Watching and listening to the ongoing noise in US Politics – The latest on Manaforte, Flynn, Cohen, ‘Obamagate’ etc could make one wonder that the church of Jesus Christ could get involved with such perversity….only if one is naive.
The church of Jesus Christ throughout the centuries and continuing today has been responsible for aiding, abetting and sometimes engineering the kind of moral depravity that empowers atheists and agnostics the world over to simply tune out religion or desire to subject it to state regulation , a thing I considered in the Politics of Religion: The list of depravity includes: war, genocide, slavery, apartheid, segregation, racism, torture, and every kind of graft, theft, debauchery and perversion that the mind can imagine.
And by the time the barking dogs are done with their religious rhetoric more serpentile than the words used to beguile Eve, you may think that all such wickedness is the will of God….after they quote chapter and verse….A god whose love, if they (false prophets) be any representative, is as bitter as wormwood.
There is a simple yardstick I use to differentiate true religion from its poisonous counterfeit. Too often religion is merely a tool to justify the status quo and has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the gospel Jesus announced in synagogue while reading that Isaiah scroll at the beginning of his authentic ministry.
Listen for how one’s proclaimed religious faith treats with the voice of pain and oppression. I care not about cosmologies and moralities, doctrines or rituals. All less than bullshit to me if it does not fulfil Cornel West’s requirement for authentic justice – to “Allow the voice of pain and suffering to speak”…..and even more powerfully,… having listened, to lighten the way to empowerment, redress and human fulfilment. That’s good news. Everything else – you can burn it. No grief or loss on my part. Happy riddance.
Holy hatred is not new, whether directed at Muslims, Liberals, Feminists, Secularists or any of the other so-called ‘enemies of God’……( if you believe the barkers. ) David said ‘their offerings of blood will I not offer nor shall their names be on my lips.’ He also said he would not rest till their seed was cut off from the land. He swore to break their teeth and put them to death. Well, since hatred in the name of God is so in vogue; I will reserve mine for those who use the name of God as a cloak to decieve, oppress and defraud.
We really needn’t have any use for a religion that weaponizes sentiment, ritual and dogma in a bid to imprison the human spirit and intellect, and take advantage of human vulnerability, rather than protect human dignity.
Some fear the spirit of AntiChrist. And then there are those of us – the Crusaders.
YeKengalé 