I was recently reminded of just how self-serving and short right-wing Christians’ memories are, and it happened right when we’ve been talking about the nature of power in broken social systems.
Last time we talked about how power manifests in broken systems. Today we’ll talk about how to recognize one of the biggest signs of a broken social system: turnover, especially when combined with a particular way of speaking about those who have left.
A social system becomes broken when it starts causing harm to people both in and out of its group, and when it fails to deliver what its leaders and designers have promised it can do. But “broken” doesn’t imply a loss of power. To the contrary, a broken system’s leaders might have even more power than those in a healthy one because a broken system relies upon a shrewd understanding and brutal deployment of unwarranted power among its leaders. That’s the kind of power we’ll be talking about today.
Last time, we began talking about broken social systems–starting with the most dangerous question someone in one of these systems can possibly ask: Why is this system not working out in reality the way everyone says it’s supposed to be working out? Today we’ll be talking about the start of the answer to that question.
I heard about this story a while ago, but I wanted to hold off on writing about it till now because it fit in so well with what we’ve been talking about lately regarding failed behavioral models and cultural expectations. A Baptist minister might well be discovering that the beginning of wisdom is not “fear of the Lord,” but rather asking the right questions. And because he’s begun asking the right questions, I thought I’d take a stab at answering him because I’m helpful that way. Maybe someone else is wondering the same thing he is. Today I’ll outline why his question needs to be asked, and next time we’ll talk about the actual answer to that question.
I saw a story recently about a Christian lady who thinks she prayed a tornado away from her home. I couldn’t possibly find a better example of the narcissistic right-wing Christian mentality of “screw all y’all, I’ma get mine” than this story, and today I’ll show you what I mean by that.
Many Christians would rather think their god is a dishonest trickster than be wrong about their conceptualization of him. The other day we got a rather visceral reminder of that fact, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Quite a few Christians have begun to think of their god as a trickster–creating a vision of this god that would be entirely unfamiliar to generations of past Christians.
Many Christians would rather think their god is a dishonest trickster than be wrong about their conceptualization of him. The other day we got a rather visceral reminder of that fact, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Quite a few Christians have begun to think of their god as a trickster–creating a vision of this god that would be entirely unfamiliar to generations of past Christians.
It astonishes me that Christians can say that our finite human lifetimes don’t matter–that they are meaningless, even!–but that eternity matters infinitely. They tell whoever listens that if we are not intended to have eternal life, that nothing we really do on Earth during our lifetimes matters at all, that life is “meaningless” without the promise of Heaven behind it. I touched on this idea a long time ago with one of this blog’s most popular posts, “Captain Cassidy and the Cosmic Purpose”, but at the time I was talking more about how preposterous the idea of a divinely-granted purpose really is. Today I want to delve more deeply into the common Christian concept that a finite lifetime is less meaningful than an eternal one.
It astonishes me that Christians can say that our finite human lifetimes don’t matter–that they are meaningless, even!–but that eternity matters infinitely. They tell whoever listens that if we are not intended to have eternal life, that nothing we really do on Earth during our lifetimes matters at all, that life is “meaningless” without the promise of Heaven behind it. I touched on this idea a long time ago with one of this blog’s most popular posts, “Captain Cassidy and the Cosmic Purpose”, but at the time I was talking more about how preposterous the idea of a divinely-granted purpose really is. Today I want to delve more deeply into the common Christian concept that a finite lifetime is less meaningful than an eternal one.