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fool_of_sound posted:Don't complain about effortposts you don't want to read. I will when they seem to be quoted, in full, several times on the same page. edit: tax 
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Nov 26, 2019 06:35
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GoutPatrol posted:quoted, in full, several times on the same page. Yes that is rude please do not do that as well.
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Nov 26, 2019 06:39
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RandomBlue posted:My experience with giant walls of text is that you think you're smarter than everyone else but the truth is you simply lack the capacity to summarize your thoughts. If it takes several pages for you to explain a concept, you either lack full understanding or are just bad at communicating concepts to other people. This is ridiculous thinking IMO. There's nothing wrong with communicating something in a manner that *isn't* brief. In fact, sometimes it's even beneficial! There's no reason that this medium can't accommodate short and long posts. No one is forcing you to read a post that you don't have time for.
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Nov 26, 2019 06:43
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RandomBlue posted:My experience with giant walls of text is that you think you're smarter than everyone else but the truth is you simply lack the capacity to summarize your thoughts. If it takes several pages for you to explain a concept, you either lack full understanding or are just bad at communicating concepts to other people. While there's some truth to what you're saying, I don't really know how to drop someone into the state to understand magical thinking other than with some very, very lengthy prose. If these death cultists really start believing that Trump is a chosen one in the vein of King David and he's removed from power, they're absolutely going to start killing people in a way that is much like how the fascist nihilists do now. I didn't even touch on the violent rhetoric of something like spiritual warfare and with enough stress and enough violent rhetoric you'll start having these death cultists live up to the death part of their name and start murdering people, even political figures, if this catches on. Imagine abortion clinics on fire and colleges shot up for spreading satanism and maybe even shooting up rival denominations, like going after Catholics. There's a lot stewing under the surface and modern Christianity is collapsing in terms of their demographic numbers. They are in no poo poo panic mode and cultures do not do healthy things when they're looking down the barrel of cultural extinction. While there is probably some fat I could cut from the text, if I cut too much and it becomes less weird, dropping people into a brief liminal state to scratch the surface of what magical thinking is becomes basically impossible. It takes time to prime someone to do that. RandomBlue posted:I'm pretty sure most of us have a basic grasp of Christian "magical thinking" and there's nothing magical about it. It's 100% about performative comparison of one person's Christianity vs. another. Mostly measured by how much you go to church and how loudly you sing and pray during services. I used to think that. That's what evangelicals do when they're being nice. Again, they're looking at cultural extinction. Becoming irrelevant. Cultures don't just go down without flailing in their death spasms. For about a year and a half I went to an evangelical church and spent time among people who took their religion very seriously. The wife of the pastor, sweet and kind, thought that I had a demon inside of me and that it needed to be driven out. She said this in front of the entire congregation and no one questioned her. Just 100% serious and 100% terrified for me. Intellectual thoughts completely bounce off that mode of thinking when someone who thinks in terms of magic thinks you've got demons inside of you. And to sum up spiritual warfare really quickly, since you seem to want quick summaries, imagine every single action that you do every day needs to be measured if you're doing a Godly thing or if you're actually working for Satan. Everything. Every, little thing. It dumps someone into a permanent do or die mindset that makes someone believe they're constantly at war. It's not healthy and yet a lot of people engage in the practice. People get consumed by spiritual warfare and the end result is often violence. Now give them firearms and apocalyptic narratives, including an existential crisis that includes the no poo poo collapse of Christianity as a cultural force. It's an ugly cocktail and people are going to die for it if the narrative takes hold. Six months of that on Fox News and Y'allquidea isn't so funny anymore. Unless you actively engage with these people by entering their spaces and hearing the fervor behind closed doors where it's socially acceptable, where they actually pull of the mask and talk about what they actually believe you will never, ever understand. I'm trying to help people understand anyway, which I suppose isn't the greatest plan, but this is important. There's a wide gulf between what you would call a basic grasp and actual understanding. What's happening on Fox in that instance is priming people for violence in a purposeful way using existing violent narratives. There is no other way to interpret it if you're familiar with that vein of thinking. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 06:48
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stop posting about star wars, start posting about lovely loving democrats!!! https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1199166396711755777 when you gain a historic victory over the opposition party but just loving love corporate donors way too much to enact actual changes
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Nov 26, 2019 06:50
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Part of the problem, I think, is that Christianity is too mundane and unexceptional for Westerners to truly appreciate how thoroughly insane the religion is -- they're too accustomed to it and they think lengthy detail-oriented examinations of it are boring rather than deeply revelatory.
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Nov 26, 2019 06:51
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https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1199157647074832384
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Nov 26, 2019 06:53
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theflyingorc posted:There are almost certainly "good Republicans" on the LOCAL level, but I think that ship has sailed on the state or federal level.
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Nov 26, 2019 06:58
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SKULL.GIF posted:Part of the problem, I think, is that Christianity is too mundane and unexceptional for Westerners to truly appreciate how thoroughly insane the religion is -- they're too accustomed to it and they think lengthy detail-oriented examinations of it are boring rather than deeply revelatory. I recently went over the old testament and have been tacking into the new. It's deeply boring, deeply interesting, deeply moving and deeply disturbing depending on what you're reading. Sometimes multiples of those at once. And if you're reading the wrong translation, you'll skip over the deeply disturbing parts. Did you know when Moses came off the mountain and found people dancing around the golden calf, he separated his followers into different factions and had one faction murder the other, starting with family members? Violence on that level not only creates tribe, but starkly reminds me of an old Roman decimation, only it's half of everyone. The taboo of kinslaying and mass murder create extremely strong bonds through shared shame and guilt. Who does honor killing for slain family members when absolutely everyone is involved? The answer is no one. You've created a new tribe through a shared act of violence. You won't find that in the veggie tails version. Hell, you won't find it in most translations of the bible. What I was interested in was how ancient peoples solved social problems. Some of them did and you could see social evolution over time, though the periods of time where people solved social questions were long. Some of them never happened, but a lot of those social problems are just 100% unresolved despite attempts to tackle them. Distribution of wealth was probably the biggest and while prophets and kings kept tackling it, nothing really budged. Occasionally they'd have what were called Jubilees, where debt was just forgiven and slaves would be freed there would be a focus on freedom for a few years, but the problem was that the Jubilee was just a pressure valve. It didn't stop people from trapping each other in debt and stealing land and enslaving one another through debt peonage. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 07:00
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empty whippet box posted:I am really struggling to understand what point you are trying to make here, can you clarify what you are saying? His point was that vitriolic condemnation of a group of people because they have and act on abhorrent myopic opinions is exactly the same as hate and bigotry towards a group because of an unchangeable aspect of their humanity such as their skin color. Basically it’s just him trying to pin the racist badge on someone who hates assholes because all groups are identically defined. It’s so incredibly stupid that it basically has to be in bad faith.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:02
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"Tried to"?
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Nov 26, 2019 07:07
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:I'm sure there were some Nazis that just wanted to fix potholes and poo poo but they were still Nazis, theflyingorc. You put that (R) next to your name and you're loving scum, end of story. The only good republicans don’t vote, or hold office, or share their opinions, or wield any power over anyone. Also they are still poo poo because even then they aren’t voting to make things better, or fighting for the rights of others. I hope the Republican Party and the political right in general dies it’s final death soon so the rest of us can stop fighting their bullshit and actually work on all the poo poo we know needs to be done. But instead conservatism will live forever as an unholy vampire sucking blood from those of us with living beating hearts and minds not clouded by a cold hateful devotion to the self or the tribe at the expense of the “other.”
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Nov 26, 2019 07:10
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SKULL.GIF posted:If you're posting in D&D and don't have time to spend 3 minutes reading an analysis of Christian magical thinking and cultural narratives then don't post in D&D.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:10
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ice and others, you're conflating christianity with the lunatic nutters, which is exactly what the lunatic nutters do and want everyone to do in fairness to ice, you made something like a distinction before dispensing with it edit: i was raised episcopalian and had a front-row seat to the relatively boring quasi-schism so I'm particularly sensitive to this; the reactionary dickbags, who are (...mostly) nowhere near as crazy as the evangelicals y'all are talking about as Typical loving Christians, called themselves the Anglicans and attempted to get the decent denomination thrown out of the Anglican Communion, and declared they were the only real Christians among American Anglicans i'm not going to let folks hereabouts announce that the reactionary dickbags were right Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 07:16
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Ice Phisherman posted:
Thank you very much for this, IP this is an excellent summary of a concept that I've tried struggled very hard to communicate myself. You simply cannot understand intellectually a psychological state that is driven by pure emotion and simplistic story time- intellectualism cannot understand something that is inherently anti-intellectual. Rational thought just can't do it, rational thought can only (very) roughly define the outer boundaries of such a thing but it can never truly describe it. So to understand magical thinking you have to understand irrational thinking; but the thing about irrational thought is it's not without its own internally consistent logic, but to understand what that logic is and what its implications are you have to first prime your audience by spending a lot of time explaining the differences between living in a permanent liminal state and living in normal waking consciousness. IP spent a year-and-a-half behind closed doors with the nicest most well-meaning Christians that one could ask for; and he is trying to explain that they are processing/experiencing waking consciousness in a manner that differs fundamentally from how you experience waking consciousness. They don't just have different beliefs, they have different thinking, they reason differently- they experience the same events differently from others because all events are first categorized by their role in The Narrative before they are processed.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:23
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Prester Jane posted:
Bullshit. There are, as difficult as it is to fathom, Christians that are not evangelicals. and as far as evangelicals go I recommend that you specifically read Slacktivist
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Nov 26, 2019 07:24
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Slowpoke! posted:For those of you watching Watchmen on HBO... Just a reminder Fred Trump went to a KKK rally protesting the NYPD (second wave Klan really didn't like Roman Catholics and the NYPD was like 75% Irish Catholics at the time) and the NYPD locked his rear end up. Along with like 100 other Klan members. Edit: not sure about the numbers I think I heard about a thousand Klan idiots squared up on 100 or so NYPD cops and it didn't end well for the Klan. Smiling Jack fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 07:31
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Bullshit. There are, as difficult as it is to fathom, Christians that are not evangelicals. I mean, there's a very strong argument that evangelicals aren't actually Christians, in that whatever they worship is so divorced from Jesus' actual teachings that it may as well be a different being entirely.
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Nov 26, 2019 07:38
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saintonan posted:I mean, there's a very strong argument that evangelicals aren't actually Christians, in that whatever they worship is so divorced from Jesus' actual teachings that it may as well be a different being entirely. Fred Slacktivist Clark basically makes this argument about conservative evangelicals, that they're heretical monsters. He's a leftist evangelical.  edit: he's the guy who did a Let's Read of the first... two? Left Behind books and lolled them out of the room from an evangelical Christian perspective Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 07:54
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GreyjoyBastard posted:ice and others, you're conflating christianity with the lunatic nutters, which is exactly what the lunatic nutters do and want everyone to do This is a fair point and I apologize if I offended. Which I suppose is pretty meaningless as I'm probably going to offend again. In the same end, I find that many, but not all regular, chill Christians tend to run interference for the lunatics. Usually not on purpose exactly, more just by being advocates for the status quo. Often by enabling the crazies through inaction, but allowing themselves to become politically hijacked A lack of anything regarding policing, though I'm not sure how that would be possible, allowed the lunatics to find social power and then political power while continuing to radicalize. Not just the lunatics, but the grifters as well. Part of me really wants someone dressed in simple linens to simply rush into Joel Osteen's megachurch and onto the stage while wielding a scourge and whip him bloody on television. You know, find some of that fire in a real critique of the church that got Jesus in trouble. That would definitely be compelling. There's a problem of toleration and a lack of direct action. It's not gone. It does exist, but there's a problem with direct action. Last year I read about credible challenges to the Mormon church. One of their bishops was excommunicated for trying to talk openly about people in charge getting young men and women to confess to sexually explicit thoughts. And these are 12 to 18 year olds. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/24/us/mormon-young-excommunicated/index.html The Southern Bapitist convention has their own version of the #metoo movement going on right now as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/opinion/southern-baptists-sexual-abuse.html The problem is that many people who want to change the institutions find that the institution can just kick you out. It's not responsive to corruption charges and so people grow disillusioned, especially young people. This leaves those who may still be disillusioned, but don't want to leave for whatever reason. Or maybe they don't believe what happened. The problem I think isn't with Christianity or evangelicalism or whatever. It's that abusers will seek hierarchical positions in places of authority and other people in that hierarchy will cover for them. Not always, but whistle blowers will absolutely get raked over the coals and there are zero labor protections for people who talk. You'll see the same kinds of behavior in say, an awful sports program or in the military. Each door to power is a test of will and character. Some people do fine with a little power. Some people can handle a lot of power. Some people can handle absolute power. And some people can't be trusted with any power at all full stop. An awful person on their own can't do much damage, or at least it's limited. Give someone power and an institution to enable and protect them and they will absolutely ruin lives. Toxic authoritarians will seek power over people for their own selfish purposes. GreyjoyBastard posted:Bullshit. There are, as difficult as it is to fathom, Christians that are not evangelicals. I spent most of my time around evangelicals. They said that they were non-denominational, but if pressed their lineage was Pentecostal. They were expelled from the main church for first appealing to disaffected outsider youth and then not telling them to conform to their clean cut image. So the guy in charge was pretty cool for that. Also he was probably aware that crushing their individuality would not only be awful, but those who weren't crushed would leave. So he left and took his misfits with him which created a lot of respect in my eyes for him. Sadly he doesn't really seem to get that the culture is turning a lot of his flock racist as poo poo or they were there to begin with and are getting worse. He flat out told me on multiple occasions that he didn't see it after I took him aside. Despite where his church came from, he's conflict averse. I don't think that he had the narrative tools to deprogram people in the age of 24 hour Fox News and social media and right wing radio. Church has a seriously hard time competing if it's just once a week, no matter how many hours it is. He wanted the fellowship and I think that at some point he's going to be in for an ugly surprise when he finds out that he's lost control of the narrative. That they'll say the words and mean them, they'll sing the songs, they'll do the rituals but not in the way he intends. That a good person who just doesn't get it is going to go through a period of disillusionment and possibly lose his faith. It's sad really. There were real expressions of individualism that you probably wouldn't reliably find elsewhere save for what remains of the old Jesus Freaks. Also he really didn't like being called evangelical either now that I think about it. The term is absolutely politically loaded because the crazies have poisoned it pretty thoroughly. I can't speak with any authority about say, Catholics or Mormons or non-evangelical, non-charismatic churches. Each denomination does differ and each church in that denomination differs and each faction differs, though my old church wasn't large enough to have cliques. Intellectually I know the differences, but I know enough to know that's not really enough. I can serve as a bridge for certain concepts that someone who hasn't immersed themselves in faith, at least to an extent, but it's not a concept that I can explain like bullet points. The modes of thinking are irrational. Faith is not rational even if a lot of people try to square rational thought, but it is powerful and it is meaningful to many people. I feel like whatever I do, I just can't explain some concepts to people. Not how I want to. Not because people are somehow dumb, but because there's a difference between implied knowledge, like the kind you can get from books, and inferred knowledge, they kind you can only get from experience. You can't learn everything from a book. You can't feel your way to an understanding of physics. Most of us speak and think in ways that are largely implied because implied knowledge has a lot to do with rationality. But I can only bring a person so far into the realm of inferred knowledge before you actually have to go live it for yourself. GreyjoyBastard posted:Fred Slacktivist Clark basically makes this argument about conservative evangelicals, that they're heretical monsters. I remember speaking to you a year ago and I think you pointed some of his stuff to me. I enjoyed them. I'd probably have stayed in church if he were my pastor. I remember liking his views. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 08:09
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Yeah there's frankly a ton of christians who are pretty much invisible and unremarkably decent (especially relative to their extremely visible and ridiculously loud evangelical counterparts). Afaik evangelicals don't even make up anywhere near a majority of american christians (25% or something) so it's always weird that they get conflated with american christians writ large
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Nov 26, 2019 08:09
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Ice Phisherman posted:
while on a quick skim you make some interesting points in this post, if you can't speak with any authority about anyone except evangelical and/or charismatic subsets, do not generalize your terminology to 'Christians' please it doesn't do good things for anybody edit: i probably recommended you, among other things, Fred Slacktivist Clark's Vampire Allegory, which might be my favorite piece of his, and is well worth reposting in this thread https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2009/09/10/vampires-crosses/ quote:It's a well-established fact that vampires can't abide crosses. There seems to be some confusion, however, as to why this is so. Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 08:13
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Yeah there's frankly a ton of christians who are pretty much invisible and unremarkably decent (especially relative to their extremely visible and ridiculously loud evangelical counterparts). Afaik evangelicals don't even make up anywhere near a majority of american christians (25% or something) so it's always weird that they get conflated with american christians writ large The right wing evangelicals are the best organized and politically active and close to the best funded. For this reason they tend to drive policy in politics. I don't confuse them, though I used to. Not seeing Christians as a monolith, but as extremely factional was part of experimenting with Christianity again like I do about every five years or so and the evangelical strain was what failed to sink its claws into me. My own disillusionment when my pastor continually failed to confront the chuds caused me to abandon Christianity again and go into leftist politics. GreyjoyBastard posted:while on a quick skim you make some interesting points in this post, if you can't speak with any authority about anyone except evangelical and/or charismatic subsets, do not generalize your terminology to 'Christians' please I'll go back and change some stuff then. I didn't mean to offend. This is a difficult topic to talk about without offending people. I'm not sure if anyone can speak with authority about the entire breadth of Christianity though. It's too big and too factional and you're dealing with thousands of years of apologetics and tons of translations and dead denominations and how Christianity plugged into the world. You need a biblical scholar to talk about Christianity and I'm definitely not that. Just someone who lived a piece of it and is trying to explain a difficult concept to people. They're not boots that I'm used to wearing, so I'm somewhat clumsy when stomping around in them. Ice Phisherman fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 08:14
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saintonan posted:I mean, there's a very strong argument that evangelicals aren't actually Christians, in that whatever they worship is so divorced from Jesus' actual teachings that it may as well be a different being entirely.
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Nov 26, 2019 08:22
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T. Bombastus posted:This is No True Scotsman bullshit, and basically serves as a way for "good" Christians to elide the fact that a gigantic proportion of their fellows are bigoted self-serving freaks. The point is that evangelicals aren't "fellows" as you label them. It may look like a No True Scotsman argument from the outside, but from the inside it's somewhat similar to the idea that all Muslims are jihadists. There absolutely are segments that are that way, but it's not representative of the faith as a whole.
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Nov 26, 2019 08:30
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saintonan posted:The point is that evangelicals aren't "fellows" as you label them. It may look like a No True Scotsman argument from the outside, but from the inside it's somewhat similar to the idea that all Muslims are jihadists. There absolutely are segments that are that way, but it's not representative of the faith as a whole. Edit: in fact, that analogy doesn't just suck poo poo, it is almost literally the opposite of the claim you're trying to make. It's not true that all Christians are evangelicals. It is true that evangelicals are Christians. T. Bombastus fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Nov 26, 2019 |
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Nov 26, 2019 08:36
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GreyjoyBastard posted:and as far as evangelicals go I recommend that you specifically read Slacktivist PJ would probably benefit greatly from Fred Clark's writing, in several respects. Does anyone have a Slackivist Greatest Hits handy ?
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Nov 26, 2019 08:38
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Thanks to whoever coined this term earlier; I felt someone needed to do something with it:
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Nov 26, 2019 08:44
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saintonan posted:I mean, there's a very strong argument that evangelicals aren't actually Christians, in that whatever they worship is so divorced from Jesus' actual teachings that it may as well be a different being entirely. I think you'll find that the doctrine of the trinity was invented wholecloth in the third and fourth centuries. The followers of Arius are the only true Christians.
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Nov 26, 2019 08:45
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Verus posted:I think you'll find that the doctrine of the trinity was invented wholecloth in the third and fourth centuries. The followers of Arius are the only true Christians. in almost exactly one month, Santa Claus will express his opinion on this topic to you with his strong right hook
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Nov 26, 2019 08:48
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Not all Christians are an insane death cult, just all of the ones with actual power.
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Nov 26, 2019 08:49
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Verus posted:I think you'll find that the doctrine of the trinity was invented wholecloth in the third and fourth centuries. The followers of Arius are the only true Christians. loving niceans declaring all scriptures that conflicted with their vision as "fake gospels"
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Nov 26, 2019 08:49
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Esplanade posted:Thanks to whoever coined this term earlier; I felt someone needed to do something with it: Ooh! Has a bit of an Edward Steed vibe to it! Noice
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Nov 26, 2019 08:54
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GreyjoyBastard posted:in almost exactly one month, Santa Claus will express his opinion on this topic to you with his strong right hook When you declare the war on Christmas, you also declare war on Saint Nicholas. He rolls deep. Patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, and students in various cities and countries around Europe. I want to go to that block party. Sounds dope as gently caress. https://hauntedwalk.com/news/christmas-is-weird-the-strange-connection-between-santa-prostitution/ Esplanade posted:Thanks to whoever coined this term earlier; I felt someone needed to do something with it: It's like Lady and the Tramp meets Spy versus Spy.
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Nov 26, 2019 08:55
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Esplanade posted:Thanks to whoever coined this term earlier; I felt someone needed to do something with it: This is great.
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Nov 26, 2019 09:05
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Esplanade posted:Thanks to whoever coined this term earlier; I felt someone needed to do something with it: Wheeeen the press goes insane over calls to Ukraine, that's quid pro quo. 'Cause you withheld some aid, and drank your own kool-aid that's quid pro quo. And you think, you won't land in the clink, 'cause your poo poo don't stink Just keep blaming the Bidens. Call Fox Hosts, give them all your boasts and move those goal posts They'll help with your truth hidin'!
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Nov 26, 2019 09:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Not all Christians are an insane death cult, just all of the ones with actual power. yes, the president and Senate are Republican, you are correct
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Nov 26, 2019 09:43
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A big flaming stink posted:loving niceans declaring all scriptures that conflicted with their vision as "fake gospels" Tbf there was some serious real-world political context surrounding this decision.
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Nov 26, 2019 10:12
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oxsnard posted:The only time I go look at the_donald is when Trump does someone unquestionably inoffensive or good, and it never disappoints Their persecution complex is infuriating.
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Nov 26, 2019 10:20
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GreyjoyBastard posted:yes, the president and Senate are Republican, you are correct The acceptance of the president by the evangelical right as a "Baby Christian" speaks to their desperation for political power and their terror at cultural dissolution. I view grasping for political power and the loss of cultural power a a kind of teeter-totter event. Embrace cultural power, lose political credibility, because the rapid gain cultural of cultural power untempered by political power scares elites. Grasping for political power without minding cultural power erodes your base. Faith has a strong spontaneous component to it. It is difficult to find in rituals that grow more and more empty without cultural power, because institutions don't generally produce people who can create culture. It is the outsider who generally revitalizes with that spontaneous, creative spirit. The power of religion is not political, or not what we recognize as political. It's actual power is cultural. But the evangelical right has fully abandoned its cultural power to reach for the brass ring of political power. In doing so, they doomed themselves by sacrificing cultural power for political power. Further, spontaneity, innovation (in the religious sense) and individualism are crushed by authoritarianism. In becoming a right wing identitarian movement, around the 1950's and 1960's, they drummed out those individuals, the artists, the free thinkers, the radicals, who are best at producing cultural spontaneous acts of faith. That cultural well is dry and any attempt to draw water from that well in hopes that there is something left is despised. The authoritarian actively shuns and suppresses acts of individualism, spontaneity and innovation. In doing so they doom themselves to a cultural death. And I would argue that for some time now, right wing evangelicals are not only unable to create culture, but what I mentioned before, their magical thinking, it's too deep. It works both ways. They've become alien to the dominant culture. Any culture that they try to create is bizarre, shallow and amateurish. That culture speaks to no one but themselves and their in-group is rapidly dwindling. Without cultural power, all they have is political power and they can only hold onto political power for so much longer. They can legislate through what remains of their numbers as their children abandon their traditions and faith in droves, but they can't make anyone understand them, much less love them. They sought after political power when they should have been reaching for culture. They achieved victory, but they never really considered what it would mean. They have everything they ever desired instead of everything they needed. Their victory is not sweet, it's bitter. The right wing evangelicals hate the people, meaning everyone else, that they have power over. The people resent their bizarre, hateful authoritarian traditions masquerading as faith. To them, morality isn't about the power of culture, to be right through convincing people through culture. It's about force, which makes people resentful through top down political power. They won, at least for the moment and their victory is like ashes in their mouth. To them, it's a loss because no one loves them. People resist and the ones who could course correct back towards cultural relevance were long ago driven off. I think that even if some outsider came to save them, some religious figure full of that charismatic, spontaneous, innovative cultural power, that in their rage at changing the slightest bit, they'd probably kill or discredit this figure. Not because they didn't recognize his or her cultural power, but because it would threaten the calcified political power of entrenched elites. Power that's rapidly waning and failing. That it doesn't matter how ancient those sitting in the pews are. They'll rule the hospices because they know nothing else. My hope is that Christianity in the US can have a kind of revival once all of this political dead wood has been cleared and burned. Not into what was, this once hopeful, optimistic evangelicalism that is almost as old as America, that soured at Antitum and became nothing more than a vessel for white supremacy in reaction to the civil rights movement. I wish it to become something new and vibrant and expressive. To blow on lingering embers of identity. Maybe even getting back to their roots with real care about people, service first. Though I suppose that's just me dreaming out loud. Unlike many here, I don't want to see Christianity fail. Partially because I still think there's something good left in it. That's there still some there, there if you understand me. But because it is also a complex identity. We don't currently have anything to replace it and without identity, what's left is shallow consumerism and fascism, both simple, but intensely destructive identities. People should have an identity. People should have common purpose. And until some new, better identity arises, I don't want to abandon faith.
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Nov 26, 2019 10:56
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