I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said "Here am I; Send me."~Isaiah 6:8
"Us."
Apparently God is Okay with using plural pronouns every now and again.
Which is odd, because I saw an article yesterday that said "They is not a Pronoun for God."
In fact, according to the linked article, the transphobia is the goddamn point.
I mean, why believe anything if you can't hate somebody for it? That's basically the core of Evangelical belief, right there.
While the article acknowledged cultural and social change, and the fact that language evolves with that, they start off with a linguistic defense, which very quickly morphs into trying to cut out some kind of exception for God because "God Is Holy" and should therefore be above such petty cultural concerns.
Except of course they forget to factor in that they're trying to preserve or promote the way their specific Evangelical subculture addresses the nature and the pronouns of God.
"God doesn't have a gender, but His pronouns do."
Bullshit.
If your aunt had a dick, she'd be your uncle.
At it's core, their argument is dishonest horse shit as usual. Kind of like how God doesn't have a race but they always depict God as an old white man with a long white beard, and Jesus is usually a white man with long brown hair, and a shorter, more neatly trimmed mustache and beard.
The patriarchy and racism are the fucking point.
And it's funny how nobody ever seems to think that God might have His own opinion in these matters, as reflected in Bible verses where the text doesn't rigidly adhere to modern Christian ideas of homophobia and transphobia.
Hell, these people never even stop to think that sexuality was often viewed differently in the ancient world, to start with, than it is now. And of course these goddamned prudes don't have the guts to just make idols of dicks like the ancient Romans did.
But their large-scale undercurrents of male dominance and misogyny really are exactly that, just updated for a world where these people don't have the guts to say "Fuck" anymore.
But it's really worse than that...
"God isn't X or Y, but we're going to describe him as exactly X and Y because it makes us feel better about ourselves and reinforces our false claims that we should dominate society forever. Certainly none of our people will question that Jesus looks more like them than he does like those other people."
It's like how, in the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs and Daffy are in the Himalayas dealing with the Abominable Snowman, Daffy throws Bugs under the bus and then as he's sneaking away he's like "I'm not like other people, I can't stand pain. It hurts me."
They literally do not give a shit about anybody else, period.
And it's funny how the Word of God is holy and timeless and true and must be taken exactly literally...until it isn't.
The constant hypocrisy was a big part of what drove me out of Christianity.
And it's only getting worse.
It's like how they fanatically believed in Jesus...until somebody turns up that they like better than they like Jesus, and it doesn't appear to matter to them if that person treats breaking the Ten Commandments like it's nothing and treats the Seven Deadly Sins like a to-do list while professing utter ignorance of the Scriptures or the traditions of the Christian church beyond the social dominance and successful colonization assured by guns, germs and steel.
And for that the Word is little more than a rationalization, a means to control colonized peoples and then to try and justify and maintain dominance as decolonization accelerated.
And that is exactly what Donald Trump is to these people, they see him as their protector against social change and a return to colonizing other people. How's that working out?
They're mostly the ones being colonized by the greedy rich, and these fucking people are going along with it willingly because they think they'll get something out of it.
Americans are the ones destroying American language and culture and all that stuff, and it has nothing to do with the Left or with transgender people.
These people would rather become an Idiocracy and die of disease or gun violence or submit to fascism, because they think it'll tweak "The Left" somehow.
There's no survival instinct, no thought for the future, and most of all no attempt at even the most basic sincere, good faith leadership. They don't want to have to show why they're superior or their ideas are any better...they just want it to be considered so, automatically.
And they're willing to force, to kill, to lie and to steal to make that happen.
And then these fucking people have the nerve to wonder why the influence of their sects is declining?
It's funny, for a few decades there, and for a lot of reasons a lot of African countries gravitated towards the Soviet bloc for various things, and thus toward more secular beliefs. But, you know, 30 years after all that came crashing down it's funny how Christianity thrives far more in modern Africa where the people who live there can do things their own way and according to their own cultures...than it ever did before.
(But that's not what the Evangelicals really want, is it, now?)
Though it's funny how the African Christians tend to only have the same sorts of political and social beliefs as American Christians when there's a lot of American missionary activity and shit. Like when Christian missionaries were actively spreading homophobia back during the early-to-mid aughts.
I know some deeply religious African Christians, mostly via my old job or Facebook...and a lot of them, politically, are basically socialists.
They're still believers. Political and social beliefs vary by culture as much as anything else.
In fact, African churches send missionaries here, now. And no, not always for the best of purposes.
Think about that, for a second.
Get over yourselves, white people.
In the Pacific island nations, there are a lot of gay and transgender people, it's a part of those cultures and their traditions...and a hell of a lot of LGBT Pacific Islanders are conservative, fundamentalist Christians. They might or might not gravitate toward American-style right-wing-ism but even if they do, even a transgender Samoan person (for example) might be Fundamentalist as fuck, often on a level that's not really cool in America anymore.
And the difference is, a lot of those people really believe it.
To them, it's not just something to beat other people over the head with, or to justify their prejudices. It's funny how religion changes when cruelty and patriarchy, social dominance and White Supremacy or Superiority aren't the fucking point of it all.
But, again, that's not the world these Evangelicals want to live in, now is it?
Empty the fucking pews.
Starve these people and their shitty churches of attention and money and see how fast people like Kenneth Copeland end up hawking Bitcoin and NFT's and "Let's Go Brandon" merchandise, because Jesus never really mattered in the first place.
There was a bit in the novel "Tribulation Force" the second book of the Left Behind Series, that I always found mind-boggling.
In this scene where there's a bunch of religious leaders negotiating to form the series' cheesy "One world religion" there's this bit where a member of the Rastafari movement is quoted as saying "God is above us and around us and in us, God is us, We are God." Now, even at that time I'd worked with a few Jamaican Rastas and I'm reading this thinking "That's not what Rastafari really believes!"
Because I know people, because I've always listened to people and found it interesting to talk to people who believe in different faiths, even when I was a conservative Christian, I knew better than that. So that line boggled my mind for years.
But when you look at bullshit lines like that as projection, it makes perfect sense now, doesn't it?
These fucking people believe that they are God, in the age of Trump they've appointed him as their representative and literally put up golden idols to that effect. And so of course they're absolutely going to get all persnickety about His pronouns.
Because they don't believe in a higher power that might have its own opinion about such things.
These people, one and all, see their true "god" every time they look at their own face in the mirror, so of course that "deity" must reflect their own prejudices.
OF COURSE "THEY" IS NOT GOD'S PRONOUN!!!!
God, or any gods that might actually exist, doesn't get a say as far as these people are concerned. That's not the world "Conservatives" want. They don't want God or Jesus to actually be living, all-powerful entities that might hold them to account.
No one acts more like they believe Christianity is bullshit and God is not real than the white American evangelical Christians do.
Because all "He" is, is their reflection.
And they tell us this constantly, hoping we won't notice or the actual substance of their message will get lost in the noise.
Because they think it's all about them. Anything else is bullshit.
That's all.
And then they wonder how their religion basically has become the Eater Of Souls?
I know how.
It eats souls, it turns people into monsters, that's how.
"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''
"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''
"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''
He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''
The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' ~From A Colder War, a novella by Charles Stross.
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