I’ve worked on deconstructing my faith for about 25 years or so. The biggest cheerleader for doing so usually comes from the people I love who are devout believers. It doesn’t take long for evangelicals to express their love of God and to say things that just blow my mind.
This article associated with the above tweet is a rich entertaining piece of mental aerobics that is sure to push people like me further from religious ideas and draw those with religious propensities closer. How weird is that?
Here’s a wingdinger from the text:
Think of it this way: the Enemy’s virtue of compassion attempts to suffer withthe hurting while maintaining an allegiance to the Enemy. In fact, it suffers with the hurting precisely because of this allegiance. In doing so, the Christians are to follow the example of their pathetic and repulsive Master. Just as the Enemy joined the humans in their misery in that detestable act of incarnation, so also his followers are to join those who are hurting in their misery.
However, just as the Enemy became like them in every way but sin, so also his followers are not permitted to sin in their attempts to comfort the afflicted. Thus, his compassion always reserves the right not to blaspheme. It seeks the sufferer’s good and subordinates itself to the Enemy’s abominable standard of Truth.
Our alternative, empathy, shifts the focus from the sufferer’s good to the sufferer’s feelings, making them the measure of whether a person is truly “loved.” We teach the humans that unless they subordinate their feelings entirely to the misery, pain, sorrow, and even sin and unbelief of the afflicted, they are not loving them.
There is nothing more anti-Jesus than this kind of perspective, and yet here we all are.
For instance, I recently overheard the following: “Women’s Rights!?! Women’s rights! What about men’s rights? I want more Men’s Rights!” That was followed by the next statement: “If men continue on this path without rights, it’s going to be the end of this country.”
Boy, the MeToo movement has done a doozy on Men’s Rights. Gee, how hard it is to not be able to publicly touch, ogle, or mistreat women. How shitty it is that you can’t yell at women, beat them or put them in their place with an iron fist.
The statement is wild on so many levels.
The same person who wants more men’s rights and complains about not being able to be manly like John Wayne, Charlie Mother Fucking Bronson or Vlady Putin, idolizes an orange dude with fake hair and who wears makeup. They’re also likely to “love Jesus” who taught to love one’s enemies, help the sick and the poor, turn the other cheek, and forgive those who hurt you without end.
But the American stereotype of manly men is big trucks, big flags, big muscles, and an endless opportunity to hit women, children and people of different faiths.
So we must change the Bible and our versions of Jesus to this sick and twisted view of men who get carte blanche to live like the evolved monkeys they wish to be without all the education or knowledge of humanity.
This is what happens when men set the rules, when they conclude that forcing women to stay married is better than giving them the freedom to remove themselves from toxic masculinity.
Men can’t act like horny evolved monkeys and think they’ll just get a pass from their loved ones. But here we are. Fighting over men’s rights in a world that has left that thinking behind and a select few are holding onto the past for dear life, because Jesus. Or something.
Le Café Wittypoots 