Exploring cruelty
So Louis Theroux goes to visit the Phelps family – you know, the ‘God hates fags’ crowd, the people who go to funerals to shout about ‘fags’. Hell’s angels have started policing military funerals to help keep them at a distance – just in case people who have lost someone they love to a violent death in a war don’t much feel like hearing from Fred Phelps and his descendants at the funeral.
What we did, I think, was try to understand how a group like this operates; its group psychology, the way the beliefs are passed down the family…We’re exploring what is cruelty, trying to explain how something that really does very often just amount to cruelty could be perpetuated and passed down in a family. Why would nice people do such horrible things?…I think that the pastor is not a very nice person. I think he’s an angry person who’s twisted the Bible and picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger, and he’s instilled that in his children and they’ve passed it on to their children…I think another part of the answer is that parts of the Christian Bible are pretty weird. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there and when you take that and you add this angry, domineering kind of a father figure, which is Gramps, and you add that he has sort of separated them off from other people, other families and driven them to achieve a lot…
So that’s all it takes. One not nice, angry, cruel man, who has the power or influence to domineer and isolate his children. Somebody much like the pope, in fact, but with children added.
“So that’s all it takes.”
No, no, not all. Mustn’t forget the bible. A not nice, angry, cruel man is easy to shun, dismiss or pillory. One who does it in the name of a book so many people who are nicer and less angry and cruel think is holy will get a lot further than he would if he admitted it was merely his own prejuduces he was acting out.
What appears to be anti-gay rhetoric is often a vehicle for WBC’s anti-Semitism, hatred of other Christians, and even racism, though in the 1980s Fred Phelps received awards from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government and the Bonner Springs branch of the NAACP for his work on behalf of Black clients.”
I read that he was disbarred from his job as a lawyer. This could be one of the causation factors for his anger. He must feel so rejected to have had all the power taken from him.
Notwithstanding the prestige and confidence that such a job would have brought. I find a lot of lawyers/barristers at the best of times such an arrogant bunch. It goes with the territory.
He is projecting big time on to his family, and his family’s family. Others are being scapegoat dreadfully for this terrible misplaced anger. The dividing line between good and evil as with the panzer is albeit hellishly thin.
“picked and chosen verses that support his anger, that sort of justify his anger,”
Indeed, a selective and biased reading that allows him to sideline the wealth of pro gay-rights messages in the bib… oh, hang on.
“So that’s what it takes”
Yeah,
The bible and his dearly beloved family
Gramps, as well did not any longer have his law practice, to hide behind; in venting his spleen to the world (in the guise of helping the underdog). So, he turned it around on its heels and as a substitution found malleable, soft, easy and compliable replacements. That being the bible, and his family to express his obsesses. They are nice and easy and bendable sources that he could do with what he will. [I mean here the physciality aspect of the bible].
“physicality” correction
“So that’s all it takes. One not nice, angry, cruel man, who has the power or influence to domineer and isolate his children. Somebody much like the pope, in fact, but with children added.”
OB,
it sounds like you have just come up with a unique argument in support of the doctrine of celibate priests!
You’ve missed out one word in your excellent description.
One the religious, especially in the USA always claim that the godless don’t use, except that some (including me) do:
EVIL.
The Phelps’, or perhaps just their leader (or should I say guide = Fürher?) are evil.
They are deliberately going out of their way to cause pain and suffering to people whom they don’t even know, or know of.
That’s evil, in my book.