We’ll go with minor demons today, because Wiles & Wallnau don’t deserve anyone grander. To the left is Ukobach: a demon of an inferior order. He is shown with a flaming or red body, large eyes and ears and often a pan full of coals or a hot poker. He is said to be the inventor of fireworks and the art of frying foods. He is charged by Belzebuth to maintain the “oil in the infernal boilers”, which is made of the blood of the damned, “forged in the west where the sun sets”. To the right is Xaphan: a fallen angel, rebelled with Lucifer, a demon of the 2nd order. He is said to have an inventive mind and came up with the idea to set fire to heaven before he and the other fallen were cast out. He has a bellows as an emblem, but must fan the flames of the abyss with his mouth and hands.
It’s rather interesting that heaven was considered to be flammable. Okay, on with today’s dose of ineffable nonsense. We start with Rick Wiles, who has figured out who is at fault for all those powerful men who sexually assault and harass.
“The left has viciously waged a war against Christianity in America for over 50 years,” he said. “You, the left, you demanded that children not read the Bible in schools. You demanded that nobody in public schools pray to Jesus Christ. You, the left, you demanded the removal of the Christian cross and Ten Commandments from public buildings and town squares and city parks. You, the left, you demanded a godless secular society, void of biblical morality.”
50 years ago is 1967. At that time, I was stuck in catholic school. There was no end of fucking praying, having to go to mass, and of course, having to go to confession three bloody times a week. Christianity in general was still going strong at that time, in spite of no verbal mandatory prayer in public schools. I couldn’t wait to get into a public school. When the time came, there was fight, because it was expected I’d go to Mater Dei HS, but I managed to make my way into a happily public school. I can honestly say that removing mandatory prayer from schools was a great thing. Personal religious beliefs don’t belong in an institution where the aim is to educate. It’s easier having a talk with a stone than it is getting through to you idiotic asses that students can still pray. They can pray all day long, just not out loud. When I was in my public HS, there were student bible studies and the like; they weren’t stopped or stomped on. Crosses and monuments to the 10 commandments don’t need to be in every public building, town square, and city park. FFS, it’s not like people pay attention to them, or bother to obey them much, and that includes christians. You assholes break those things every damn day, and you don’t care about that at all. What you do care about is being able to force all that crap on everyone else. If I want to see that nonsense, I’ll go to a church.
We’re living in a godless, secular society? Where? I’d like to go there. Being void of biblical ‘morality’ is good thing. A very good thing. Have you read that mess? It’s an instruction manual on how to be the very best psychopath you can be. I’ll pass, I have much higher morals than the bible.
Using the news media, the entertainment industry, academia and the internet, Wiles said, the left has “systematically indoctrinated tens of millions of children and teens and young adults to embrace atheism or Eastern religions.”
Goodness me, people using their brains! Yeah, there’s a horror. Choice is not a bad thing. Education is not a bad thing. Being able to communicate easily with people from all over the world can open a person’s mind in wonderful ways. That’s good too. You only ascribe it all to evil because it’s a matter of you losing control.
“You arrogantly mocked on television God-fearing Christians, the Holy Bible and morality,” Wiles said. “You demanded a godless society. Well, you got it. All these allegations of sexual misconduct are the byproduct of your godless society.
Well, there’s so much material to mock. No, we don’t have a godless society, and you damn well know it. But you christians, you can’t manage to breathe without complaining. Sexual assault and harassment are not the byproduct of a godless society (the one we don’t have). You can take a very good look at societies which are truly secular, and they don’t have anywhere near the level of problems we have here in Ustates. Now, it’s beyond fucking wrong to pretend that in the 1950s and 1960s and on that men just didn’t do this sort of thing. They did. There was plenty of harassment, sexual assault, and rape. People had little recourse back then, and that sort of thing was in the “don’t talk about it” category. It’s taken a long time for people to be able to speak out. That does not mean this behaviour is brand new.
When it comes to sexual assault and harassment, there’s been one hell of a lot of christians behind it. Most of the people who did such thing would describe themselves a good, upstanding christians. People still do that sort of shit – Roy Moore. There’s no one who will stand and defend the very worst of behaviour like a white, christian man. Personally, I don’t give a shit about what religion an abuser may or may not embrace; that should not be a focus. Behaviour should be the focus. A great many priests are abusive. Christians get caught with their pants down every other day. Obviously, that biblical morality isn’t so great.
You ripped out of America’s heart her affections for God and His Holy Bible. Why are you now indignant that people are acting like godless heathens?”
America is not a person. To my 60 year old eyes, people are acting like “good christians”. I’ve always been indignant when it comes to sexual abuse. Again, this isn’t new at all. Been going on since forever. What has changed is that people now have the tools to come out about abuse, and they have support in doing so. That still does not make it easy in any way, shape or form. People who come out with sexual abuse are often hounded and harassed, they receive death threats, and much of that shit comes from “good christians”. You have no high horse, Mr. Wiles. Nor do you have a cross, so get yourself down.
Honestly, reading such shit makes me feel the need to take a shower. Moving on to Lance Wallnau, below the fold…
Oh, Lance is ‘prophesying’ again. About the Tiny Tyrant, of course.
“In the name of Jesus, I prophesy that Donald Trump is going to experience a fresh encounter of the Lord in January of this new year and will begin to do Bible quoting in public at an unprecedented rate,” Wallnau said. “Not since Lincoln will we find a president who will be such a quoter of the Bible; he is going to find verses and apply them to national incidents and international situations.”
Ah, bibliomancy. [See: Sortes Sanctorum and Bibliomancy.] That’s an extraordinarily stupid way to make decisions, to say the least. This little prophecy might have a hard time overcoming the fact that the Tiny Tyrant doesn’t read. I wouldn’t put money on Donny owning a bible, either. Perhaps the whole bible is on Twitter? Donny can barely get things right with a teleprompter, and when it comes to speaking spontaneously, it tends to be a word salad mess, which is generally focused on how he won the election, and Clinton and Obama bad.
“May this man be anointed with fresh oil from on high so that he is so slippery the enemy can’t get a hold of him and he keeps on eluding the snare of the fowler and that the net that they set, they fall into themselves and the pit that they dug, they fall into themselves,” he declared. “For it is not against man that they are fighting, but is against he whom God has anointed and who is man to question who God has chosen.”
Oh, I think it’s perfectly fine for us to question your imaginary god’s “chosen”. That god of yours has very bad taste in men, to say the least. And I seriously did not need an image of an oil covered Tiny Tyrant in my head. Thanks ever so much. :shudders:
I attended public school until I was sixteen, but when I was twelve, in 6th grade, I had teacher who wouldn’t teach science class. She told us bible stories, instead. I complained, loudly. I liked science, and I didn’t much care for bible stories. Bad enough that I had to go to confirmation class every Wednesday and church every Sunday. Besides, I knew the world wasn’t “less than 10,000 years old,” and fossils weren’t lies planted by devil to trick us.
Eventually, my teacher stopped telling those stories. I had most of the class on my side, complaining about the nonsense, for one thing. For another, I hadn’t stopped at arguing with the teacher; I’d complained to the principal and every adult who’d listen. Nothing really happened to the teacher, who had a lot of friends with political clout in our little town, but the stories stopped.
In what was surely a coincidence, two science quizzes appeared on my grade average, one with a score of 20% and the other with a 0%. Strangely, no one could remember these quizzes. Nor could anyone produce a copy, despite the teacher’s assertion that she’d handed them back. Certainly I didn’t remember them. I was pretty sure I knew what was going on, though I couldn’t prove it.
I busted my ass the rest of the quarter (the last of the year), but it didn’t matter; her little revenge pulled my grade down to a C. I begged her to reconsider, knowing I’d catch hell and get my ass beat for it at home, but she just gave me this smug little smile and told me I should have thought of that before.
My schoolwork suffered from then on. I worked hard for a while longer, but in the back of my mind there was always a voice saying “Why bother? You know you can’t trust the teachers at all.” My sophomore year of high school was a real red-letter year- I got straight E’s on my first two report cards. I couldn’t keep up with my classes anymore, and I was all out of fucks, anyway.
That’s what I think about every time some asshole starts going on about how bringing ‘God’ back to the schools will make us all ‘better people.’ God botherers* helped set my on the path of the delinquent, and it sure as hell didn’t make my sixth grade teacher decent or honest.
*Confirmation class did not help. Once a pastor has told you you’re going to hell (if anyone would know, it would be a pastor, right?), what’s the point in anything?
-Rick Wiles
Again this Christian refusal to understand the diference between forcing people to pray and not compelling.
I’m pretty sure that no one was saying people couldn’t just pray if they wanted to (& weren’t disrupting others?), merely that it wasn’t compulsory to do so and yet that simple distinction, somehow never gets grasped & this Wiles effectively lies here because?
PS. And he’d be cool with letting people in public schools pray to Buddha , Ganesha or have Jewish prayers? I doubt it very much and another seemingly obvious distinction mysteriously (?) missed.
Vucodlak:
Another fine example of that vaunted biblical morality. Christians are some of the most immoral people I have ever met. Their blatant hypocrisy is breathtaking, and the worst thing is that they know they are doing wrong, but they’ll never admit it, because they have this little vision of themselves as righteous christians.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your teacher ended up thinking she didn’t do anything wrong at all, because you thwarted ‘god’, and she was just the instrument of ‘god’s’ vengeance. She’s probably the kind of person who would say suffering is good for the soul. I heard that one too many times.
As for the going to hell business, oh man. When I was around nine, I had been at mass, and took communion. If you’ve never had wafer Jesus, those damn things get all gluey sticky when hit with saliva. I had gone back to my pew and sat down, when Jesus got stuck in my throat. I started having trouble breathing, and I was in the middle of a massive crisis. We had been taught that touching the host (tongues excepted) was a mortal sin. Going to hell, never gettin’ out. I was frantically thinking -- if I stuck my finger down my throat and shoved the host down or pulled it out -- hell. Forever. (And the nuns preached hell like crazy way back when) but if I just sat there and choked to death, that would be suicide, or so I thought. In the end, my finger went down my throat. Later that night, I spent the whole night clutching my bible and crying, because I knew I was going to go to hell. Forever.
It was decades before I could root all the hell stuff out of my head. For much too long, it resided in the back of my mind, with a sharp, caustic fear attached. Later on, in my Jesus Freak days (Calvary Chapel tent days), it was hell that put paid to religion again. I tried to ask Romaine if being scared of going to hell was a good reason to believe in god. I got a laugh, “seems like a good reason to me” and was brushed off. I decided that fear was a lousy basis for faith.
I am really sorry about what happened to you in school, Vucodlak.
vucodlak #1
You have
my thoughts and prayersan offer of virtual rum..
That time in our lives, that ten-to-thirteen time, that seems to be really … formative
I think the Jesuits had it wrong.
@ Caine, #4
Ugh, that sounds terrible; I’m sorry that happened to you. One good thing about the LCMS is that they weren’t quite as strict about the wafers and wine. I remember specifically learning that, if you were choking or having an allergic reaction or whatever, you could spit it out without being damned. We used the same gluey wafers as most Catholic churches, I think, so I suspect the pastors got that question a lot.
My first “long night of the soul” occurred a sometime after the pastor pronounced me ‘hell-bound.’ I was worried about it right away, but I also mostly avoided thinking too much about it. But one night, days or weeks later, I was unable to sleep. As I was flipping through the channels I came across Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth.
I started watching it, and that’s when it really hit me; I was going to hell, to face an eternity of torments worse than anything anyone could imagine… and the stuff in that movie was a lot worse than anything I’d ever imagined. I didn’t have much stomach for gory, violent films at that age, so I’d never seen anything quite like it. It put the fear of God into me but good, and I didn’t sleep for days, afraid I’d die and wake up in hell. It was terror that kept me a Christian for another decade or so, but it was terror that eventually made me leave, too.
I started praying for answers that very same night as I saw that stupid movie. I wanted to know if I was really damned. I couldn’t take not knowing (though I suppose an almighty ‘YEP’ from on high wouldn’t have been very comforting, either). In my early twenties, I decided I’d had enough. People all around me talked about feeling God’s presence, sensing his will, seeing signs, and all that nonsense constantly, but I’d never felt a damn thing. Maybe another god would be less of an asshole.
Long story short- I came to the conclusion that there was about the same evidence for all gods, including the one I was raised with, and became an atheist (and gained a taste for blasphemous music). I even enjoy the first couple of Hellraiser movies, though I like the novel the first is based on better.
@ chigau (違う), #5
Thanks! And it does it indeed. I still don’t trust authority figures. So perhaps I did learn something of value from her.