Saturday morning and I got up early; I went to bed last night at my usual time. I was kind of worn down yesterday after I finished my work at home duties, so I just kind of collapsed into my easy chair to watch some documentaries because my brain still felt fried. I hate that for me, and I hate not being able to get things done that I need to. I was able to get chores managed and completed, which was nice. The kitchen is pretty much in good shape this morning, so there isn’t much to do around here this morning major, but I can do little things to made things tidier around here. I also have some business to take care of this morning (hello, IRS!) as well as writing to get done. Paul’s going to be at the office for most of the day, but hopefully he’ll be home in time to watch the SEC Gymnastics Championships tonight. LSU is in the night group, so that also gives me all day to write and clean and read and the taxes and other chores that need to be done. Whew. That’s a day, isn’t it?
It is indeed.
Well, here’s hoping that I have a productive day, at any rate. I am easily distracted these days, as I imagine many are, by the current events that pummel us into insensibility and rage every goddamned day. There are times, I swear, when I think the Christians’ “rapture” has already happened because all we have around these days are the faux kind, the ones who cosplay at being Christians but have no interest in actually being Christ-like. Nothing is more irritating that someone who is arrogant in their faith–especially since their Holy Book firmly establishes in the first part that God despises everything other than humility from humans, and the second part is all about being kind and helping the sick and the poor and feeding the hungry. All of that, of course, was ignored for centuries by the established European version of the religion, which really came to be about earthly power and the accumulation of wealth. Men pick the pope, after all–and men are capable of corruption, and no man is as capable of being corrupted as someone who has chosen the path of religion for money and power. Jesus would weep at the corruption of his faith, and at the false miracles invented to reward humans with godhood1, the way the Romans did with their emperors?
And how is that not heresy and/or blasphemy?
But that’s not my job to figure out. But I feel pretty confident that people who are performative Christians–the ones who pray loudly in public, who proclaim themselves to the world as saved and so forth, and who proselytize and weaponize their faith (I don’t think there’s anywhere in the Bible where Jesus ever says to the faithful to use their faith to bash and beat down anyone; the message of Christianity–of religions in general–is to be a good person who cares about others and cares about the world–but not its rewards. It saddens me to see that religion has grown so corrupted and worldly, the way false prophets can pervert the word to make themselves wealthy while they do nothing for the faithful or the poor and unfortunate.
Can you tell I had an encounter with a cosplay Christian on-line the other day whose arrogance and pride is antithetical to Jesus? That always makes me laugh about religion, and think about it some more. I was raised that way, and it is very ingrained in me. I also noted the hypocrisy of the denomination I was raised in; the mealy-mouthed “amens” during the service and the piety they claimed to espouse…while being liars, adulterers and thieves while judging others for their sins…and those sins are usually things so little considered in the Bible that you really have to look for them. Three misinterpreted passages about homosexuality, but literally hundreds about lying, cheating and stealing…that they never bring up.
Remove the mote from thine own eye.
I have been writing an essay, off and on, for nearly thirty years, about religion and morality, and how difficult it is to break the Christian conditioning we are groomed into, and how that grooming often includes the stuff Christianity has been corrupted into targeting–gays, minorities, trans folk, etc. Call it what it is: grooming. Children aren’t given a choice about religion, are they? And it’s very hard to shake that training off. I haven’t set foot in a church for anything other than a wedding or a funeral in over forty years, going on fifty, and while I don’t consider myself to be a believer anymore…I can’t say I’ve broken through the training completely, but I no longer believe the Bible is literally true nor do I believe the Earth is less than six thousand years old. I do not believe the entire world was flooded and every living thing except what was loaded into an ark made of wood perished. The actual teachings of Jesus–particularly the Sermon on the Mount–are something I try to adhere to, not always successfully, as a guide post for my life.2
I also refuse to believe that you can be a horrible person all week but will go to “heaven” so long as you go to church every Sunday and perfunctorily go through the motions of the devout. If the ritual is that important whereas your regular behavior isn’t, what kind of god is that? And I’ve never understood why anyone would believe in predestination, which is antithetical to Christianity itself because it removes free will, which is kind of the cornerstone the entire faith is built on?
I also owe a friend a letter. I am a little worried about writing said letter because, obviously, I’ve not written a letter in decades. I was a faithful letter writer when I was younger, and moving so much…I did try to stay in touch with people I thought were my friends after moving away, but they would never write back quickly, if at all, and the correspondence would always die when they owed me a letter. I always wrote people last…which was a very early lesson in out of sight, out of mind as well as they weren’t really your friends which is another reason I stopped trying to stay in touch with people whenever I moved. I was always the last person to reach out to anyone, so it’s always funny to me when people from my past–especially the far distant past–will act like they’re sorry we fell out of touch, and much as I always want to say “you stopped responding to ME”, I never do.3 But my friend typed out a note and mailed it to me, and rather than emailing (which is a most sorry substitute for writing a letter or getting one in the mail) I am going to write a letter back. I am oddly excited about it?
I am awake and feel good, and feel like I can get things done this morning. I am going to post this, and then go read in my chair for a little bit before getting cleaned up and heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later, one never knows!
- No one will ever convince me that the saints aren’t anything other than a continuation of the pantheon of Greek/Roman gods and demigods and other mythic creatures. There’s a patron saint for everything that you can pray to—just like the Greeks/Romans had a god or nymph or something that they prayed to. ↩︎
- Which is why I am so fully aware that one cannot be both a Christian and an adherent of Ayn Rand, Republicans. ↩︎
- And there are very few of those people from my past that I’ve let have access to me again that I didn’t regret later. ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 