Heretics

The GOP has maintained power over the last almost forty years by making an unholy alliance between big business and "the moral majority", by that I mean the religious right, or really Evangelicals. The businesses, and mega churches, finance the outreach, and the churches get the vote out by convincing them that the Republican candidates are going to return America to a Christian nation, put everyone to work, and make sure that their supporters never have to see anyone with darker skin than them ever again, the last item is rarely explicitly stated.

I am oversimplifying of course, but in general terms that is more or less the gist of it, now the corporate wing of the part never really intended to honor any of those promises, being in it exclusively for the money, but something interesting has happened.

It turns out almost forty years is a really long time, and in that time a couple generations of incredibly ignorant bigots managed to get raised while slowly realizing that the party they follow has no intention of giving them what they want, rather than return to their non participation of old though, many of them decided to go into politics themselves, and other established politicians realized that there was a movement they could take advantage of. Queue the Tea Party, and of course, The Toddler.

Both arms of the party are incredibly harmful of course, but today I want to talk about the religious folks in more detail. A friend of mine described them as heathens in a post a while back, and that is an important distinction that I think bears emphasizing.

The Evangelical wing of the Republican party are not actually Christian, not in any real sense. I know it seems arrogant of me to make that judgement not being religious myself, but fuck it, they are gonna judge me anyway so whatever. Understand that when I talk about Christianity, I am talking about all the various sects and spinoffs, including Judaism sometimes, but not including Islam for the most part, but hypocrites abound in any religion, even silly made up ones like Wicca. Just understand I am speaking in generalities at the moment.

The basic beliefs of the Right these days include the inflexible rule of law(as applied to people who aren't me) the supremacy of wealth, the idea that the unfortunate deserve their lot, and the subjugation or removal of foreign elements. Get into any argument where these topics come up on social media and you will find many people who claim to be Christians talking about how we can't allow refugees in because one of them might hurt someone, or how caring for the poor isn't something the government should be doing, or how if you don't want to get shot, you should just listen to the cop, and anyway he had a record.

I've read the Bible, once, a long time ago. It was long winded, kinda boring, and hard to read, but, and it's a big but, everything in the paragraph above is explicitly and repeatedly condemned by Jesus, it's... not a matter open to interpretation, at all.

By contrast, the portions of the book that condemn things like homosexuality and abortion do tend to be either more open to interpretation, or part of the Old Testament, which contains a number of wacky rules that are conveniently ignored with the reasoning that the New Testament supersedes and invalidates the Old.

Conveniently, again, the parts of the Bible that are vigorously defended by these people are the parts that allow them to judge and condemn other humans, not the parts that actually encourage or even require, them to go out and help, and no, handing out pamphlets to strangers, or to pizza delivery guys, as happened to me last week, doesn't count.

I could go on, but the whole argument is useless anyway, you can't use bible quotes to show these people what their book actually says, the instant that comes up they simply respond with either  "judge not, lest you be judged", or "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" then scream about being persecuted for their beliefs. Those are the only two quotes the majority of the religious right can reliably come up with and it is all they need, because, remember, they aren't actually Christians. They call themselves that sure, but they aren't, they use religion as a shield to justify their ignorance and intolerance, and to protect themselves from criticism, they hide behind the Bible, but they don't really follow it.

They are heretics, following a debased form of the religion exclusively for their own personal benefit, they believe they are already saved, and so do not need to actually work for salvation, they believe that those who aren't already saved(by their own definition of course) do not deserve the chance to be, and indeed deserve whatever fate they have, by sheer coincidence the undeserving faithless include the homeless, single mothers, children living in poverty, veterans, immigrants(illegal or otherwise), refugees, the mentally ill, and victims of police brutality and hate crimes(these are often the same thing).

They voted overwhelmingly for The Toddler, a man who, when pressed, came up with "two Corinthians" as his favorite book of the Bible and then basically avoided the issue for the remainder of the campaign. A man who embodies selfishness and xenophobia, someone the fucking Pope thought was out of line on multiple occasions.

I hate them, and what they have done and continue to do to this country, They are a better argument against god than any I could come up with. And the GOP knowingly courted these people in an effort to maintain financial supremacy for the rich.