Satan's Sermons (The Killing Fields, Again, Two.)

And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am?

And they answered, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets.

And he said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answered and said unto him, Thou art the Christ.

And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And he spoke that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.

But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.

And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. ~Mark 8:27-38

I saw this earlier.

A lot of Republicans are mad because Mike Johnson evidently turned some kind of Republican retreat supposedly dedicated to trying to preserve their slim majority into a damn Evangelical church service.

If only anybody had, ya know, tried to warn them that this 1990's Focus On The Family Evangelical shit-bag would do, ya know, exactly that.

*Checks Notes* Like I Did.

And yet somehow 99% of the shit these fucking people are ever on about isn't even stuff that's in the Bible...because for the most part it wasn't even thought of yet. Invariably, this bullshit has nothing to do with God or Jesus, it's all about Power for the Few, usually some small and totally self-appointed group.

I'm serious.

Like, literally the only woman I knew for a very long time who'd had am abortion was a 40-something married lady from my church. She'd have died if she hadn't had it...which would have left her (I'm being serious, here) six already-born kids without a mother. (And, fun fact, once whatever the issue was got fixed, she'd go on to have a couple more.) Her husband was on staff, they both had good jobs and were active, literally tithe-paying members who were there damn near every time the doors were open.

But, ya know, there was a small clique of nuts in our church...mostly relatively new, hell I'd been there longer than most of them had...who was determined that this lady should have died for their unrelenting fanaticism.

And a lot of the rest of us tried like hell to protect this family from these motherfuckers. They just kept making this couple's church life (and ultimately, as much of life outside of the church as they could reach) hell. It got to the point where the husband had to change jobs (which turned out to be an upgrade that meant his wife could quit her job and went back to school.) Ultimately even the Pastor asked some of those nuts to leave. (They refused, ultimately he left and they didn't.)

It ended up that within a few months, that lady ended up going from being in my church to being in my biology class at the local Community College, and they not only found a different Baptist church that didn't have a clique of social-climber nuts...I ultimately followed them a few months later. I went to that church for a couple years as well, and even switched to a different one in what was (at the time) an association of several independent Baptist churches.

Fun fact, but later on and for different reasons than me, both of those people more-or-less ended up being neither conservative nor religious.

Which the fanatics (or such of them as I would keep tabs on, at least) also later cited as some kind of "proof" of Something Something Gazpacho.

Meanwhile, the nuts...flush from there success at running people out just for the grave sin of the Wife wanting to be alive...decided to go after the new assistant Pastor. He was a young guy with a big mustache and a penchant for Looney Tunes neckties who worked as a construction foreman. 

And he and his wife had been able to have a family in the first place because of IVF. She had some kind of medical issue, It wasn't my place to even ask what.

They had several kids, always squeaky-clean, well-behaved kids.

They were very much the same kind of Biblical-Inerrant, Creationist, Focus On The Family types then "In Vogue" in conservative Christianity...and unlike the previously-mentioned couple, this guy's wife didn't work and was very much the mild-mannered, mousy domestic servant and penis-washer that the fucking fanatics said was the Greatest Thing Ever. 

This dude is literally how I became aware of Promise Keepers, he was a member of that crap. 

I mean you even wanna talk modern gun-happy bullshit...I was one of the people who made an effort, with this guy, to organize various and assorted hunting stuff through the Church during Deer Season of 1998.

And this was what that (by then growing) group of fanatics said they wanted.

But ya know, the wife also had that medical issue, and they'd trusted in modern medicine and science to get it resolved in such a way that they could, ya know, live according to their interpretation of the Lord's Word. 99% of the world (and the rest of us) were fine with that.

But it wasn't good enough for the nuts.

Dude was Fundamentalist as all hell, but that wasn't Fundamentalist enough.

He wasn't going to denounce the science that, ya know, made it so he could have a family in the first place. He literally told them "No."

So that little clique of fanatics ran them out, too. (This was after I'd already left.) The Pastor resigned in solidarity with him and went to work as a maintenance man up in Mackinaw City. I found out a lot more details than the town rumor-mill provided when I ran into him at Wal-Mart in Cheboygan, MI a year and a half or so later. (That was just where I was working at the time, and I'd not yet left the church myself.)

The nuts more or less took over and (of course) the church fell apart in scandal and recriminations in 2004-2005 when it turned out one of these fanatics was screwing another one (and both were men.) They'd ecstatically said they wanted to do scorched-earth political warfare for their interpretation of Jesus and this, that and the other damn thing...but it was just a ploy to get power in the end...and eventually they decided (like all such people do) to push the boundaries of that power to break their own rules.

Interestingly I found this out in a casino breakroom from a friend of mine who worked there, that I'd worked with at a previous job. She wasn't affiliated with that church, but she had relatives who'd gone there.

But the thing is, performative-religiosity bullshit too often comes down to exactly this kind of crap.

You want to listen to a sermon from a MAGA?? You might as well let the damn devil preach at your church, as far as I'm concerned.

What the hell good is "Church membership" when you worship not Jesus Christ, but Donald Trump (or worse, your own gold-plated lusts??)

And I'm here to tell you, these fucking people just can't wait to kill other people over this bullshit.

Again, who's gonna save your soul from the shouty man in the Pulpit??

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Then Jesus spoke to the multitude, and to his disciples,

Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:

All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. ~Matthew 23:1-15

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"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press