Triple 6 Chromo (Serpent In The Garden, 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.
Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:23-27

I saw this earlier.

Some Q-Anon morons are claiming that snake blood was put into vaccines to "Inject people with Satan's DNA.

And I just blew a gasket.

First of all, Snakes as a class, order and clade of animals have not one damned thing to do with Satan, theologically...except that's the form that was used to tempt Eve in the garden. And there's a whole huge range of theological arguments and this, that and the other thing that crosses even religious lines in terms of arguing about who it actually was and why they did it.

Injecting a human with snake DNA would do...nothing, unless there was something in it you were allergic to, maybe? 

I was a Christian for most of my life. I was raised in Church. I have a church background and theological education. I went to Christian schools, I was required to know this stuff and to learn more of it on a daily basis for most of my childhood.

Like, are you kidding me?

More to the point, as a Believer, I read the Bible, I read books about the Bible. I still own a lot of those books and I read through some of them today just to remind myself that this kind of superstitious bullshit is not the totality of the religious experience. I'm serious, there is a vast interplay of culture, language, philosophy and religion all mixed together in any part of the Word, and not only that but even within that context, language itself creates and shapes ideas and reshapes the texts over the course of translation and interpretation. You have to know where and when a given text came from, and what cultural context it was written in, among many other things To know this stuff...and to know it rightly...you have to have at least a general knowledge of a lot of other stuff. I'm 100% not kidding. 

And some people glean nothing more from all this than an excuse to kill their neighbors.

I could write a dozen, a hundred posts about this stuff and not begin to do it justice. And I've tried, even in the context of explaining my own spiritual journeys.

And some people boil this down to "THEY Are Trying To Give Us SATAN By Vaccinating Us!"

As if the Accuser were a pathogen one could catch...?

You know, at least in the Bible some people got struck dead or otherwise suffered real consequences for blasphemous stupidity...

I'm sorry, I just get tired of this garbage, day in and day out. It never stops with these fanatics who are, in effect, fanatical about...fanaticism for its own sake? Most of these people don't even know what they believe so ardently, much less are so angry about.

I used to work in a kitchen at a casino. Most of the time, trained monkeys could have done my job. So, I'd find shit to do, talk to co-workers when it was slower, think on stuff, years worth of gaming scenarios were generated on slow nights at work, and so on.

I'd occasionally think up some random question and poll co-workers. I worked with a lot of religious people, and sometimes that played into my thinking on these questions.

For Example; Question: What are the 95 Theses, Who composed them and put them up for public consumption and where did they do so? And what religious movement resulted from this event?

Answer: A list of propositions widely considered to form the basis of Protestant Christian theology, composed and nailed to the door of a church in Wittenburg, Germany by Martin Luther, which is considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

Is this really that hard for people? This stuff is basic history and religious doctrine.

And as with the Bronze Age and the Classical Era, and the Dark Ages that followed, this period of time had its own sets of cultural impacts. Many of these effects, such as the creation of many modern denominations and theological strains are still felt today and each of which themselves further affected doctrine, interpretation, religious practice and text.

And yes, for the sake of completeness, there were plenty of cultural and philosophical movements against this stuff, too, later on. And we're still feeling the direct and rather kinetic effects of those today as well.

No matter what "Biblical Literalists" and Fundamentalists might tell you, all this stuff was never set in stone, it's a living, breathing history of which we're all a part whether we want to be or ever asked to be or not. Civilization is a collaborative, multicultural, pluralistic effort. And it's not always easy or fun and sometimes there are many unintended consequences.

But I'll tell you one thing for sure.

There's no religious extremism in the world, nor has there ever been, that bothers me to the degree that the rise of this atheistic modern conspiracy-theory driven techno-Gnosticism that's expressed in bullshit like Putinism, "Q-Anon" and Trumpism.

Whether one draws one's certainties from religion or science, in order for one to push back against Power one must have one's feet set on a hard floor of Truth, and one must have the freedom to build and to have and to maintain that foundation. This can only exist in the context of a democratic, pluralistic society. Now I don't give a damn if the truth one uses for this is Darwin's theory of Evolution or that God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. People have to have this, and conspiracy theories, false doctrines, junk science, quack medicine and religious extremism are nothing more than shades of the same effort by forces of Greed and Power to undermine Truth on a conceptual level. 

And that's all that's going on here.

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If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan