Burning Like Fire (On Bigotry, Christianity And Stupid Shit, Two.)

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

...

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.


The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

~Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, Jonathan Edwards, 1741

I saw this crap when I got up this morning.

A bunch of Pentecostals, attempting to consecrate a hearing room in the Texas capitol to their nonsense, primitive version of "God."

This politicized Christian Nationalist/wannabe New Age crap isn't Christianity, it's acting out, it's fake Bunga Bunga woo woo bullshit. They are worshiping some kind of Ur Beast-Man type of shit made up of their own urges, not God.

Note; I won't say that about all of these people...just the political, public ones. There's plenty of decent Pentecostals who don't go around acting like they think they should rule the world and who try to use whatever abilities they think they have to make things better. Some of those people helped me. They know who they are, and so does their God.

But these nuts in Texas are not trying to make Texas a better place...except for themselves.

And they don't care about God or what He asks.

You ever notice these fucking people never want to Jesus it up about feeding the hungry, helping the poor of welcoming the stranger?? This kind of thing is, ever and always, loud, declarative, self-serving horseshit of the exact type that Jesus Himself despised. Don't take my word for it, look it up.

Although, to make it easy, I've quoted the relevant verses here many times myself. I'm not a born-again anything, it's what I read.

I mean, on a certain level (and I say this as a former Christian myself) I don't understand WHY convincing people that they had magical powers and some kind of a direct line to "god" and that whatever bigotry and made-up nonsense and dumb shit they thought up was therefore sacralized, didn't come off as a dangerous level of foolishness and narcissism the first time.

Religion, or at least Christianity as I was taught it, or Buddhism or Islam as I've had them explained to me, is supposed to call people to something higher, not ratify their existing selfishness and shitty behavior.

Seriously, God does not care if you get the good parking space or not. nor does He have anything to do with that, nor does He require your thanks like you think there's an open line and Jesus is just sitting there on the other end listening to you say random shit. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a narcissist or the Big Fascist In The Sky who needs their ego to be constantly fluffed. You're thinking of people, of men specifically, like Donald Trump or Greg Abbott.

Like where does it stop??

I left Christianity in 2007 and conservatism in 2008 and a big part of why I did that was because all the magical woo woo stuff, fanaticism for its own sake, and political shit was becoming the point, or at least where the money was, and thus becoming the dominant strain of American Protestant Christianity, and I could see both collapse and the fall into even more ridiculousness coming even way back then.

Money and politics and what the mob wants to hear are not the point of religion and should not be its fucking focus. If you're telling people what they want to hear or letting them act like beasts, you're not preparing them for any of the shit that's going on in this world, right now, much less the next life, and you're not fulfilling any sort of spiritual calling. You're just another disgraceful jackoff grifter of the same sort that's loudly and publicly running America into the ground.

Yeah, I get it, that's where a lot of the mob wants to go because they're bored, debased and stupid. These are the people who thought them being able to go to the store during COVID-19 was more important than your health. I get that people have simply reached a self-destructive level of boredom and stupidity and a lot of them are so well-fed and far from even the idea of the basics of life, survival instinct, or anything other than material computation as the destiny of Man that they *Can't* believe in anything or be mentally un-fucked. 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. That's what leadership is, leading the people not just serving some bullshit avatar of idiot-consciousness. You get what you tolerate.

In the end if this crap is not stopped, or at least if people aren't made to understand that GOD is not their Political Party nor some great ratifier of Whatever They Already Wanted To Do Anyway, you end up with people who'd worship demons and golden idols if that'd fluff their narcissism.

Before this is over, these motherfuckers will preach from their pulpits that stuff like Elon Musk's Neuralink is "Not the Mark Of The Beast when we do it" and that one must swear allegiance to the goddamned billionaires and the false world-system people like Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin want to create. Yes, it will come to that, but only after killing and misery.

These assholes want the End Times so bad they're turning into the Beast of Revelations themselves. They know how it ends, they don't care. Inflicting suffering on the undeserving in the here and now is more important to them.

And whatever Jesus might have to say about that or whatever it might do to the kind of people who'd actually follow Him...regardless of what those people may be...be damned. The privileged could give a shit.

His Wrath toward them will burn like fire, and they don't care.

Think about that, for a second.

Of course, that's why these fucking people much prefer to worship a Dead Savior On A Stick rather than a Living Christ who might judge the Sheep and the Goats or require things of them without being an endless font of bullshit "Forgiveness." They can start by understanding that Jesus wasn't White, didn't speak English and didn't live high off the hog. The Bible is actually pretty clear about most of this stuff.

There's a reason they don't read it, and that they prefer to listen to made-up bullshit. The Truth isn't what these fucking people want. I'm serious about that. No, they don't care if they go to hell.

Nobody acts more like Christianity and all that stuff is all crap, and they know it, than the Christian Nationalists and Prosperity Gospel Liars do. They want to spew enough bullshit to make you fear the bullshitters.

Don't.

I say that as somebody who's been through all this crap already.

And of course, it will come down to these fucking people trying to kill other people for this horseshit because somehow every time, to a person who doesn't really believe in anything, the power to take life becomes the greatest thing there is.

And it's going to come down to a fight, literally, if we want to make this stop.

You didn't want to be a better citizen.

So now it comes down to "You either believe in freedom or you don't."

Freedom ain't free, sometimes you have to fight for it.

And you won't have time to be bored.

Слава Україна!

And he spoke this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalts himself shall be abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.

~Luke 18:9-14

Two

Eli Sunday: Daniel, I'm asking if you'd like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy's thousand acre tract. I'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!  

Daniel Plainview: I'd be happy to work with you.

Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. That’s wonderful.

Daniel Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.

Eli Sunday: All right.

Daniel Plainview: I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet. I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet, and that God is a superstition.

~From the film There Will Be Blood.