No deep insights here. Just a big, bold WTF? at the fact that so many conservative Christians continue to profess to be champions of personal responsibility.
Really?
Christians: your god hates personal responsibility. He loathes it. If you believe he exists and if you believe Christian doctrine, then this god has condemned you to torture because of something someone else did thousands of years before you were born. That’s not personal responsibility. If that god believed in personal responsibility, Eve and Adam would have taken some lumps – presumably the snake also – and, well, that would be it. They were cast out of the garden. Their children didn’t return, so no one else ate the forbidden fruit. Nope. Just those two. But the Christian god is happy to make you responsible for events in which you played no personal part.
And, of course, there’s no responsibility imposed on you for your evil acts. Sure, you have to “believe” in the Big J, but even if you don’t commit any evil acts, you’d still have to have faith in order to escape torture. To escape divine condemnation, Stalin must pay the same price (no more, no less) that any child who dies within minutes of being born must pay. No need to make amends to those you’ve wronged. No need to do something a little extra to make it back into the Christian god’s good graces if you ordered water boarding and other war crimes. No need to suck up just a little bit more if you launch a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.
Nope. This god condemns regardless of your behavior. This god condemns regardless of the amount of evil you harbor. And this god forgives Hitler and Mother Teresa just as quickly and easily as this god “forgives” Charles Hamilton Houston, Sylvia Rivera, Hildegard von Bingen, and Woody Guthrie.
Personalized responsibility? Responsibility where it actually matters what you personally have done, why you did it, and what outcomes resulted? That’s anathema to the Christian god and antithetical to the tenets of Christianity.
And yet so many people simultaneously profess to be devout Christians and believers in personal responsibility. I sometimes wonder: do they even realize that they must of necessity be lying about at least one of those things?
That would necessitate thinking.
“Personal responsibility” always boils down to one thing – “I don’t want to pay taxes so screw the poor.”
And if there’s one message Jesus is known for, it’s “screw the poor”.
To Tabby Lavalamp
Not always. I believe that the best and only fix for cases where police assault, batter, and shoot people, is personal responsibility of the police! That’s the kind of personal responsibility that I want to see. For example, that
coppig who said that he meant to reach for his taser instead of his gun, and shot some gun on the ground in California in the subway – that should automatically be manslaughter. Even accepting the guy’s story, which is already highly dubious, that’s manslaughter. I would look really hard and try to upgrade it to murder, because how the fuck do you confuse a gun for a taser when the gun is already subdued and on the floor.