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Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. ~James 1:27
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Why, why, why, why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn't wanna fuck in the first place? Boy, these conservatives are really something, aren't they? They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked. Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach military age. Then they think you're just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. Pro-life... pro-life... These people aren't pro-life, they're killing doctors! What kind of pro-life is that? What, they'll do anything they can to save a fetus but if it grows up to be a doctor they just might have to kill it? They're not pro-life. You know what they are? They're anti-woman. Simple as it gets, anti-woman. They don't like them. They don't like women. They believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state. ~George Carlin
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
Very early Monday morning, Pope Francis died. I saw the news when I was on break at work.
Let me tell you something.
Over the years of his Papacy I saw a lot of people who weren't privileged White Conservatives either consider becoming Catholic or actually do it because of Pope Francis, because of his care for other people and his personal conduct.
And I'm not necessarily talking about people who'd fit the conventional image of folks who'd do that, either.
Pope Francis made an impression on my atheistic lesbian roommate, just for example. She actually started asking me questions and we talked about Christianity and Jesus and stuff one day.
It's like my Grandma used to say, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Like, nobody cares how harshly "religious" or sternly "Conservative" you are or appear to be, folks. You're the only ones who are impressed by your appearance of religiosity and Jesus had a hell of a lot to say about people like that.
None of it was any good.
I'm serious. Jesus did not like those kind of people.
Don't take my word for it, go read the Gospels yourself.
And of course, these fucking people don't get that the Catholic church is majority-non-white and often has to live and work in places that make the worst neighborhood in America seem like heaven on earth.
Like, seriously, in America Opus Dei is a sect of the privileged and the wealthy with political influence (and striving for more) and there's a whole like, weird creepy industrial-complex around converting used-up celebrities to "Traditionalist" Catholicism in the name of getting more people to follow that belief. I guess, like everything else in American "Conservatism" it's a damn marketing scheme and political scam and not much else.
In most of the world, Opus Dei is a sect of the Poor, of people who have neither a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of, and it's centered on finding dignity in work and stuff like that.
The words "Opus Dei" literally mean "The Work of God."
And there's a lot more poor Latino farm workers, citizens and not, documented and otherwise, than there is rich celebrities or richly-supported priests who believe this crap.
And it's not just that we don't get that for other people, it might not be that way. It's that we refuse to understand any of this.
Fuck all that.
I'm just sayin' damned few other countries at all, let alone Catholic ones, share America's utterly backwards priorities at this point.
It's like this:
When I lived down in Mount Pleasant I had this neighbor for awhile; a British lady, about ten years older than me. She was visiting faculty at CMU for a year or so. She saw me walking my Schnauzers one afternoon and I was wearing one of my old PSAB T-shirts at the time...and she had an ex-partner who was an RAF enlisted EOD troop (by then an SNCO) and had been stationed there also at some point.
So she started chatting me up, with obvious interests. Her dog liked my dogs, too, but not as much as my dogs liked him.
Nor, hilariously, in the same way.
(And her dog was a Labrador Retriever, go figure.)
Come to find out, we had a lot in common, including both bad and extensive histories with Evangelical Christianity.
We never ended up hooking up, because we got to be fairly close friends and it would've been weird by the time we actually considered it after a few months of joint dog-walks and lunch on Sundays followed by hours of throw-the-damn-ball-for-the-damn-dog off of her back patio.
And they couldn't understand why converts weren't flocking to their homemade homophobic and misogynistic (in English!) signs and shit.
All the while, these fucking people, who were in Paris...wouldn't shut up about Booty Poke, Alabama and how they couldn't wait to get back there. Like, why did they even leave??
And my neighbor talked about this bullshit while hilariously imitating their southern accents.
She of course, skipped out on that and did...what any twenty-something with a brain in their head would do in a place like Paris, just occasionally talking to people about religion while she was doing it.
And those fucking people blew a gasket, talked about her behind her back, finally started calling her all sorts of names to her face and then threw her out of the group with the excuse that they'd seen her bum a cigarette from some French guy...who she said she'd literally been trying to Evangelize at the time.
So she hung out in Paris for another week before catching a flight home because she'd had a new job she was starting or something.
Because it's not about Jesus, to them. It's about their fake religiosity, insular bigotry and violent misspelled hatred. Only now, going on 40 years after the incidents my neighbor described to me, the hate has become the point. Like, there is nothing else.
Needless to say, by the time I met her, my neighbor was an Agnostic like I was, having last attended an Anglican church before she decided she preferred sleeping in on Sundays.
At that time, American conservatives were mad as hell about the declining levels of religious belief in this country. This was around 2010 at the height of the whole Tea Party thing.
American "Conservative" Christianity, now thoroughly identified with Donald Trump, is in free-fall, and even a whole hell of MAGA Evangelicals don't go to church anymore.
And they mad about it. Oh yes, they is.
I guarantee you that Pope Francis is standing tall before the Lord right now, having been called Good And Faithful Servant and told to enter into Eternal Life.
And the Right-wing Christians be mad about that, too.
It's really kind of hard to tell which is which, anymore.
Note: These are the same fucking people who'd gladly turn Ukraine...a small-c conservative, very Christian country...over to the tender mercies of KGB Agent Vladimir Putin, except the Ukrainians told them NO and kept fighting and the EU is ramping up preparing to defend themselves.
Think about that for a second.
These fucking people basically sold their souls to Donald Trump and a 2011 Fox News comment section.
Their idea of religion is to sit in the breakroom with an open Bible looking all serious and shit, and they don't care if actual believers see that and think they're full of shit. Hell, they get mad if you point it out. They want an audience and props for looking "Righteous."
And they don't care if they go to hell. They want the reward of getting their narcissism jerked off in this life.
Their time is coming, too, on swift wings.
They know it, they just want to take you and me with them.
Be aware of this.
If you don't think it's going to come down to a fight to stop these motherfuckers from having power over your life and selling America to the lowest (and most malevolent) bidder for kicks...you're wrong.
It's really that simple.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
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
Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty. ~Saint Oscar Romero.
(Note: Oscar Romero was a conservative Opus Dei bishop in El Salvador, if one who had a heart for the poor. Can you imagine Clarence Thomas or Sam Alito saying anything like that? I can't.)
There's this brother on death row somewhere, he checked in when he was 16. He sat there another 16 years while the courts and lawyers argued about this and that. While he waited he painted a mural on his wall. For all those years he painted, not letting a soul see what he was up to. Finally, when he was 32 and had spent more life on death row than in his mama's house, all his appeals were exhausted. He was about to die. As he was about to be let out for the final time, he finally unveiled his masterpiece. All there was were six words. "Death is certain, life is not". The next day the hacks painted over it. Peace out. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" S1, E4 "Capital P."
