Do not tempt the Lord your God (On Mehadism, Part Four.)

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,

And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. ~Matthew 4:5-7

I keep seeing this shit. "The Blood of Christ is my vaccine" or whatever.

Didn't these people ever hear "Do not test the Lord your God" or as I've also heard it my whole life "Don't push your luck."

I mean, seriously, I spent most of my life as one kind or another of Christian. That you go to the fucking doctor when you contract a deadly disease isn't even a question as far as I'm concerned...and I say that as somebody who doesn't LIKE to go to the doctor one bit. I spent too much time in the hospital and in and out of mental health and outpatient care in my 20's. But you bet your ass when my work offered the vaccine I got my name on the list immediately. Still took the Tribe's health care agency over a month to get to me, but at least they did. I wasn't going to complain. God isn't going to miraculously heal you. He does not work that way, and in any case the need for miracles to prove His glory ended when the Word was written down and compiled.

Don't get me wrong, there's occasional things I and other people consider miraculous, but when there's stories of some miraculous healing from religious people 95% of the time they're just that, stories. And there was a time I'd have viewed this stuff as relatively harmless, but in the post-Information, Internet Age the stories and the truth have been stripped away from each other. Honestly, these days, the wilder and more improbable the story is the more likely it'll gain traction on Facebook.

But ya know, that's the thing. The people who are rejecting medicine and science and vaccines, they're *Not* doing it out of unshakable faith in God. 

They're doing it because it's what their social group is doing, and because every last one of them *Hopes* to receive some miraculous healing or other because they want that 15 minutes of fame and the wealth they think it would bring. That's all. They're doing this, at the least, because of the lure of cheap internet fame at the minimum.

They're doing it, fundamentally, because they have more faith in Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson than they ever had in Jesus Christ.

Isn't that idolatry? Isn't trying to use spiritual things to cheat the universe the basics of what all of the Abrahamic traditions define as sorcery or witchcraft?

Or have my former people simply lost any and all ability to detect bullshit when they see it, as well as any inclination to try?

I believe it's something different; When people have convinced themselves that they are the center of the universe, the protagonists of reality, they think whatever they want to believe is real and whatever any Gods say about that is irrelevant.

Because they think that they are God.

This is the core tenet of Mehadism, right here. 

Whether it comes out of fanaticism for its own sake, just plain narcissism, self-centered religiosity, or the Tijuana donkey show of modern conservative politics (and its attendant belief in belief for its own sake) is irrelevant. It's here and it's a problem and we're going to have to do something about it.

Because this shit absolutely has become violent, the competence or scope of said violence is not a factor in the nature of the problem. That it exists at all is bad enough. The Proud Boys spent last weekend engaging in street brawls, petty crime and vandalism in Portland, and damned little was done about it. 

Here, for example, is these brave, pro-American souls vandalizing some disabled person's adapted van before they tip it over. I'm sorry, but what exactly is this supposed to accomplish other than damaging the property of and severely inconveniencing a person who very likely can't really afford it? And I mean, sure, the van is likely insured, but what are they supposed to do about transportation while it's getting fixed?

And you're telling me that these fools couldn't find some hippie person's Subaru to damage? This is in Portland. No, I think the disabled person's van...which is clearly marked as handicap-accessible and has plates indicating such was targeted on purpose, because the fucking cruelty is the point.

The lack of consideration or thought, the cruelty to The Other and the deliberate targeting of people in already distressed circumstances are hallmarks of fascism, yes, but also a key indicator of Mehadism. The last thing your basic Mehadist ever wants to think about is that they could become disabled or 'lesser' so they strike out at disabled people or people they think of as lesser than themselves because they think by driving them away, by not seeing them, then they won't have to think about "There but for the grace of God go I" or any such thing...because the thought of being stripped of their [imaginary] superiority is the one thing they fear most of all...and these motherfuckers fear basically everything outside of the very narrow little bubbles that they inhabit, and their lack of life experience and unwillingness to learn anything itself will also affect their competence.

(Regarding the picture and that these morons gassed themselves...this is NOT how you learn to use a gas mask. 

If these people ever come face to face with police who aren't ideologically in the bag with them, much less trained soldiers, what's going to happen will be an atrocity for which the people who radicalized these morons should be held accountable. They will get their asses beat or they will be killed in great numbers...and they won't even know why. Why is that? Because, thanks to their ideology of Mehadism, they literally do not understand that bad things can happen to them, that they can lose. This has already been observed among incarcerated 1/6 participants and caused mental health problems, worse than the ones they had before at least.)

It sounds like a hell of a way to live, if you ask me.

Don't be these fucking people.

Part Three.