Have I ever mentioned that I am fed up with imbecilic militant christianists who feel that they have the only secret friend worth following and who blame every natural disaster on 'God's Wrath'? I posted this one back on March 12th this year. It's worth repeating:
I have been pondering following the most recent earthquake. There have been more recorded earthquakes in the last century than in the preceding 2000 years. More people have been affected by famines and pestilence in the last century than any other time in history and within this last century we have the only time in world history where the whole world has been at war. The only place I know that speaks of these things is the Bible and it does so as a warning that we are approaching the time of the end (Matthew 24). These warnings are followed by parables that exhort us to be aware of the times and seasons in which we live when we see an escalation of these things. The bible has, so far, not been wrong about anything it prophesied, so this leaves me wondering what comes next. The signs are there for our notice and we are in danger of ignoring them and failing to make the appropriate response. We have no way of telling how long it will be before He comes, but certainly the signs of the times and seasons are with us.
Yes, he's seen one of the four postmen of the apocalypse. Maybe he'd better duck and cover. I wonder if he realises that a natural disaster doesn't care what secret friend he worships.
Now this guy is small beer. He found his deity for personal reasons. I don't mind that at all. He has a profound faith and he doesn't try to shove it up my bottom. I do not disagree with personal faith at all. But he has friends who think that this evil and vengeful deity's worship should be shoved up my bottom so far that I'll be able to brush my teeth with it. I admit I got into a verbal fisticuff with one christianist asswipe, so much so that the idiot tried to abuse me by using that well worn christianist weapon of war 'I'll pray for you.'
My one time and long term friend has quietly used the Facebook weapon of de-friending me, silently, and slyly. This is truly Christian Spirit.
And that leads me to my thought today:
Ah, Cindy Jacobs. You, too, have seen the four postmen of the apocalypse. You are a true prophet. You may even be the second coming...
Er, no.
Listen up, Cinderella.
Your God, the one made up from a Deity, a Man, and a Ghost, that three in one thing, hasn't really got a clue when it comes to building a planet. Maybe that's because he didn't spend that long doing it. See, he got a big thing wrong.
Tectonic Plates.
That's a pretty big thing to screw up on, really.
Now, Cindykins, I very much doubt you want to bother your vitriolic little head with such things as geology and volcanology, or even facts. I expect your view is that none of this is important anyway, but it really is. So, an idiot's guide to the matter is as follows.
On a molten core float huge, unbelievably huge, vast, plates of solid rock. Broadly, one side is replenished from the hot stuff underneath, the other side isn't. This pushes the huge floating plate away from the point where it forms. It's a slow and inexorable process. This happens to all such plates. We call those things Tectonic Plates. That concept is easy to grasp.
Where two plates move towards each other there is pressure so great where they meet that great stresses form. The rock is somewhat compressible, so that force builds up. One plate finds a way to dive under another, lifting the one it dives under slightly. Individual rocks get caught up, and that point gets very stressed. The whole thing is like a ticking bomb of unimaginable stresses, waiting to blow, but no-one knows how long the timer has to run.
One day a truly trivial amount of extra stress, no more than a soft handshake, makes the whole shebang let go. Remember camels and last straws? Then, pretty much like a dog shaking after it gets out of the water, things at the surface get rearranged some. That can be trivial, or, as in Japan in March 2011, enormous. Lives can be lost in huge quantities or we barely notice it. In human terms this can be terrible, or a non event. In geological terms this is a simple and normal jiggling about of the massive floating plates that float on the molten stuff.
When this happens near water, and, let's face it, everywhere on our planet is near water, the water gets moved about. It has to either get off the bit that got pushed higher, or rush in to fill the bit that got dropped lower, or it just sloshes about some. This sloshing about is called a tsunami. The Japanese one was truly enormous and the results were dreadful. That's not because the Japanese chose the wrong imaginary friend. It's physics, fluid dynamics and a lot of other 'ics'. Deities don't tend to have fights or get petty about stuff unless you believe in Mount Olympus, or are soft in the head.
Now, Cindy, this is where you come in. There is a real product used in Chinese medicine called Snake Oil.
Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicine made from the Chinese Water Snake (Enhydris chinensis), which is used to treat joint pain. However, the most common usage of the phrase is as a derogatory term for quack medicine. The expression is also applied metaphorically to any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable and/or unverifiable quality or benefit.
See! There really is snake oil. It just isn't the stuff you're pushing on us. You're trying to shove up our bottoms the irrational belief you hold that having a few homosexual people in the world so upsets your secret, spiteful, vengeful and incompetent friend (remember that that's the one who is infallible and created everyone, the heterosexual and homosexual alike?) that it made a load of Japanese folk die in many and horrible ways just to get its message across.
I watched your video.
What I wonder is how the real followers of the god of the Christians don't take you down as a false prophet.
I wonder it, and then I wonder if many of them aren't secretly as afraid as you are. My Facebook ex friend obviously is.
Didn't your man Jesus mention looking for beams in your own eye before looking for motes in other people's?
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Domenico Fetti - The Parable of the Mote and the Beam |
The parable of the Mote and Beam
Judge not, that ye be not judged.For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
That's your religious book speaking, Cindy.
There's one other thing. Homosexual people do not choose to be homosexual. We get the same choice you did about our sexuality. "Whooops, here it is, and I am (delete as appropriate) homosexual/ heterosexual/ bisexual/ asexual." It happens around puberty, mainly. It's one of those crazy things that happens when our bodies develop. We find out what is in store for us. Sometimes it's a nasty shock. You have to trust me on this: finding out I was homosexual was a nasty shock. But I got over it.
We do get a choice. So do you. We can choose to act on our sexuality or not.
But, see, we get no choice about what it is. We just get, if we are homosexual, to choose to act and perhaps be vilified, tortured, killed, spat at, and be as we are, or we get to suppress it and go nuts in the process. Some of us even preach against homosexuality before, finally, coming out of the closet and admitting we're homosexual after all.
You, Cindy Jacobs, you get the choice to be a bigot. And you've chosen bigotry.
So what awaits you is pretty scary, isn't it?
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| Farinata degli Uberti addresses Dante. A Gustav Doré woodcut illustration from The Divine Comedy: The Inferno: Canto 10. |
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1 comments:
Well said, Tim.
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