Religion and Stuff

It’s frustrating that so many people misinterpret what religion is trying to do in this country and across the world. There seems to be this notion that evangelical christians and dominionists and legalists and the like just go around willy-nilly knee-jerk reacting to things that upset them. This comes along with the belief that “those christians”, TCs are hypocritical and have an “it’s ok for me, it’s not ok for you” attitude. While those things are mostly true, it’s not so simple as it sounds… They have that ”hate the sin, love the sinner” mantra, but that’s pretty much bullshit, of course. We know they have more of a problem with people who talk about the sin, who aren’t ashamed; if the sin is repressed, they have no problem. The only person who can suppress the sin is the sinner, so if the sin isn’t repressed the sinner gets the blame. Perhaps from their point of view, God could suppress the sin, but of course the sinner has to ask first and accept God into their heart and all that crap. 

That’s why they go around telling us about god all the time like we’ve never heard about it before.

They need to make sure that 1st- we have all heard about god and know we can ask him to help us, so that; 2nd - they can make sure that we willfully chose NOT to ask god for help, and it’s not just because we didn’t know about the option, so that; 3rd – they can be free from guilt if they kill us or wound us because it’s part of the mission anyway to eradicate those who have willfully rejected god. Unrepentant sinners, godless liberals, pagans and heathens – all these people who have rejected “God”; It’s never our sins, it’s that we continue to do them after we’ve been warned.

They may go around saying  they are merely concerned, that they think we’re confused and haven’t heard “the word of god” yet – but they don’t harass us because we are confused, they harass us because they know we’re willfully unrepentant.

It’s similar to what us liberal heathens do – some of us think TCs are just misguided, or that some/most of them are misguided/confused/haven’t seen the secular humanist light; some of us think they are racists and misogynists cloaking themselves in the “word of god” to justify their hate. Most of us waver between the two beliefs, but a lot of us will say to them “you’re just uninformed”, while inside we are thinking “you are purposely racist and hateful”. What we don’t have though is the conviction that it’s “ok” to hate because god said so, as a result we temper our words, we temper our tempers.

The equal marriage issue for example, they will tell us that they feel that traditional marriage is threatened. They don’t really feel that it’s threatened, so we waste our time trying to reassure them by telling them their churches won’t have to gay-marry anyone and things like that. They don’t care, homosexuality is a sin, and it must not be encouraged; it must be discouraged and those who willfully choose to support it over the express command of god deserves what they get. Same with hate-crime law – they resist not because they are worried about “thought police” (though I think it’s a concern) they fight those laws because – and it should be obvious – they would much prefer killing gays for being gay to be totally legal. They’d prefer it to be encouraged. But though we might think they want us under threat and afraid so that we will learn to repress our sins properly- that’s not really it – it’s so they can know that those who still haven’t repressed the sin even under the threat of violence deserve the violence they get. If society tells everyone that it’s ‘ok’ to be gay – then they might kill someone who didn’t actually understand that “god said no” – they might mistakenly kill someone who didn’t deserve it.

We look at what they do, the legal attacks they mount on our freedoms – it’s not just to control us, it’s to be able to quickly identify and eliminate those who are uncontrollable. It would be nice, I admit, to have a world where anyone who made trouble for me could be disposed of and where I could be certain that it was the Righteous thing to do. But it’s that uncertainty of righteousness that stops us all from harming those around us. Religious extremists of all stripes have, for whatever reason, the belief that thier hate is righteous.

It’s easy to point out to TCs all the nice things Jesus said about forgiveness, but the most important thing for them is that Jesus died so that they could be forgiven. To them, they are already forgiven, so it’s carte blanche to do any horrific thing they want to.

I wish only atheists and agnostics and humanists were allowed to be in government. Seriously.