What Concord Hath Christ With Belial? (Left Behind Is A Lie II, Fourteen.)

Do you wanna be a poet and write
Do you wanna be an actor up in lights
Do you wanna be a soldier and fight for love
Do you wanna travel the world
Do you wanna be a diver for pearls
Or climb a mountain and touch the clouds above

Be anyone you want to be
Bring to life your fantasies
But I want something in return

I want you to burn
Burn for me, baby
Like a candle in my night (I want you to burn)
Burn for me, burn for me. ~Jo Dee Messina, Burn

On my lunch break at work the other night, I was bored and watching old country music videos.

And by "Old" I mean, stuff from my mid-to-late 20's. Yeah, think about that one for a second.

It struck me, having not seen most of the videos I watched in at least 20 years, just how diverse the people shown in the video were. And it's funny, nobody said a damn thing about that, at the time.

Hell, I remember one night, working at Walmart and the song quoted above was playing on the radio, standing around during a slow point on my shift, talking to a couple of my co-workers...one was a conservative Baptist dude like me. The other was an atheist lesbian who worked in the photo-lab (She was also a college student, which I was at the time, and we were in the same psychology class) and one of the Jamaican guys I worked with at my other job had seen me and came over to say hello, he'd caught a ride and come into town to get some stuff on his day off.

Somehow, somebody said something that turned the topic of conversation to matters like religion and social issues...and honestly, they were different from those of today only by degree, rather than substance. In point of fact, the most loudly opinionated on such matters was my Jamaican buddy.

Of the people in our immediate vicinity, it's a safe bet that Photo-lab chick was the only liberal present, and then just barely, by today's standards. (We're talking she still had a faded Bill Clinton 1996 bumper sticker on her car.)

For the time, that lady could be pretty strident in her beliefs, most of which seemed kind of edgy at the time but...for Democrats and anti-Trump conservatives at least, most of that stuff passed into being merely "normal" years ago.

We had, within the constraints of the moment, a fairly animated discussion until things picked up a bit and those of us who were on the clock had to get back to work.

And yet, everybody got along. I look back on moments like that, and I honestly wonder what the hell happened since. Although I'm not so sure it was that different of a world, things were distributed differently. 

For one thing, my co-worker had a (company-provided!) Pride flag pin on her blue Walmart vest. So, going on 23 years ago now, was Walmart "Woke?"

I was a conservative Republican at the time. I embraced the "Compassionate Conservatism" espoused by then-candidate George W. Bush and would for several years after identify myself as a neo-Conservative along similar lines.

If you would have told me, in the fall of 2000, that "Conservatives" in the year 2023 would be openly expressing desires for everything from [political] Authoritarianism, to death in the street from disease like medieval peasants to incest, monarchism and a form of neo-Communism that even stripped away the meager "benefits" of that system...I'd probably have punched you in the face.

Just the contradiction of it all blows my mind. But I guess it does so less if I consider the fact that the only thing really important to most of these people is "Owning The Libs" (whatever that means.) If you're stuck in a perpetual Opposite-Day vs. Somebody Else, obviously you can't really be expected to be consistent.

I mean, shit, as I've written before...I'd only just, over the course of the previous spring, divested myself from the End Times Prophecy movement. I knew from having been in that, that constant fear and needing to have an emotional reaction all the goddamn time isn't good for people.

I was still, very much indeed, grappling with the fact that Left Behind was a Lie.

Even so, My then-girlfriend (and later ex-wife) and I were both devout Christians and consistent churchgoers.

By my decision, we went to a Baptist church that was close to home most of the time, but on Wednesdays she'd often hang out with family in town while I was at work and go to the Pentecostal church by her Mom's house. (By mutual agreement with my boss, I preferred to have Sunday mornings off so we could go to church and the company was, at the time, committed to honoring that kind of thing. If I worked a Sunday evening, my ex would usually come into town with me and she'd go to church at her church.) 

Of the two, her church was by far the more diverse, because a lot of the Jamaicans who had Green Cards, work visas, etc. that lived in the area year-round went there. One of our CSM's...a skinny "metrosexual" (as the term went at the time) white kid, also went to that church and his wife (who was Jamaican-Canadian and part of my ex's group of bar-hopping and Karaoke friends) had some leadership position or other. 

My Baptist church was all white, but I'm here to tell you, when my ex and I got married they treated my Air Force bros who I invited just fine...and it was a pretty diverse group. One of my dudes was, in fact, an African American Muslim. Honestly, I think he found more common ground than differences with the Baptists, that day.

If things like racism were an issue in those days, such things weren't expressed so openly. 

If things like trying to censor information on LGBT issues (or even on the existence of LGBT people) were on anyone's mind, nobody said so. And there were...even in my neck of the woods...a fair number of gay people around and we knew they were gay. 

Homophobia was an issue...but it was mainly the preserve of angry old men, rednecks and religious fanatics. It'd be a few years yet before it was picked up as a cause by the Republican Party, and I was against that shit then, too.

Of course, as far as these people go, if my ex-wife is any indication the last we spoke, a couple years ago, her religion had turned into nothing but a wild mishmash of conspiracy theories.

Nowadays it seems like "Conservatives" see every single damn thing as a conspiracy against "Conservatives."

Nowadays, these fucking people would rather play for second, or only to not lose...if not simply submit without even fighting...against Putinist neo-Communism. As somebody who grew up when the Soviet Union was called the "Evil Empire" by none other than Ronald Reagan, the idea that conservatives would bow to a country whose army currently flies the Hammer And Sickle sickens me.

The idea that Christians or Republicans would lift up somebody who is a murderer or keep feeding a goddamned narcissist long after they're out of office just blows my damn mind.

Kevin McCarthy says he wants to "Expunge" Trump's impeachment. Okay. You mean you seriously want to re-litigate not one but two cases where dude beat the charges? Our system don't work like that. 

You beat the shit, leave it be before somebody suspects you've got a guilty conscience and does more digging and finds stuff they didn't charge you with the first time.

Also good luck getting that past either the Senate or the Executive Branch.

The world done changed on us while Republicans were chasing after conspiracy theories and stupidity, among other things. It does no good to try and make laws about it now. 

And it done changed even more while these fucking people were bowing before the Idol of a goddamned narcissist and tried to overthrow our government. more to the point, Republicans changed too, to the point that they've combined the worst aspects of far-left and far-right and this they call "Conservatism." 

I can't even imagine threatening a brewery because they didn't want to host your favorite two-bit murderer. Freedom of speech means you also get to not speak, or to have the right to control what is said on your property or decide not to host an event.

It's funny how "Conservatives" like the idea of abolishing free speech and private property any time anybody tells them "No" isn't it?

No, you do not have a right to an audience. No one has to give you a forum.

I don't even get it anymore...because this bullshit is as foreign to anything I was ever taught to believe in, that it's as if somebody randomly walked up to me and started extolling the virtues of North Korean Juche.

I cannot and will not support any political philosophy whose sole animating idea seems to be to tear down America, the liberal-democratic world-civilization that keeps us all alive, and the very concept of freedom.

I'm not down with the "Pro-Life" people embracing a neo-Communist dictatorship that commits genocide and murders children, nor Republicans who don't want to help the people fighting against it.

And such is not far off, these "Conservatives" idea of "freedom" sounds to me like life in a Soviet or North Korean Gulag.

And it seems like if they had the choice between that Gulag...and seeing a black person and a gay person and two normal white [small-c] conservative dudes having a conversation and knowing that corporate America encourages diversity. It's like the "Conservatives" would pick the Gulag...so long as they got to be a better class of prisoner than some of the other prisoners.

As a Christian, I was taught per the words of the Apostle Paul, that light has no communion with darkness. 

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?

And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ~2nd Corinthians 14:16

I don't understand being faced with the choice of darkness and light, and then choosing darkness because you think it'll hurt somebody else's feelings...or somehow thinking your choice of darkness will put somebody else in worse darkness than you.

Aren't you then...both in darkness?

And I understand even less, not caring who that person is, only having the knowledge that there must be somebody. Heaven isn't Heaven if everybody gets to go, there must be a sacrifice to the Blood God.

What does it matter your "Relative Status" if you're both stuck living in a New Dark Age?

Again, and I know I've asked this before; What concord hath Christ with Belial?

Why do Republicans think they'll forever get away with half-measures according to convenience? Again, Jesus specifically said...using water as an analogy...that he would spit out those who were neither hot nor cold, but merely lukewarm.

And it seems like if "Conservatives" know that...or ever did...they no longer care.

Feeling important in the moment, or "Owning the Libs" or winning some "Argument" that exists only on the internet or in their own heads is more important. No one cares enough to bother with anything more.

I can no longer understand these fucking people, and you know what?

Maybe I just don't want to.

Thirteen

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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