Fuck Off, Bird. (Reason For The Season, Ten.)

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. 

~Matthew 5:43-48

I kept seeing stuff like this yesterday. 

"People never become atheists for intellectual reasons, but for sinful reasons. People become atheists because they don’t want to be held morally accountable for the sins that they love."

I'm not sure I've seen that much of a damned Strawman since I used to watch the Wizard Of Oz every year or so as a kid.

For all the talk about Christian Nationalism lately, I've legit not seen that kind of argumentation basically anywhere since I used to be an admin on the ex-Pentecostal forum and have to ban idiot trolls like that every damned day.

Until yesterday.

Even pretty much all the remaining Christians I communicate with know better than this kind of stuff

I'm not going to bother to engage and take this garbage apart theologically. That implies that I think this dude posted it in good faith in the first place. Suffice it to say, that this is but one of many different interpretations, and one you don't see too much anymore...certainly not from decent people.

There's no purpose in engaging theologically, in even implying this bad-faith, my-way-or-the-highway shit is a legitimate argument for anything in a diverse, secular culture. The only question anybody should even bother asking is "Why should I follow this?"

And the only answer you'll ever get is more of the same, because they don't actually have an answer that falls outside of the same kind of religiosity-based claptrap. To call it a circular argument implies that they thought enough about it to call it an argument. It implies these people want any outcome other than to say "You're going to hell!"

I heard enough of this crap for the first 34 years of my life.

It needs to be understood, to these kinds of people, religion is nothing more than a weapon to be wielded against people they don't like...and should they successfully bully somebody into accepting it...turning some other person into one of these Stepford-clone Evangelicals is the ultimate form of erasure.

And then "Based on my Retweets" Twitter hit me up with more of the same.

Fuck off, Bird.

These people don't care about Jesus, they want ethnic and political cleansing, fascism and genocide of the people they don't like...which is basically everybody including Christians and conservatives who've accepted any degree of modernity. 

(Which, again, is most of them because we all have to live in the world and most people will get fired for being openly anti-LGBT, fascist or racist. Capitalism needs/wants everybody's money, and that's why these idiots want to destroy it.)

And if religion doesn't work as a justification...and it really doesn't, because even the most stringent form of Fundamentalist Christianity that pays the least attention to the Word imposes limits on their behavior...there's always conspiracy theories.

But then there's people like Muskrat looking to indulge that shit, if only so they can monetize that infinitely-moveable goalpost to try and make up for the losses from all the stupid shit they've done.

But make no mistake, that's not all that's going on here. 

I have no doubt that somewhere, Muskrat has somebody digging through lines of code somewhere in the electronic guts of The Bird (if he's not doing it himself, micromanaging twit that he apparently is.) tying to find the Liberal Source Code or Secret Sauce or Something Something Gazpacho...because these are the same idiots who thought the Blue Check meant people were some sort of Progressive Secret Society, rather than, you know, simply who they say they are.

He thinks the culture of Twitter...the company as well as the content/users...was imposed by somebody or something else. And Muskrat wants to find it so he can monetize or weaponize whatever it is. 

That's just how a lot of these people see the world. It's bullshit, but you can't make these people see that. They have to find that mental space for themselves. He doesn't understand it's the people.

He doesn't understand the world's not changing, it's done changed. While Republicans were playing Hide The Sausage with Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay or blowing up a good chunk of the Middle East or going down endless conspiracy rabbit holes themselves for years, while people like Elongate were out doing other things...the rest of us just kept on living.

And along the way, adapting, learning to work around or with the new gay coworker, the lesbian roommates, the friends coming out as transgender, the different cultures and people from around the world represented in the ferret group on Facebook.

Because, ya know, we just gotta live. Most of us, in a world that doesn't have time for our personal bullshit. And remember, I was a (small-c) conservative.

Doesn't matter.

I don't have the patience or privilege or time or the lack of compassion necessary to try and put my life or anyone else's on hold because of some willfully ignorant uninvolved third party's opinion.

More to the point as somebody steeped in Christianity and the philosophical guts of "Western Culture" I absolutely know that doing so would not be Just.

It certainly does not reflect the conduct of Jesus as described in the Bible.

And people whose thing is ideology or technocracy don't understand that. To come to understand it would mean they...and the ideas they regard as or even above holy writ...would have to change.

And oh my God are these fucking people pissed about that.

They keep trying to force a large spherical world into a very small cubic box and if that's unjust, well, they simply don't care.

It's supposed to be the time of Peace On Earth and Goodwill Towards Men, but of course hate is more important to them than any of that.

Even Christmas is nothing more to these nuts than a stick to beat somebody else with.

I just...couldn't do it. And more to the point, I don't want to. There was a time we were supposed to be better than that.

And now, at this time of year Twitter wants to promote hate and religiosity??

Fuck off, Bird.

Nine

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

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