller and less national scale, even now.

Eight people got murdered yesterday, and the cops are actively trying to soft-pedal the fucking killer?

And then they have the balls to wonder why people are demanding police reform? Or why people say "Fuck The Police." Gee, I wonder why they do that. Well, among other things, when the media and the police keep being publicly seen trying to find ways to empathize with every white criminal that comes along, maybe we should goddamned well name the roots of the problems here?

Racism, for one.

Easy access to weapons for another.

And perhaps more to the point, one half of our political culture specifically and with malice aforethought enables both for their political and financial profits and for a certain set of religious and theological beliefs.

If you wonder why my last blog post series was "America is not so exceptional" and why I'm up to six main and a couple of secondary series with the tag "American Revelation" look no further than this.

America is a country where some people seem to have the right to have the cops try and make you look good when you do a mass murder, and where some people's right to be alive is contingent upon not crossing the path of said murderers.

If you wonder why, among countries with an actual reputation for religiosity or religious fanaticism (either real, like in much of the Middle East, or astroturfed by the government like in Russia) America is called godless, well this kind of shit is why. True enough, a lot of those countries do plenty of bad things. Part of the difference is, most of them make no bones about it (or even cite religion as the reason) and they don't demand that the rest of the world see them as actually moral in both religious and secular terms like America in general, and American conservatives in particular, do.

But when American police agencies and others effectively, publicly, imply that some damned white fool's fear of temptation, imagined "purity," squicky sexual issues or simply what kind of a day the son of a bitch was having are more important than the lives of eight other human beings, we don't need them to call us immoral. We're telling on ourselves.

Americans are not a moral people, even those of us who have morals are tolerating far too much immorality in the name of convenience.

America is not a moral nation, and all one needs to do to see that is look at how we treat the least of us, or the stranger among us, and compare that to what the Word of God (in whatever persuasion you want, really) actually says.

No nation will ever be judged by how it treats its in-groups, its religious nuts, or its wealthy.

And if we want to not be judged, or to be judged on a favorable basis, we're going to have to become a better people.

Sin and temptation are not monsters under the bed or things unto themselves. What they mean is that we miss the mark set by God. Similarly, without conviction, without repentance...without actual sincere efforts to change and make amends, these terms are just empty, meaningless words most useful for fooling the feeble-minded.

If you actually are a person who's read the Bible, you know that the alternative to conviction and repentance...the alternative to picking up that mark and working to do better...is destruction.

If you're more worried about wanting to get your dick jerked off than you are about killing people you're doing it wrong.

All temptation is, is the dark side of the universe and your own thoughts and rationalizations trying to convince you to do what you already want to do anyway.

That guy wanted to do wrong, there's nothing actually wrong with sex. He wanted to hate, he wanted to act on that hate. The sexual stuff was just a rationalization.

Humans will always rationalize stupid bullshit, given the chance. According to Christianity that's because of our own fallen, sinful nature.

If you want to overcome that, you have to love your own life and the lives of others more than you love your sin.

If we want to have a better country, we have to be better citizens. We are going to have to be better people.

And we're going to have to, or a lot more people are going to die. Call it God's judgement, call it our own godless stupidity, either way the result is the same, and fixing that, preventing more bloodshed? That part is on us.
 

Part Two.