Guest post: It’s always been just us
Originally a comment by Freemage on In our religion-deferential country.
This is the kind of thing that first started me questioning my faith. Not the existence of these assholes–I was world-wise enough to know full well that people are people, no matter what granfaloon they belong to. But it was the awful, deadening silence of the mainstream churches when confronted by the undeniable evil of, say, Westboro Baptist Church. Sure, if you mentioned WBC to a practicing Catholic or Methodist, they’d insist that the former didn’t speak for them, and were out of bounds.
But they are never willing to actively do anything about it. Imagine a world where one of those anodyne interfaith councils came out with specific condemnation for Christian Nationalists and their churches for perverting Christian teachings (sure, it’d require cherry picking the text, but that’s nothing new in and of itself). Where all the ‘mainstream’ Christian churches worked together to make sure that any planned rally or march was surrounded and outnumbered by people rebutting their claims to Biblical inspiration. Where they organize a massive boycott of FOX and other outlets pushing the Nat-C narrative. Where they all use those Sunday sermons to make a joint statement to a captive audience of why these scum make Baby Jesus cry.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it took a bunch of motorcycle-riding veterans to call out and undercut the WBC’s hate campaign. I’m sure most of the Patriot Riders identify as Christians, but they were speaking as vets. It forced me to confront the fact that faith doesn’t move mountains–people do, and they do it without help from a divine source. From there, it wasn’t much of a leap to realize that “God” wasn’t running anything, it’s always been just us.
Never mind all the other scriptures and all the other gods. The Pentateuch ~ the first 5 books of the OT are enough. God made the Earth, THEN the Sun, the Moon and the stars. He also set up the Garden of Eden, then announced that he was surprised when that damned talking snake that HE had created led poor innocent Eve astray, and she in turn beguiled poor dumbell Adam. All that divine surprise had to be total bullshit, because God was also supposed to be omniscient and the greatest know-it-all ever. (It says so somewhere in the Bible.) He also is necessarily omnipotent. He can do anything he wants to, anytime he wants to.
Well, he sure blew it when he created that talking snake.
But it gets worse. In an effort to fix up the mess, he adopted human form by having himself born to the Virgin Mary as Jesus Christ, and then sacrificed himself as Jesus to himself as God, to pay for the sins of all sinners who had inherited their sinful natures by some mysterious process fit to baffle all geneticists, that God himself had set up in the first place by creating that damned talking snake that led the first pair of humans astray, while he had to pretend that he had no idea in advance that such an outcome would take place. So bang went his omniscience.
Now if something goes wrong with some project of mine that leads me to kick the nearest cat, that is called ‘displacement activity’ by psychologists, and is everywhere condemned as being unfair to that particular cat. In no way is it recognised as any kind of justice, divine or otherwise. God had only himself to blame. No way out of that for him. Which is probably why he gets cranky with himself so often, and buggers things up still further, sending pandemics and natural disasters galore; to get everyone praying to him to ease off on the hurricanes, epidemics, etc, etc.
He is also the greatest egotist in the Universe. He loves to be praised, and his followers recognise that need of his and humour him. Not that it does them all that much good. He remains prone to do his block at the slightest provocation.
My father was a Patriot Rider; he definitely identifies as Christian. I never asked him why he didn’t protest WBC when they were doing their things at gay funerals; I didn’t need to. I knew the answer.
Westboro realized they wouldn’t get the kind of attention they wanted picketing gay funerals, so they targeted vets. The vets responded exactly as they wanted.