History and Reality, Distinction and Diversity (Part the First)
Click to persecute.
Timojin said:
# 1 I believe you are wrong just like many of us by lumping every Christian Jew or muslim into one bucket.
I believe your assessment is wrong:
• The actual moral relativism that is shredding the fabric of American society is carried by a politically empowered bloc of Christendom.
• ... are actually the very same argument we heard from these Christians for generations while they burned books, threatened to bomb movie theatres, and argued that everybody else's right to free speech ended whenever a Christian was offended by anything they could invent.
• When a Christian argues that it is immoral to feed the hungry, people notice.
• When politicians rush to demonstrate their piety for the sake of being seen by others, and these Christians celebrate that open, petulant defiance of Christ Himself―no, seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people?
• This block of American Christendom is a bloodthirsty (death penalty, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-Islam), hatemongering (anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-infidel), raping (anti-woman, anti-gay) supremacist (white, male, Christian) cult struggling toward Apocalypse (premillennial dispensationalism, domestic insurrection and dissolution), and near the heart of it all is a relativistic belief that what they perceive as good enough for the Devil is good enough for the Christian.
• These self-righteous apostates celebrate the joy of their sins.
All of those
boldfaced statements deliniate and limit the range of Christians under consideration.
The only general statement about Christianity has to do with working to bring about the end fo the world, and it's really hard to complain about the generalization unless you are willing to denounce and repudiate not only the Revelations, but also the
words of Jesus Christ Himself. Think of it this way: Former congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has undertaken a new career and pitch, of late. These days, she travels the End Times circuit delivering a striking new gospel:
Jesus is coming! Be angry!
This is new. It's a lovely innovation, because the Second Coming of Christ is supposed to be cause for rejoice.
Which in turn reminds of the counterpoint:
Premillennial dispensationalists↱ are, in fact, working to bring about the end of the world, in Jesus' name, amen.
Nonetheless, you have charged
"lumping every Christian Jew or muslim into one bucket". Please explain the part about Jews and Muslims, else explain your need to bear false witness.
# 2 As you mention we have the good book to guide us , yes we fail but we try to rise up from our failure . The secular does not have any original guidance, so you may do things without any restrain.
This manner of superstitious, self-aggrandizing prejudice is, to the one, a staple of traditionally thoughtless Christian apologism.
To the other, it's also true that I've tried engaging my evangelical atheist neighbors on this point, and how to close the gap, but they refuse the discussion outright.
Still, though, in practical terms, the moral conundra wracking my society at present do not, and never have originated with atheists. When Christianists argue that America is a "Christian nation", their best case is that Christian mores have traditionally dominated the sociomoral paradigm. That part has been true since before the nation existed.
It's been true throughout my lifetime, too. My introduction to Christian politics was not abortion or the Gay Fray; it was
censorship. The basic idea was akin to a principle in American jurisprudence:
Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of someone else's nose.
The Christian argument for censorship, against women, against homosexuals and transgender, and against fundamental equality in society has, throughout my political life, derived from an adaptation:
Your right to _____ ends when I disapprove.
Thus, our free speech ended when a Christian complained. We fought about this for years, and this assertion of Christian supremacism even had Democrats onboard. It generally doesn't matter if the complaint is true or not, either. Like Bob Larson, the pastor now working the Arizona fringe scene, who advocated against music in the '80s and '90s. For whatever reason, he felt the need to specifically and deliberately bear false witness,
rewriting lyrics in order to tell parents the songs are scary and dangerous. Even when the song was clearly explained in the liner notes, well, just like you, Timojin, what the other people say doesn't matter―you have decided, just like Pastor Larson, what other people think. You've decided
for them. You know those little black and white stickers? That's what we got. According to this movement within Christianity, which indeed won the day, the day before your eighteenth birthday, you are not smart enough to be allowed to listen to this music; the next day, you arbitrarily become smart enough. That's what we got out of it, so in the end, yes, those Christians are losing their fight, because fewer and fewer people give a damn.
But, hey, speaking of making shit up in order to tell Christians what to be afraid of, I personally adore the bit where they get L'Engle's
A Wrinkle in Time exactly backwards (it's anti-communist, and honors the God in the Bible), and then try to convince us that a Shakespeare joke is really secret code for elder lesbian orgy porn. Wasn't Madeleine L'Engle thinking about a bunch of old women chowing box. Wasn't the kids who read the books. It was, however, on the minds of the Christians who came up with what rose to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century as the leading objection against one of the ten most contested books in libraries. For your benefit, I will explicitly remind that this isn't
all Christians. We'll get to others shortly, but we might note enough adopted the argument to make it influential and consequential.
And that's the problem: You might recall hearing occasional denunciations of a false, "liberal" Christianity. What conservative Christians mean when they complain of liberal Christianity is that they find most of their Christian neighbors apostate.
Consider that I have been a registered voter for twenty-five years. In that time, technically speaking, the first time I was asked to vote on Christian mores was an anti-abortion bill that mostly would have affected minor survivors of sexual abuse. It was abortion politics at the time; the rise of the "Christian right" is what compels the contemporary consideration of the issue as Christian politics.
But the first time I had to vote on a deliberately Christian initiative was '92. And then we did it again in '94, '95, and '96. I left the state in '96, moving home to Washington, where people so openly repudiated what was going on across the southern border so strongly that the Oregon Citizens Alliance failed to establish itself in the northland. Meanwhile, poor Oregon went through it again and again throughout the rest of the decade.
I haven't really had to vote on much of this stuff in recent years because it doesn't often make the ballot in the Evergreen State. That and we spend our time with Republicans trying to drown our state government in the bathtub and the rest of us working to keep it breathing while our coalition argues over whether
alive is sufficient or
healthy is necessary. It's an astounding clusterdiddle, a danger of moral relativism in politics and business.
But across the rest of the country? By elections, we went one for thirty-four, after
Lawrence v. Texas, and 0-33 for states over that period until we started winning. And once we started winning, it was pretty much
over. The Court put off
U.S. v. Windsor until the spring of '13 because of the 2012 election. It was a wise move insofar as that's the year voters redefined the "sense of the nation", a vague notion the Court occasionally relies on to bolster rulings. It contributed to
Roper v. Simmons, for instance, when one bloc of the Supreme Court needed to pick up a vote; in addition to the new science, there was also a rising sensibility, "sense of the nation", that Americans felt differently about this than before. It's essentially saying, "Look, you can see the writing on the wall."
It also came up in
Bowers v. Hardwick; and also
Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the
Bowers decision.
We ran four for four that day; the Court's suspicion was affirmed.
And that's the thing about, for instance, "liberal Christianity" in the apostate context profferred by conservative Christians.
We know they exist. They stood and fought and voted alongside us in '92, and all the way through until we lost them in '04. Yeah, the marriage phase arriving after
Lawrence started with Christians in Oregon; imagine that.
Even still, we didn't get what we got after we started losing in '04 without Christians. Many of them voted with us during that long, miserable streak. And we could not have run the table in '12 without them. We know they exist, and they know we know. Many of my queer brothers and sisters attend church right alongside them; our communities overlap.
These are who conservative Christians denounce for "liberal Christianity".
―End Part I―