There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die. Who knows? If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix — a clean well lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except those who know in their hearts what is missing... And being driven slowly and quietly into the kind of terminal craziness that comes with finally understanding that the one thing you want is not there. Missing. Back-ordered. No tengo. Vaya con dios. Grow up! Small is better. Take what you can get. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Generation Of Swine.
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I don't preach a social Gospel I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread. ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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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
The "Traditionalist" Catholics on Twitter are flipping out because of the Pope appointing Cardinal Robert McElroy to head the Archdiocese of Washington D.C.
I checked, the Cardinal is...an utterly standard middle-of-the-road, scans-as-a-standard-conservative Catholic priest, but he has a high level of tolerance for people who are not like him, including Catholics with different views and LGBT people (including their being employed by the Church) having literally said that if the Church only employed people who lived the fullness of Catholic doctrine nobody could work there.
The Twitter Traditionalists call him a "Modernist Heretic."
This isn't hard, yo, there's a real world out there whether you want there to be or not. The Church, like everything else, has to live in that world and can't simply change it by Diktat. That's the trouble with "Conservatives" these days, they're on such a damn power trip that they don't understand that nobody actually has to listen to them, like at all.
Not that their utterly Christless Christianity has any room for anything other than their own egos.
And as I've said before, they think they're too good to even have to explain themselves to anybody, and they think everybody else should just obey. (Never mind that they themselves do not, and they know it.) They also don't understand that simple force will not work. That's not conservatism, it's narcissism.
American Christianity has a Personality Disorder and worships an Unholy Trinity.
Power, Right-Wing politics and Wealth are these people's gods, not the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And their core purpose (whatever figureheads they may slap over top of it) is the Glorification Of Self.
But then, when their personal Autocratic Douchebags do something they don't like, they whine about it endlessly.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong but I think Autocracy...especially the kind they say they want...doesn't work that way.
Thus they expose themselves as nothing but the odd little postmodern weirdos that they are, as people who simply like the "aesthetic" of a Medieval-looking Catholicism.
Dancing around the fire shouting Unga Bunga...or kneeling on a cold stone cell floor for endless hours in a hair shirt and mumbling the Our Father...is for Other People. They still wanna have easy bullshit jobs, freedom, Pornhub and tax cuts, but only for themselves.
Do these fucking people know nothing about how things like the Reformation and the French Revolution came to be, or are those things just theologically "Bad" and that's enough??
Again, none of this works that way, especially in a privilege-based autocracy. On Twitter (for example) only Elon has the freedom to do whatever he wants (and he's just as much of a mark as the dumbest conspiracy theorist, so there's not some special level of Gnosis he has, by which his dipshit antics are going to lead to some kind of Red Shangri-La either.
And the same goes for religion, dressing up stupidity in Latinate homilies only makes it sound more confusing and regressive to the average person, hell it sounds like that to me and I learned Latin in Catholic school. Some things are in the past because that's where they belong.
The King can't only be the King (that is, an absolute monarch) when he does what you want...which is exactly why things like the Magna Carta and Constitutional Monarchies came about as first steps and then most of the civilized world ran like hell away from those kind of systems as soon as it could, in favor of Democracy and (at least) utterly defanged Monarchies that are basically tourist traps. The reason the Islamic world is still like that is because the cultures are different...and "Conservatives" can't be bothered to understand that either, let alone that it too is changing, just more gradually.
And don't get me started on Russia, because that allegedly (according to These Fucking People, at least) "Christian" nation still applies plenty of literally Soviet titles to things and is literally re-Sovietized and gradually moving back to just out-and-out flying the Soviet Hammer and Sickle. The Orthodox Priests whose activities look like Daedric Cultists from the Elder Scrolls trying to open an Oblivion Gate?? LOL, that shit is just there to fool muddle-headed Western "Christian Conservatives" who like the "Look" of it all.
And do so completely without understanding the substance of Christianity or anything else.
These idiots would worship Demons if it allowed them to claim religious privilege, mumble obscure phrases, torture people into obeying their "beliefs" and wear more Bling than Liberace. The actual substance of how they get the Power doesn't matter to them.
Nor do they understand that most people will only put up with so much crap before violence results. These fools think they can inflict the Suffering of the Cross or the Torments of Revelation on Other people and be redeemed (and get rich) themselves. And they can't be bothered to know enough about history to know how that works out pretty much every time somebody tries it.
That "Conservatives" and Elites don't get this stuff or get why it is so should be a Them problem, not an Us problem. We as a people should have done our civic duty and not allowed shit to get this far.
As for the rest of you? You either believe in freedom or you don't.
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The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan
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
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