Recently I made an offhand comment about how I saw hypocrisy in religion as not a bug or a glitch in the ideology, but a feature of it. Today I want to expand on that idea a little more because I caught myself by surprise there and realized that it’s important. I began thinking about gaming, and how games are structured around features and bugs. So yes: today is a gaming post!
People have always left Christianity and to some degree have spoken out against it, but they didn’t pull out all the stops then–because they didn’t feel like they needed to. Now they feel like they do, but it’s too late.
I’ve been talking about Christian hypocrites for years, so I already knew that Christians like to demand that we not “judge” their hypocrites despite they themselves being, well, the most judgmental people on the planet. Well, I’ve finally decoded this bit of Christianese.
I had no idea Tony Perkins was as blitheringly ignorant, incredibly dense and intellectually dishonest as he is. Here are a few highlights of his rather dizzying thoughts from this rather excruciating interview.
Josh Duggar clearly didn’t differentiate between his sisters and any other vulnerable young girls in his power. This fifth girl–unrelated, but young and vulnerable enough to qualify as a victim for him–is the one who is bringing the lawsuit now. And that lawsuit is going to rip the Duggars’ carefully-crafted bubble wide open. Here’s why.
Tonight we’ll be talking about two sets of extremists, both alarmingly similar in strategy and both thankfully defeated recently. They share a tactic in common: they are targeting children now to force adults to do what they want.
Taken to the nadir, religion can become a means that truly predatory, shameless people use to gain social control and dominance over others, nothing more, and it is used or deployed rather than practiced or believed; the folks doing this might act like zealots, but really what they are is frauds who’ve found an angle–a foolproof one. And that’s why this week I was struck anew by just how little these zealots appear to truly trust in their god.
Ever since the case was announced on the docket for this summer, fundagelicals have been praying their little hearts out that SCOTUS would decide against equal marriage. They’ve starved themselves and even agitated for and threatened civil war–all to deny same-sex couples the same rights they have. I guess it’s more practical than threatening people with meteor strikes or even as hilariously extreme as threatening to set themselves on fire, but it’s still all so histrionic. And despite their threats and their whining and their tantrums and their entreaties toward the ceiling, they still lost.
Ever since the case was announced on the docket for this summer, fundagelicals have been praying their little hearts out that SCOTUS would decide against equal marriage. They’ve starved themselves and even agitated for and threatened civil war–all to deny same-sex couples the same rights they have. I guess it’s more practical than threatening people with meteor strikes or even as hilariously extreme as threatening to set themselves on fire, but it’s still all so histrionic. And despite their threats and their whining and their tantrums and their entreaties toward the ceiling, they still lost.
There’s one part of the country that is not happy about the recent SCOTUS decision, and that would be the part of the country that has fought tooth and nail for decades to prevent this exact eventuality. I mean, of course, the Religious Right.