Reading Amos In Satan's House (95 Theses For America, Two.)

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.

And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. 

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. ~Amos 5:7-26

...

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America,"white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.

I saw this the other day.

Some idiot came at Ilhan Omar at a town meeting and tried to throw some liquid on her. She stepped up and was about ready to beat the guy's ass when security tackled him.

The day before that, I saw this bit here, which takes my belief that these nuts will worship demons and says "Fuck that, they already are!"

What's wrong with These Fucking People at this point??

I mean, aside from the fact that the root cause of this is a literally Biblical-level plague of Narcissism on America???

These Fucking People are trying to turn the United States into Satan's House.

And there's people out there who would let them.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Why?? Because they think somehow doing so will cause God's judgment to fall on the rest of us, and not them, who are the ones that are actually doing it.

They somehow think they are protected and special. But, the truth is, they're just narcissists.

And they want to burn everything down because *Country that historically trips over itself to fuel their Narcissism, always to its own detriment* isn't blowing their damn narcissism hard enough anymore.

And if they can't do that, then they want to have a Civil War and kill a bunch of people...but they're also terrified that somebody might fight back.

One of these things is not like the other one, yo. Wars always have another side that will fight back, it's the nature of the beast. 

That's what war even is. 

And God is not stupid, and if God can be manipulated by Man then He is not God and we're all worm-food anyway so what's the point??

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

I mean, really it's a safe bet that These Fucking People never believed in anything but themselves anyway.

In effect, these fucking people are so damned Atheistic that they'll reject basic observable science (and I say this as somebody who is extremely vaccinated cause I was in the military) in favor of some bullshit narrative every fucking time.

Although they seem to have unlimited faith in that narrative. The truth is, they don't. 

They're actively trying to WILL it into being so they can keep cheating the Universe and killing people, they know it's all bullshit.

But Man cannot create such a thing, we cannot really make Gods unto ourselves.

Not according to the Abrahamic traditions, anyway.

You can make Idols all day, but they have no power.

These Fucking People are all basically Atheists Minus One, in that they'll reject any belief, even things that shouldn't be considered "beliefs" worse, the "One" being whatever belief they think they can weaponize against Other People.

I'm a veteran of Bosnia, I know exactly what that type of bullshit thinking leads to.

These Fucking People think the Bosnian Serbs were the good guys.

Like I keep saying, I can't even talk the way these people talk anymore. Their goals are alien and repulsive to me and I say that as a former Republican.

And any given belief system is actually expendable to that end. Like, in real terms These Fucking People's Christianity stopped having any meaning somewhere around 20 years ago.

Think Q-Anon and how quickly that disappeared once it became obvious who was in the Epstein files.

I don't know if I believe in Egregores as the dictionary or Wikipedia definition goes, I mean, honestly in the kind of terminology my brain has as a default setting (Church background) if it acts like a Demon, Looks like a Demon, Manipulates people like a Demon and Gets Worshiped by deranged cultists like a Demon, it's a fucking Demon.

But we can all see exactly what form these deranged assholes would want such a thing to take if it did exist:

The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived and all the crops are long gone. Soon all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food. Within a year there was fire on the ridges and deranged chanting. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and the cold and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. ~The Man, from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Film.)

And if you can't imagine these idiots setting great fires and chanting deranged homilies to Trump while they eat their neighbors or even their relatives, you ain't been paying attention.

Worse, he would let them, so long as it let him feel like a god for five seconds or hoard more money.

There ain't no bottom, and don't you forget it.

Yes, like I've been saying for a week, I've now encountered people who actually scan exactly like that.

And if there's a "Worse" out there? These fucking people will find it.

Anything to cheat the Universe, even if the result is that they themselves become monstrous undead horrors.

Look! The moonlight shows us for what we really are! We are not among the living, and so we cannot die. But neither are we dead! For too long, I've been parched of a thirst with nothin' to quench it. Too long I've been starvin' to death and haven't died. I feel nothin'. Not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea, nor the warmth of a woman's flesh. [steps out into the moonlight, revealing his skeletal form] You best start believin' in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You're in one!

~Hector Barbossa, Pirates Of The Caribbean; Curse Of The Black Pearl.

There are people out there who, if they'd heard my kid's rant about "Trump Dick Riders" last week, would take it as a compliment.

It's going to come down to a fight.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

People like me shouldn't have to be the ones nailing the 95 Theses of this American Reformation to the door of the American church, but I don't see anybody else doing it.

And while the Islamic faith of people like Ilhan Omar or the humanity of the secular Left is all well and good and part of the American way in its own way, those beliefs are neither a default cultural setting nor the problem.

The problem is rot in the American church.

You cannot fix this shit from the outside unless the solution is to destroy it completely.

It may come to that, but it'll be less bloody if it doesn't. 

These Fucking People would love to have themselves a couple hundred years of Wars Of Religion, even if they lose.

At least some people can be made to see before they find themselves on the altar being sacrificed to some bullshit right-wing theological concept. We're going to need those people either way.

And it's better to step up and try than to live in Satan's House, even for a little while.

Слава Україна!

1. Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

2. This word cannot be understood to mean sacramental penance, i.e., confession and satisfaction, which is administered by the priests.

3. Yet it means not inward repentance only; nay, there is no inward repentance which does not outwardly work divers mortifications of the flesh.

4. The penalty [of sin], therefore, continues so long as hatred of self continues; for this is the true inward repentance, and continues until our entrance into the kingdom of heaven.

5. The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.

6. The pope cannot remit any guilt, except by declaring that it has been remitted by God and by assenting to God’s remission; though, to be sure, he may grant remission in cases reserved to his judgment. If his right to grant remission in such cases were despised, the guilt would remain entirely unforgiven.

7. God remits guilt to no one whom He does not, at the same time, humble in all things and bring into subjection to His vicar, the priest.

8. The penitential canons are imposed only on the living, and, according to them, nothing should be imposed on the dying.

9. Therefore the Holy Spirit in the pope is kind to us, because in his decrees he always makes exception of the article of death and of necessity.

10. Ignorant and wicked are the doings of those priests who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penances for purgatory.

11. This changing of the canonical penalty to the penalty of purgatory is quite evidently one of the tares that were sown while the bishops slept.

12. In former times the canonical penalties were imposed not after, but before absolution, as tests of true contrition.

13. The dying are freed by death from all penalties; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be released from them.

14. The imperfect health [of soul], that is to say, the imperfect love, of the dying brings with it, of necessity, great fear; and the smaller the love, the greater is the fear.

15. This fear and horror is sufficient of itself alone (to say nothing of other things) to constitute the penalty of purgatory, since it is very near to the horror of despair.

16. Hell, purgatory, and heaven seem to differ as do despair, almost-despair, and the assurance of safety.

17. With souls in purgatory it seems necessary that horror should grow less and love increase.

18. It seems unproved, either by reason or Scripture, that they are outside the state of merit, that is to say, of increasing love.

19. Again, it seems unproved that they, or at least that all of them, are certain or assured of their own blessedness, though we may be quite certain of it.

~Martin Luther, The 95 Theses 1-19.

One

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out!

[repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."