Dear Friends:
It has been some time since I have posted here due to life but in my heart of hearts I know this community is fighting the good fight, holding a golden standard for human decency and protecting the least among us in a way that transcends traditional stilted religious constructs. To that end, thank you and please heed this following warning.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."
- Sinclair Lewis
Contemporary evangelical Christianity is simply broken. Some here may (justifiably) hold the position that Christianity as a whole is, but in any case this is not meant to go on a tangent. At the very least the fundamentalist streak, the Rapture crowd, the super churches are all byproducts (or pathological symptoms) of the Industrial Age to various degrees.
Today we face a "point of criticality" to borrow a phrase, in which the grains of sand have piled up sufficiently to threaten knocking over a large pile of accumulated sands from the winds of ideology and corruption.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma and was raised in the Church of Christ and frankly I do not recognize what things have become since I went to Bible class as a child and learned about the loving Jesus.
It is too easy to dismiss the far-right as nutjobs and idiots but unfortunately it is more odious than that. Crazy like a fox (news), this breed of thinking is simply evil. That is not an emotional inflection of the point, it is the logical conclusion of what lies ahead.
Know thine enemy. The combination of zealous fervor and Ayn Rand-styled ideology is SATANIC by definition. You do not need to believe in a pitchforked devil to understand and appreciate the following, per the Church of Satan:
Rand's philosophy rejects as ethical accepting the sacrifice of another to one's self (to paraphrase the end of Galt's oath from Atlas Shrugged). The Satanic view sees as ethical the reality of domination of the weak by the strong. The assertion in Objectivism is that the use of force to cause others to submit to the will of the stronger or cleverer individual is "wrong" for the individual.
I know the difference between the Church of Satan and the Christian concept of Satan, that is frankly beside the point here. What I mean to say is that the current climate of the Far Reicht objectively is evil.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
Mammon is often translated as money or wealth but the specific term holds much more on the issue. Denying human lives for pharma or insurance profits is sinister. Denigrating fellow citizens because they are hungry or suffering, castigating wide swaths of people as lazy because they cannot get ahead in the midst of the Great Recession is pure evil. Not an exaggeration, not spoken with angst, this is what continues to fester.
We are not far from the shifting sands laying out a dark era in this country and we should not descend into metaphysical, theological debates about good and evil to recognize the threat among us. Frankly, as someone who considers myself "Christian" I think there are many radicals among us - so-called Christians holding the worst virtues of perverted nationalism - that are guilty of sedition and hold views that are the antithesis of a just and moral society.
People that espouse asinine, clearly propagandist views on TV are not morons, they are a threat to this country.
Do not underestimate the climate of pure evil that pulses through the veins of the sociopaths that malign themselves to views that their own God would find repulsive.