Religious faith - points everywhere...and nowhere.

   

     Christian churches are not about the overarching message of the Protestant Bible, but rather about which interpretation of the book is correct. They all squabble with each other over the most inconsequential, ignorant, and petty things in their interpretations (Immersion vs. sprinkling, wine vs. grape juice, Saturday vs. Sunday...etc.) but they fail to address whether the bible is even worth basing an entire life-system on. (Full Disclosure: It's not.) Then, there's the matter of the Protestant Bible deriving from the Catholic Bible with its six extra books. Which one is the real "Christian" book? Does older mean truer and more reliable?

    Christianity's core is completely lacking in substance but has been protected, camouflaged, and embellished over the centuries spawning several offshoot industries and power centers all meant to conceal its main emptiness. They were designed to gloss over that emptiness and give it a veneer of authenticity, reliability, and truth. It is none of those things. It only pretends to be. 

    The Christians themselves sum it up with their vacuous "You just gotta have faith." What good does that do in proving the truth of something? If faith is all that is required, then Muslims are right about their faith. Mormons are right about theirs. Hindus are right about theirs... Who could ever be wrong if "you just gotta have faith?" 

It's time to grow up and realize gods were created by cavemen to explain thunder and lightning.

The Parable Paradox - Jesus Deliberately Misdirects

 

Maybe my first parable should be about your planning ahead next time...

        After reading the bible or hearing a sermon about Jesus, have you ever wondered why he spoke in so many parables rather than just speaking directly about matters that affected something as serious as an immortal soul and the life to come? You’d think he’d want to be as precise, unambiguous, and crystal clear on this issue as he could be. So why all the puffery, misdirection, and charades in the parables when it could have been so simple with a direct message?  

The Bible offers few clues as to why Jesus couldn’t plainly say what needed to be said. For starters, the bible is not exactly a good source for anything given its own dubious history. (Don’t bother asking Christians what it says in the very first, original bible. There isn’t one. The earliest complete bible dates only from the 600s and is reputedly in a vault beneath the Vatican. How do the faithful know what the first bible said?)  

So, are the stories in the bible recording times when Jesus was trying to entertain those who were listening, or did he have some other darker purpose in mind with his parable ploy?  

According to Mark:4 verses 11-12 “He (Jesus) said to them, unto you is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God, but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables. That seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing they may hear, and not understand lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.” 

That sounds like the function of Jesus’ parables was to confuse. He was speaking to his disciples, telling them THEY are given to know what God wants. If others listen in and try to divine the message, well, screw them. They may see and hear it, but they won’t perceive or understand it. Jesus wants them kept ignorant. They can’t be converted and forgiven their sins by direct message. They must filter it out through a multi-layered parable that was MEANT to confuse and ultimately damn them. And it’s THEIR fault if they fail. 

Apparently, Jesus didn’t want a large group of Christians gathered in Heaven when it was all over. He wanted to baffle the audience via the parable so most of them would end up in hell. The parable was Jesus’ misdirect into the everlasting fire, and he KNEW it was. Why would anyone worship such a monster? 

John 3:16 Corrected

       Jesus spoke in code or in riddles as sort of a “this is a wheat separated from chaff test” for his followers - to see if any could decipher them. If they couldn’t, well, Jesus literally didn’t give a damn if they failed. That was the whole point of the parables. They were an early manifestation of what satirist George Elliott wrote in his piece about Calvinists who claimed to be “the elect”: “We’re the Lord’s elected few, let all the rest be damned. There’s room enough in Hell for you. We don’t want Heaven crammed!”  

Would you have learned spelling, math or a foreign language if it was taught to you only via parable and it was up to you to discern the reality of those subjects? Would you have known where to turn for an answer? Would being given ambiguous information repeatedly have motivated you to seek greater answers?  

This is what the Bible teaches about Jesus and his reliance on parables. It is useless information. No one needs to follow such a deranged and bizarre cult as Christianity. 

Parables are fairy tales. They are stories meant to entertain little children. They have no place being presented as truth and the perfect repository of knowledge, information, and instruction. 

Pennsylvania Driver Proves Religion Poisoned Her

When the late Christopher Hitchens penned one of his best selling and most controversial books “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” he said the title was meant to sound as brutal as it did. Because religious poison is at the bottom of some of the most idiotic things humans do when they let Bronze Age stories written by semi-literate goat herders dictate how they should live their lives. And when they believe they are under 24-hour surveillance by a supernatural agent who they think they can manipulate, it gets even worse.

Here is just the latest example of why religion is dangerous.

On January 7, 2020, near Weatherly, PA, Nadejda Reilly decided just reading the bible, praying, and going to church was not enough. She needed to put God to a test. The end result was nearly catastrophic when she deliberately drove into oncoming traffic and rammed another car with three people in it. She injured two of them as “a test” of her faith in that God. And it convinced her God passed her test with flying colors. 
Law enforcement authorities revealed that she showed no empathy for the injured people and no regret for her actions. When interrogated, the 31-year-old woman told investigator Trooper Bruce Balliet that she drove around the area ‘for several hours’ so this was premeditated. She claimed she was waiting for a sign or a calling from God but when she received nothing she decided to take matters into her own hands.

"Reilly related that God took care of her by not having her injured," wrote the investigator in an arrest affidavit. "Reilly expressed no concerns or remorse for the victims and stated she did not care if the other people were injured because "God would have taken care of them."

The injured were taken to the hospital for treatment. Reilly was charged with aggravated assault and other offenses and her $50,000 bail was also revoked as it was deemed she would do it again if given an opportunity.

While a verdict on Reilly is yet to be announced, her actions have been strongly criticized and Church leaders opined that her actions were not faith-based, but were delusional.

That begs the question: how can anyone say her actions were not faith-based? Do they know her mind? Do they know the depth of her faith and how she believes God works in her life? They immediately go to a “she’s delusional” excuse. They are correct about that - but she is delusional because of her faith, not in spite of it. She honestly "believes" -  because she has been indoctrinated since the time she was a young child to accept some adult's insistence that there is a sky daddy somewhere up there who performs magic. That is delusional. She believed some supernatural power would take control of her vehicle and guide it safely through traffic if she just had enough faith. That thinking almost got four people killed (Reilly and the three people in the car she rammed). Notice the woman never has to provide any evidence that those who survived were protected by a God. She just asserts it. That should not fly in any court in this country.

This is how religion, particularly Christianity in the United States, infects people to the point of trying to kill others and not caring about the end result because some God will take care of the collateral damage. It’s another version of the old blood-thirsty “Kill ‘em all...let God sort ‘em out” slogan.

This woman injured two people and didn’t give a damn because she believed that God would protect those she almost killed - if God loved them enough - so it wasn’t her problem. God saw to it she wasn’t injured, thus proving to her that God exists - in her mind. Obviously, God kept the others from being killed so what's the problem? There's no harm done.

Why is it religion seems to inflict stupidity on its believers? People do dumb things all the time but this woman's belief in her religion convinced her that ramming another car and walking away means God loves her. So the material and physical costs don't factor into how much love she just experienced. Nor, apparently, can she figure out a less destructive or less harmful way to test her faith. We can expect her to do this every time she drives, to see if God still loves her. (I wonder...what if God doesn’t care about the people she rams into next time? Should it be her call that they die that day all because she wants to test her faith in God?) Is this how God expects his flock to perform, by testing whether he’s paying any attention to them each moment? A God that ignores people is indistinguishable from a god that is imaginary.

Trump's Rhetoric is Getting People Killed

Given the two recent mass shootings on August 3^rd in El Paso and August 4^th in Dayton (although Trump didn’t pay attention when he was told about it so he said it happened in Toledo), Trump was asked by a reporter outside the White House if in light of these attacks he thought his rhetoric was divisive. Trump immediately claimed “No” that his rhetoric brings people together.

In a way, his rhetoric does bring elements together - El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius wrote in his online posting that he viewed Hispanics in El Paso as invaders because that’s what Trump and his supporting far-right mouthpieces have been calling immigrants for the last four years. So Trump helped him bring together his intended targets, his loaded automatic weapon, his disgust with Latinos, and the motivation to kill. In the case of Dayton shooter Connor Betts, he was motivated by extreme misogyny. He had a pathological hatred of women, even making out a rape list while he was in high school and later a kill list. On August 4^th, he felt he no longer needed to restrain himself. Why should he when we have a president who said of women that he could do whatever he wanted, grab ‘em by the pussy…? When the president, now married to a third wife yet was also having an affair with an adult film star and a Playboy model at the same time, shows no more regard for women than that, Connor Betts decided he didn’t need to show them any regard either. Betts was mad at the world - and the misogynistic man who admitted on tape to acting on his impulses, well, he got elected president – so Betts acted on his.

But Trump is 100% right in that his rhetoric brings people together - the people who think just like Trump. The dishonest, scheming, racist, narrow-minded bigots who think only white people should have rights of any kind in this country. Trump’s verbal attacks on non-whites and/or non-christians bring out the worst in people who think like him. They now feel emboldened to say and do things like Trump suggests. If some of that leads to killing those that Trump railed about as invading our country, well that’s the price we pay for the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Second Amendments. Trump supporters just wish the media would stop reporting it. That, to them, is the problem. There’s too much attention paid to the negative things Trump says and does. Why can’t the media just ignore all that? They approve of the torturing and deaths of little children by ICE agents, by Border Patrol, and DHS. It doesn’t trouble them any more than it troubles Trump so talking about how cruel and un-American it is is a waste of time. Their attitude is “I don't care” because they know Trump doesn't care.

This is what we are up against. The people who defend Donald Trump may not have his wealth and power but they damn sure share his ideas. That includes the evangelicals who defend whatever Trump does by claiming he was anointed by God so who are we to judge. There are even profits...er, prophets…who claim the God of the bible told them Donald Trump was going to be president and you can read about it by buying their book which has been mass-marketed at evangelical churches since 2015. Those evangelicals are required by God to do all they can to protect Trump as president, even when he repeatedly says and does un-godly things. They have sold their souls to defend Donald Trump but deflect attention from it by claiming it is the forces of darkness (Satan, demons, the Deep State, the Never-Trumpers, the Democrats, liberals…) who are trying to usurp God’s chosen one by unconstitutionally taking the presidency away from Trump. It doesn’t matter if he colluded with the Russians, or that he obstructed justice, or that he treats women badly, they want everyone to acknowledge that Trump was hand-picked by God…their God…the God of the Protestant (preferable King James) Bible. If the Russians helped get Trump elected, it’s because God wanted it that way.

It has come down to the people who carry a bible also carry a torch for Trump. They make up about 30% of the population. There is another 5% that claim they are ambivalent about Trump.

The other 65% of us are the people who oppose what Trump is doing to our country and to the image of the United States around the world. When Trump’s actions and language encourage a shooting gallery type atmosphere, travel to this country from anywhere will dry up. When he encourages the use of torture by terrorizing little kids in order to stop their parents from seeking amnesty, looking for safety or work in this country, no one will want to come here anymore. Is that what Trump thinks is best for the United States, complete ostracization from the world? At the rate people are being gunned down from sea to shining sea, most countries prudently list the U.S. as a rather dangerous place in which to travel and the Travel and Tourism Advisory Board reported that from 2018 to 2019 there had been a 17% drop in people seeking to vacation in the U.S. Get ready for that number to plunge dramtically this year.

And it’s Trump’s rhetoric that is accelerating people getting murdered. His words have definitely brought people together: the most violent white people imaginable doing the most violent things imaginable in the most violent way imaginable, and it nurtures an atmosphere of hatred where those violent people cause battlefield-type casualties because the president uses battlefield-type language to describe people he just doesn’t like. Yet Cabinet members are still too afraid to confront Trump, even though his rhetoric and inflammatory language are being quoted by mass murderers because those cabinet members have deluded themselves into thinking Trump hasn’t really done enough to warrant removal from office. So more Americans must needlessly die thanks to cowards in high places.

Trump Decay

There is a decay eating at America. A decay personified by the unchecked dishonesty emanating from the office-holder at the highest level of the government. There, resides an individual who lacks any moral character, who fans the flames of division, who encourages chaos among those in his administration and who surround him, who was actually laughed at by the entire world in his speech before the UN last September. That decay is spreading across the land. What a metaphor for what has happened to our country.

Ann Coulter, one of his biggest supporters, writes “For those of us who were ecstatic the night Donald Trump was elected president…it used to be easy to defend him against the charge that he is just a con man who would say anything to get elected. It’s getting harder.”

Sebastian Smith of AFP* wrote from the G-20 meeting in Buenos Ares on Dec. 1, 2018, regarding the announcement that Bush 41 had died:

One US president talked softly, the other harangues. One built international coalitions, the other tears them up. One was a war hero, the other avoided battle.

One was called George Herbert Walker Bush and the other is the current occupant of the White House…Donald J. Trump.

Trump was one of the first of current and past world leaders to praise the life of Bush. But even Trump's courteous statement couldn’t gloss over the undeniable contrast between the two. Using words like "humble," "quiet," "unflappable leadership," and "inspired" in their condolence announcement couldn’t detract from how alien they sounded coming from the Trump administration, especially Mr. Trump himself.

         Honor, honesty, and faithfulness are not words that would describe Mr. Trump. While he was running for president, Donald Trump was heard on tape discussing the payment scheme with Michael Cohen to pay off Karen McDougal for an affair Trump had with her just a year after he married his third wife. Another scheme was confirmed involving a quickie with adult film star Stormy Daniels one month after the birth of his 5^th child Barron when the reimbursement payment to Michael Cohen showed up in the tax filing Trump released last April. What are the odds that those were the only two times that Trump had an extramarital affair covered up? Yet the evangelicals claim to love and support this man because he is the beacon of Christianity to the world. No one is better at the Bible than Trump.

          The Bible calls for people who’ve committed adultery to be put to death. Shouldn’t Trump head the list of the “first to be executed” for dozens of instances of adultery that he admitted to on the Howard Stern radio show, on the Access Hollywood tape, and other times when he publicly bragged about it? Evangelicals tend to cherry-pick what parts of the Bible apply when it comes to Trump.

The Trump Administration sounds like a broken disc that keeps repeating "I-didn't-know-better…I didn’t know better…IDKB…"

Donald Trump sides with dictatorships over and over against the interests of the American people - for personal gain, not to MAGA. (IDKB)

He can’t be bothered to attend a remembrance ceremony honoring US World War One dead, then gets angry with others who didn’t warn him how bad that would look. 

Ivanka’s use of a private email server. (IDKB)

Kellyanne Conway, Dan Scavino, Hope Hicks, and others in his administration, repeatedly violating the Hatch Act. (IDKB)

The self-serving exploits of Scott Pruitt, Tom Price, David Shulkin, Rex Tillerson, Mike Flynn, Ryan Zinke…the list grows every day.

Did Trump collude with the Russians to get elected? Rudi Giuliani rushes to Trump's defense on TV and says that even if he did, collusion is “not a crime.” Is it still alright if the Trump Administration didn’t know better?

Trump puts his stamp of approval on the murder of a legal U.S. resident that was committed by a foreign government…a foreign government that - by Trump’s own admission pays him personally millions of dollars - would not be sanctioned because it would be financially “bad” for the U.S. to hold them accountable. It would especially impact the businesses supplying military hardware to the Saudis, who were fighting a proxy war for the Trump administration in Yemen. As a reward, imported oil suddenly costs less, and Trump tweets congratulations to himself over the Thanksgiving weekend for the lower gas prices. Can your moral compass be compromised over artificially and temporarily lower prices at the pump so the Saudi government can get away with murder?
Speaking of getting away with murder, remember these four soldiers...

        Mr. Trump treats our military like an afterthought. There is no respect for the military. There never has been. To Trump, the military is just a convenient macho-looking backdrop for when he needs to puff up his ego and remind them he's their Commander-in-Chief. His record of avoiding the draft in the late 1960s along with his contrived bone spur excuse still produces a stream of hilarious comedy material because Trump can’t remember which foot had the bone spur that kept him out of the military. Should we be trusting a forgetful, dishonest coward with the nuclear codes?

His unforgivable attitude toward military veterans was on full display when he weighed in on John McCain’s capture and torture during the Vietnam War claiming it was nothing heroic – tweeting his new name for him was “very foul-mouthed Sen. John McCain”, called him incompetent - all the way up to a final disrespect by raising the White House flag after just a few hours at half-staff the day McCain died. Nor did Trump attend the funeral. Those who serve our country mean nothing to him. Veterans mean nothing to him.

That’s why he didn’t do anything on Veteran’s Day 2018.

That’s why he skipped the visit to the Aisne-Marne US cemetery in France on the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War One.

That’s why he threw our intelligence services under the bus twice in the past 6 months. Siding with Saudi Arabia in regards to who killed Jamal Khashoggi, and siding with Putin last July in Helsinki thereby validating his deliberate attack on our election…an election that got Trump into the White House.

And now it turns out Trump has had a very recent business interest in Russia, and in order to get the money to build a business in Moscow, he needed to be president of the U.S. so he could remove those unfair sanctions, allowing Russia’s VTB bank to finance Trump Tower Moscow. And the top penthouse would be given as a gift to Vladimir Putin…for getting him into the White House.

How is this NOT a criminal conspiracy?

I can hear the sputtering of the GOP and Trump’s supporters already…”Those are just coincidences…why, he never…that’s absurd…he’s…he’s doing it to protect us…that’s just more fake news…so what if he makes a buck or two off of it…who cares what the Emoluments Clause says…who cares if he continually lies to us about it?”

Hasn’t Trump been leaving clues all along about his intent to use his position to enrich himself at our expense? Keep in mind the tax cut bill he signed last December specifically gives huge tax breaks to real estate developers and golf course owners. Is that what you put him in office for? You are right about one thing though…you Trump supporters are not forgotten anymore. Trump is holding his middle finger up at you right where you can see it. And unless we see to it he dies in prison, Trump will get to keep and enjoy those billions – of your tax dollars - long after he leaves office. Thanks, Republicans.

This is the president we currently have. He is raping the United States in front of the world to expand his bank account. He’s using the power of the presidency in order to justify his own personal financial gains. We will have to start paying for that soon with our taxes. There is no other choice unless we choose suicide via civil war.

        Trump is leading us into a disaster. It’s like approaching Niagara Falls in a large rowboat. You climbed into the rowboat when you voted Trump into office and let him steer the ship of state. You’re already in the middle of the river; you either row for the side as hard and as fast as you can, or you go over the falls.

If you get to shore, what are you going to do about the ship’s captain whose bank account meant more to him than any peril you and the country would face?

Trump is rotting the United States from the inside out because Trump is in it for Trump…and Trump only. His solitary concerned is with his bank account. He doesn't give a damn about yours. If anything he does makes you a little extra money, it is incidental, not deliberate. Make America Great Again is simply a slogan on a hat Trump uses as part of his get-rich-quick scheme that will bankrupt the country. 

        The Trump administration is like a dead fish. The stink starts at the head.

 [*AFP is the world's oldest news agency, and is the third largest news agency in the modern world] 

TRUMP + SAUDI ARABIA + $$$ = MURDER IS A-OKAY

        It’s a great day for murderers! Murder has become tolerable, even chic. According to Donald Trump, murder is acceptable. Not just acceptable, but okay to the point of making money off of it.

Who cares what the Bible’s outdated 6^th Commandment means? Evangelicals who support Trump have to be so pleased that Trump has invalidated “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Whether that means “killing” or more precisely “murder” if you’re a Christian, who needs that kind of restriction or restraint? It’s all for the best that evangelicals encourage Trump to approve of and endorse murder, most especially by a foreign government from which Trump is personally making millions of dollars. White Christians claim God put Trump in the White House. Who are we to question what God does? Sure it throws into question their whole anti-abortion stance, but Trump needs to just be Trump, and if murder is alright, then that’s alright with Christians. They approved of Trump saying “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” And he meant it.

As was predicted in mid-October, when solid evidence established that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman not only knew of Jamal Khashoggi’s torture and murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey on October 2nd but actually orchestrated it, Trump would simply ignore it and defend the Saudis. Tuesday, November 20^th, Trump said the U.S. will not levy additional punitive measures at this time against Saudi Arabia over the killing of Khashoggi. And not just that, in a statement released today claiming that while the U.S. does not condone the killing of the U.S-based Saudi columnist, Trump reiterated that "foolishly" canceling $110 billion in arms sales would only mean that Saudi Arabia would go to other countries to acquire them. See, money is always more important than murder. If Trump stands to lose even a dollar, then murder by necessity must be condoned.

Is any of this really surprising?

Trump, of course, defended Vladimir Putin and validated his interference in the 2016 U.S. election guaranteeing Trump’s victory - even after our intelligence agencies had proof that Putin had ordered the killing of Denis Voronenkov, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Sergei Magnitsky, and Anna Politkovskaya, to name just a few. What are a few murders between bosom buddies?

He’s the same man who defended Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in Charlottesville, Va. in August 2017…even after one of them used his car to kill Heather Heyer and badly injured 19 others.

He also defended Xi Jinping who grabbed absolute power in China by abolishing term limits which now means he can serve as the country’s president for life. So whatever Xi says or does has the authority of supreme law in China. It means anyone challenging Xi can now be charged with committing a political crime. Political crimes in China are considered capital offenses. As recently as April 2018, Trump demanded that White House counsel Don McGahn order the Justice Department to criminally prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. Is it any wonder why Trump approves of what Xi has done?

Trump’s repeated pissing on the military included him scoffing at retired Admiral William McRaven who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and tracked down Saddam Hussein in the second Gulf War. Why? For not killing them soon enough. Trump clearly has no issue with killing in any form, but he has to be able to make a buck off of it.

Maybe now Trump supporters can come to understand where their willingness to vote him into office - with an extra nudge from Putin - has led us. We have a president who not only mocks the word of the Biblical God’s commandment but thumbs his nose at common sense and decency as well. Approving of the killing of someone gets Trump another “mulligan” from his evangelical base and the Republican Party.

Because ignoring murder = $$$...and GOP votes.

Here is the key question his supporters now have to answer. If Trump says murder is okay, what is NOT okay?