Through me the way to the suffering city;
Through me the everlasting pain;
Through me the way that runs among the Lost.
Justice urged on my exalted Creator:
Divine Power made me,
The Supreme Wisdom and the Primal Love.
Nothing was made before me but eternal things
And I endure eternally.
Abandon all hope - You Who Enter Here. ~Sign posted above the gates of Hell, Dante's Inferno.
...
To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste. ~Deuteronomy 32:35
This is the day that the Lord has made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.Such a statement, however, implies a willingness to meet whatever comes clear-eyed and with the courage of one's convictions, to live or die based on the certainty that God, or the Universe or whatever one chooses to call those things beyond our ken has done their part and so we must do ours, regardless of what actually happens, even though any given day may by definition be our last one. "Under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave and let me lie, glad did I live and gladly die" as the old poem goes.
To have faith, to take life as it comes, however, requires the absence or at least the diminishment of fear rather than a vast, yawning abyss of it. If God really made the world, and in so doing ordained my first moments, would not He have foreknowledge of my last as well? Would not my crossing over into the afterlife be as seamless to me as my entering into this life? Would I even know the difference?
Even divine punishment, were such to come, would be based solely on my own actions, which *I* know I committed, either negligently or with malice aforethought, do the crime, you're going to do the time, so to speak.
Assume God is smarter than you and knows what you did.
Such a viewpoint, however, requires a worldview founded upon something other than fear.
I keep seeing this statement by Marjorie Taylor Greene "COVID-19 is a bio-weapon because God would never create a fatal illness that harms people.
Really?
The Old Testament is full of stories of God destroying entire nations, harming people and sending plagues, and based on forced compliance, Obey me, or I burn your city, strike your firstborn dead and curse your descendants for a thousand generations. For fuck's sake it is the entire basis of the paradigm as outlined in the text. This was a system that got so out of hand God himself sent His Son to Earth to sacrifice himself in horrible fashion in order to fix it! Don't these fucking people know how to read warning labels?
God knows he's perfect and we're not and we can never be but he expects us to be. And he punishes us if we're not, you know what I'm saying? God is the ultimate gangster. The supreme mob boss, you know what I mean? Forgiveness, live by his code. Deadness, if we don't. Yo, he never has to talk to us face to face and he never has to explain exactly why he does what he does. Know what I'm saying? Nigga sits up there in Heaven somewhere, drinking a cappuccino, chilling [singing] "Got the whole world in his hands."
He got the whole world by the balls. In Excelsius Deo and all that shit. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" Season 1, Episode 3.
God is the ultimate gangster. If the suit fits, wear that motherfucker.
I've read the Bible cover-to-cover multiple times, the assessment presented by the character of Augustus Hill is not, in any way, shape or form, actually wrong.
And here's the kicker; For most of my life, Fundamentalist Christians of every sort reveled in exactly that ideal. Everybody from the harsh Calvinists who ruled South Africa in my childhood to Jerry Falwell talking about how God hated gay people to any given random nut on the internet over a decade later, if you said God is some harsh psychotic asshole that'd blow your face off at the slightest provocation, the basic answer they'd have for that might be a slightly theological "Yep."
They got off on that shit. I am utterly not joking.
As I've written before, one of the main inflection points in my exit from Christianity was some dude raging against LGBT people literally for weeks on a Christian message board, and because the staff refused to do anything about him and ultimately about that thread in any kind of consistent fashion, the incident basically wrecked the entire community.
I guess, given her Q-Anon insanity, I'd have expected something like that from Marjorie Taylor Greene, but thus far it's not that way at least not when she isn't in front of a camera or a crowd. Instead she's becoming mostly known for silly bullshit like these comments about COVID-19 and religion, and for passive-aggressive attempts to start shit with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Well, that and I think she's got some disgusting thing going with Matt Gaetz.
Despite her own murderous fascism and equally murderous intentions toward most people, Marjorie Taylor Greene's theology is far more "God, the Devil and Bob" than it is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." And you know, the funny part is back in the 1990's I read a vast number of Christian-authored books that predicted exactly this, the only thing they got wrong was that they believed the warm fuzzy theology covering up complete denial of Truth and murderous intent would be authored by liberals rather than by supposed conservatives.
Oops.
These vapid statements by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene have lately been making me angrier every time I see them. Assuming such beliefs are real, they imply that God is exactly as depicted in the cartoon "God, the Devil and Bob" a bearded, light-beer-drinking hippie God who eats Corn nuts, kind of a cosmic Jerry Garcia, who happily relies on the lowest common denominator of humanity to save the world and prevent the Devil from manipulating Him into destroying it.
If that is so, why the vast webs of conspiracy theories? Why are you even worried about any of this shit, much less in Congress? Wouldn't it be easier to stick to CrossFit, kipping your pullups and cheating on your husband with assorted gym customers? I mean, all's forgiven...for you anyway, by your hippie God...right? Why make a fool of yourself on the national stage?
Except, somewhere along the way lust for fame and power entered the chat.
And these are the things that define these fucking people.
Their fear...which leads to hate.
Their lust...which ultimately leads to greed and desire for power.
And their raw, vast insecurity, which leads to conspiracy madness and everything being everybody else's fault.
More to the point their fear, their insecurity and their lust are each such a vast, yawning Abyss, that you could in fact likely stuff an infinite God or two in there and not fill it. If we've learned anything in the past five years it's that these fucking people are moral holes with no bottom. And they will never be satisfied by anything. One can observe the goings-on in the United Kingdom with regard to Brexit and draw that conclusion fairly easily.
And I think it's because, on a basic level they don't believe in anything much at all, or rather that their beliefs are so watered down that they might as well not exist. This is what happened when American Christianity gave up small neighborhood churches and teaching the Word in the hope that somebody might walk away with a Christian idea or two sticking in their head, for the vast stadium-like megachurches and focus-grouped soundbite teachings of the Prosperity Gospel...and only then started demanding that people obey. They turned God into a cosmic Santa Claus for themselves, but then decided they wanted to use Him as a club to beat other people over the head with.
It doesn't work that way.
I grew up with hymns like "Onward Christian Soldiers" and fire and brimstone preaching was not something I was unfamiliar with. Nowadays lots of these "Christian" pop songs are fundamentally indistinguishable from vapid pop-culture bullshit and these people rely on Fox News and politics, not to keep themselves straight, but for a daily dose of "Screw your neighbors, anyway."
The thing is, Christianity (or for that matter Islam or Judaism as well) is about your relationship to an eternal God. The entire concept is that you are the one who requires salvation in some way. "Saving" society (all too often a code for inflicting your own bullshit on other people without their consent) doesn't even enter into the discussion, because it's taken as a given that the world is fallen and cannot be perfected, or that it is overrun by unbelief, or that the scriptures primarily concern your own group and others are held to a lesser standard. In other words, mind your own damned business.
God doesn't give a damn what those gay people over here or doing, nor those Pagans over there, we're talking about you right now.
But sinful Man likes to try and cover up his wrongs by pointing out the alleged faults of others. It doesn't work that way in the end. You're not going to be judged by what other people did, but by your own actions and intentions. Stop blaming your bullshit on other people.
But that's the thing isn't it? In these people's view, the gods are not examples or leaders but justifications and rationalizations for what they already want to do anyway and that really is all there is to it.
Despite MTG's talk about God never harming people, she's a member of a blood cult whose god is small and mean, a twisted monster who can't wait to send people (other than them, anyway) to hell, but whose meanness is also used to force compliance within the group, even as leadership or those connected to it are allowed to commit an endless array of sins and no one else is even allowed to comment on this. Accountability itself is held to such a high standard that it's never practiced, yet Heaven isn't Heaven if anybody other than them gets to go...and the only one they're ever certain is going to heaven is the Pastor.
It's always that way.
In the end, the modern Conservative god looks not so much like some Jerry Garcia knockoff from 20 years ago...but suspiciously like Donald Trump. Kind of explains a lot, doesn't it?
The thing is, I was taught you have to accept and study the whole of the text, which in some cases means reconciling certain things is going to be above your pay grade...and you have to accept the bad as well as the good. Not only are you not going to win all the time, but sometimes you might just lose for a reason. Yeah, you might fall, but in the end it's "Did you get up?" that's what matters. We are all citizens of an imperfect, vast and wonderful world and it's what we do in that world that matters, with the idea that we should do what we can to make things better.
Trying to Immanentize the Eschaton and perfect the world, rightly or wrongly was seen as the goals and the work of the Antichrist, and that, especially that they expected people to be giving up belief in the Almighty for the eventual worship of the State, was what was going to cause God to rain down fire.
It's funny how that belief has been turned on its head, isn't it? It's funny how certain so-called Conservatives now seem to want the State to solve all your problems and shape your world-view for you and this, that and the other thing, and how these same people want to use the State as a steel fist to smash their enemies, real and imagined, rather than simply believing in Karma or that one reaps as they sow and that higher powers will sort it all out in the end.
But after 30 years of End Times Prophecy bullshit, or maybe just about the same of talk radio and a generation of FOX News these people's heads have been filled with so much bullshit, their hearts filled with so much hate, and they've taken on the instant gratification mentality of America so much that they want it all right now, and they want to see it instead of just having faith that X or Y will happen. That's what Donald Trump was supposed to be for.
Since God never really was going to be that big stick, just for them, they needed some other thing as a stick to beat their enemies, real and imagined, about the head with. This need resulted not in worship of the State but worship of the Man, and under his continued rule of their lives (which these people, lacking compulsion, are allowing) every kind of immorality flourishes, all the more openly every day.
And that, historically and theologically, is exactly what causes God to rain down fire.
In fact, likely with that knowledge, they're doing it all the more in the hope that the fires will consume all the rest of us as well. The cruelty really is the fucking point.
Others can investigate it, prosecute it, imprison it, even suppress it by force but this mentality will persist to whatever degree it can until the fever breaks within these people themselves and until that happens even any attempts to limit the damage or suppress this shit will only cause those who believe in it to double down infinitely until they destroy themselves.
Even in that regard, they will persist in the hope that their self-destruction will mean the destruction of others. They offer themselves to the Devil and the Beast of Revelation in malign, mocking parody of Christ's sacrifice and substitutionary atonement, in the hope that it gets the rest of us incinerated.
And this they call righteousness.
I'm not sure what we're going to do about this mess, but we'd best think of something.
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months. And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven. And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations. And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. ~Revelation 13:4-8
#Top20
No comments:
Post a Comment