Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. ~Joel 3:9-14...
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.)
I saw this earlier this morning.
So apparently the WHCD shooter was a conservative Calvinist from a group that thinks the CREC (Which Doug Wilson founded and Pete Keg-Breath belongs to) is too "Liberal."
I Googled the church off of what Kathryn Brightbill posted and looked at the website.
It's all bog-standard murderous Calvinist theology AKA the Prosperity Gospel without the gold-plated bullshit and Paula White's acting-out. Or, if you prefer, it's Apartheid South Africa without the Nation-State.
And Imma say it again, and you can like it or lump it:
There is a deep vein of accelerationist brain-fried Crazy in American religion that Republicans and Trump keep thinking they can play totally insincere fuck-fuck games with forever and then these people will just go off and be weird on their own or go the fuck home and beat their wives after voting Republican.
If you haven't learned from, oh, call it the last 60+ years of Republican history, learn that it never works out that way, ever.
And it's not just these Calvinists, there's Black Hebrew Israelites and weird Mormons and Pentecostal end times cults that are basically a dime a dozen in this country's religious landscape and they
all, at least at first, thought Trump was gonna turn things their way.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
People like Mike Davis that think they're goat-eager to go after the "Left" (which in real terms isn't even much of a thing in this country relative to the rest of the world) are gonna be really, and I mean really fuckin' surprised when they get tarred-and-feathered as "Leftists" themselves by people who think the only "real" form of leadership is some kind of bullshit Theocracy led explicitly by their Pastor or some insane "Prophet."
Your basic vapid non-denominational Evangelicals, Pentecostals or Southern Baptists get bushwhacked by these nuts all the time and all too often, fail to learn anything and simply retreat to more familiar surroundings. But a lot of people that I've seen this happen to end up losing their religion eventually, if not as a direct result of this type of shit.
It's getting worse and far more deadly than that nowadays. Funny how every time somebody goes after Trump it's some weird conservative or religious extremist.
The thing that worries me, though, is that a hell of a lot of the straight-up MAGA-as-a-religion types will eventually become disenchanted with Trump and all that and grab onto
this type of shit as a replacement. This is what my partner's cousins were like and why she had to stop staying with them for work. Why? They're mean, meanness is a hell of a drug. They will eventually want bigger hits of it. Trump plays at sadism, he "merely" enjoys being mean and petty to people. Not to
downplay that, but for him, cruelty is a function of his narcissism, of a disordered personality. It's not actually his
religion.
And I don't think it's Keg-Breath's either, as much as he plays at it.
Yeah I saw those photos of him at the correspondent's dinner, looking like he was drunk and/or had no idea what the fuck was going on, either.
People like him are religious because it feeds their narcissism and because they want their sins forgiven or justified, Sin being the point.
For a lot of these idiots it's all just macho bullshit. The trouble is there's genuine dangerous fanatics out there. A lot of the time it's just one or two hiding in regular churches, but groups like Doug Wilson's CREC take that a step further, seeking to make That Guy the entire congregation.
(The trouble with that is a lot of the people drawn to this stuff, and especially the loud and performative ones are in fact, just plain old losers.)
No Western nation is as religion-soaked as ours, where nine out of ten of us love God and are loved by Him in return. That mutual passion centers our society and demands some understanding, if our doom-eager society is to be understood at all. ~Harold Bloom, The American Religion. (Quoted from Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.)
I've met people that wanted that kind of blood-soaked Fundamentalist crap to be their entire
religion. I served with a couple of people who were like that, or who
turned out to be later.
A lot of the time, those people, the
really dangerous ones? They're quiet as fuck about it, or at least keep their views out of the public eye...until they're not and
then they don't.
Sometimes these nuts are as crazy and dangerous as any Radical Islamist, basically like members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban...but "Christian."
And it will get worse.
Yuri Orlov: [At Andrei's presidential compound showing the Liberian president a silver revolver pistol] The Glock is interesting. It is made of a polymer composite. Many of my clients feel that they can go through airport security without seeing a lot of bells and whistles. Personally, I do not recommend that. [Andrei chuckles glancing over at a guard flirting with a female staffer] On the other hand, if you are looking for traditional wheel gun, there is no substitute for six inches of muzzle energy of 357 mag I mean, of course, it will never jam. [Andrei shoots the guard flirting with the female staffer] WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!
Andrei Baptiste Sr.: [Aims gun at Yuri] WHAT DID YOU SAY?!
Yuri Orlov: Now, you gonna have to buy it! IT IS A USED GUN! How can I sell a used gun? [Takes pistol from Andrei with his son and bodyguards all aiming rifles at an entirely still business-focused Yuri]
Andrei Baptiste Sr.: A "used gun"? A "used gun"?! [Chuckles] That's a good one. You know? There is no discipline with the youth today. I tried to set an example, but it is difficult huh? Personally, I blame MTV. [Smiles and Yuri nods in acknowledgment] A "used gun"? [Chuckles heartily, gets up and extends hand for handshake] I think you and I, we can do business. ~From the film Lord Of War.
I've been warning people about this for awhile.
And the thing is, a combination of a massive lack of discernment among American Evangelicals and Trump's basic ideal of "No Enemies To The Right" makes it all but inevitable that this shit is gonna get jacked by far worse people than we have now.
And Republicans? They'd rather play games with this bullshit than anything else, some of them anyway.
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields
Some of these fucking people's ideal world is the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a mall, and maybe a church. I first had this realization and
wrote about it at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
And a lot of the people like that? They're these religious nuts.
Think about that.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
And you're either willing to fight for it or you're not.
Слава Україна!
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan
And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.
And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. ~Revelation 6:3-4
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