Party Like It's 1499.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people? ~Karen Armstrong

...

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

I saw this earlier.

Steve Bannon wishes Europe would go back to the 16th century in terms of religious belief.

He seems to forget how we got here, literally.

Do you know how, and why that whole Reformation thing got started?

In 1517 a guy named Martin Luther, a theology professor who would later translate the Bible into German...also stimulating literacy and the written word at a critical time...nailed a document called the 95 Theses or the Disputation of the power of Indulgences to the door of a castle church in Wittenberg, Germany.

And without him knowing or giving permission, people copied that shit down and it spread like wildfire...and there was a reason for that.

You know what an "Indulgence" was? It was a piece of paper that you purchased from a priest that said your sins were forgiven. I mean, a lot of this shit was pretty routine. These things were sold openly. Of course, it was the wealthy who could afford to do this the most often and European royalty, nobility and the wealthy at the time (But I repeat myself) engaged in levels of depravity that today would be considered shocking. Incestuous marriages to keep wealth and power within families were routine...as was a level of adultery and closeted homosexuality that would make the Florida legislature and CPAC seem tame by comparison.

I mean, seriously, dude wants to bang his aunt, his cousin or his sister and have that shit be legal? Just write a letter to the Bishop, the Cardinal, or even the Pope begging for an Indulgence and there you have it. The (in)famous Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, that every American kid of a certain age knows from the bullshit Columbus stories in Elementary school history? They were first cousins.

(You want to know why American "Conservative" Christianity post-Roe is strangely preoccupied with incest and the idea of grown-ass men having sex with young girls? Start right there.)

The Habsburgs, the royal family that ruled much of Catholic Europe at the time have a whole slew of genetic deformities with their name on it because of this kind of garbage.

I should add, the average person in Europe at the time didn't have jack shit, and especially if one did not live in a city they were damned lucky to have their own freedom. Many European peasants were serfs, basically slaves, tied to the land they worked, in practical terms owned by the same knights and lords who owned the land.

And the Church condoned this BS. In point of fact, the Church was in on it, and owned plenty of land and people its own self. A decent-sized chunk of Italy was in fact the "Papal States" literally a kingdom with the Pope as sovereign.

If you could read, you couldn't read the Word of God in your own language...and thus find out that none of thus stuff works that way. (This was done entirely on purpose, with malice aforethought by the medieval Catholic Church. Remember that the next time you see some "Traditionalist Catholic" on Twitter.)

People fought and died for the right to read the Lord's Word in their own language, do not forget this.

And people got tired of this bullshit. After the Reformation got started, wars were fought over this stuff, for the better part of three centuries.

(And this is the kind of crap that "Conservatives" want to go back to?)

Colonization, Genocide, mass murder and theft of every kind...all were given the stamp of approval by the Church, if not by the Pope himself.

(And seriously, people with all the self-awareness of a dog licking its ass in the middle of the street wonder why so much of the world is irreligious?)

Latin America is Latin America because the Pope wrote a Papal Bull (Apologia justifying whatever BS) that divided the New World between Portugal and Spain. The only reason that most of North America wasn't included was that the Native civilizations north of Mesoamerica weren't seen as wealthy enough for conquest and plunder. Of course, there were plenty of unintended consequences of all this and the rest of the world didn't just obey the Pope, either. 

This is pretty much how the Golden Age of Piracy happened.

People find a way, to say "Fuck the rules" and decide they don't want to live under that kind of bullshit.

And Republicans wonder why Generation Z, LGBT folk, and People of Color don't vote for them? 

The absolute truth is that Christianity (especially, but not exclusively the politically-conservative side of it) from the Crusades to the Indian Wars to slavery to colonialism to the goddamn fuckin' Nazis, the "Church" rarely if ever failed to knuckle under to atrocity and/or openly side with genocide and murder or at least roll over for it after some half-ass attempt at protest.

It's my literal, lived experience that white Conservatives are shockingly ignorant of all this history, and I think too much of that is with deadly intent, perpetrated by their political and religious leaders.

The True Faith of too much of Western Christianity is in a trinity of control, empire and profit. In the end, Islam...no matter how radical...has historically had better morals. I mean, most religions have spent their fair share of times doing bad things to people...but nobody tops the medieval and Reformation-era Catholic Church, nor Colonial-era Protestantism for pure savagery on a sustained basis. 

You could probably argue in the short term that Communism comes close...but the Communists didn't hold monarchial, totalitarian power for hundreds of years, either.

The whole idea of America...and, indeed, of most of modern Europe is the secular state...for a goddamned reason. Citizenship, not peasantry or serfdom or subjection, is the core ideal of America in particular.

Our founders built America on the ideals of the Enlightenment because what had gone before was still within living memory, indeed, some of them had fought in the Seven Years War, which was either the last of the wars of religion, or the one where Europe began the long, slow climb to modernity, depending on how you want to interpret things.

God doesn't get to vote here. He's not a citizen of the United States.

It was the Constitutionalist, Agnostic and Deistic founding fathers, not the Calvinist Pilgrims (who'd been chased out of the UK and the Netherlands because the government wouldn't let them murder people) who founded America, and don't you dare forget that.

George Washington was a hard worker, and liked to go to church on Sunday mornings as much as anything else, to catch a nap. For this reason his family's pew faced away from the pulpit. I learned that in a college history class, and later actually went and saw what my instructor had been talking about.

This is America, the whole idea is "You can do that here."

And a whole hell of a lot of Europe, right or wrong, told God to go fuck himself awhile ago. Yes, the fact that Christianity as a whole had no problem with fascists and Nazis absolutely was a big factor in that decision.

And I'm here to tell you fuckers, picking on Black people, LGBT folks, senior citizens and women ain't the power moves you think it all is.

I have no desire to live in the 16th goddamned century, life where we're at is hard enough.

I'm a citizen, not a Serf. My government saw fit to have me swear an oath to our Constitution and trained me to use weapons, and I'll fight anybody who tries to change that. I swore to defend pluralistic democracy, not religious bullying, and I'm not the only one. I don't give a damn what religion you use to try and justify it.

If it's the "Fight" you live for, or if you have "Sola Gratia" in your bio but are forever unwilling to extend that grace to others, maybe America and Christianity and pluralistic democracy aren't the things you even want.

These fucking people are leaning into Traditionalist Catholicism...because they want all the immoralities described herein, because the cruelty is the point, and they want to feel righteous about it.

Right and wrong have nothing to do with your religion. Maybe y'all might want to change that.

Слава Україна!

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