Alan: Christian fundamentalists hope -- actually delight in the article of faith -- that hundreds of millions, if not billions of human beings will go to hell where they will burn alive in a Lake Of Unquenchable Fire with no prospect of relief much less termination.
The nervous systems of the damned will renew themselves forever for no other purpose than to experience the pain of bathing in magma fully conscious -- cosmically conscious -- forever.
The vindictive punitiveness aroused by the prospect of others' damnation is antithetical to compassion and results, as a practical matter, in the continual exercise of a bedrock conviction that there are "good people" who deserve good things, and "bad people" who deserve bad things.
I do not know if these self-professed Christians can acknowledge their spiteful antipathy -- and often their sadistic delight -- in another's incalculable pain.
Still, such antipathy exists and festers.
Insofar as we must adopt beliefs about "the ineffable," I believe that no "creator God" worthy of worship would devise a "world" in which (even) the most evil were not allowed "at some point" to exit Existence.
"Putting down a pet" to save it from pointless pain that has no prospect of cure is a rubric of compasssion.
I understand the "Christian" argument that "freedom" can only reach culmination in The Beatific Vision if people choose to use freedom to align with God/Good.
The following image, however, reveals the biases that, one way or another, everyone brings to bear upon "the lost," "the cruel," "the hateful," "the ne'r-do-wells," "the evidently undeserving."
Notably, hatred, cruelty and chest-thumping "patriotic" belligerence do not appear in The Lake of Fire. (Remarkably, "lesbians" do appear in The Lake even though chaste lesbians abound in Catholic convents.)
The salient sin of our time -- the sin that enthralls much of humankind and degrades the rest -- is Greed, one of The Seven Deadlys.
Yet not one American in a million conceives their own greed as casting their soiled soul into the same lake with sodomites and lesbians.
The prospect is literally unthinkable.
The prospect is literally unthinkable.
In the mind of Christian conservatives, the real sins -- the sins that inspire the orgasmic pleasure of vengeance, vindictiveness and retribution -- are those that involve the exchange (or loss) of bodily fluids, "The Sins of The Flesh."
Pride, always acknowledged as The Cardinal Sin, The Original Sin, the sin whereby Satan fell, never appears in The Lake of Never-Ending Holocaust.
Never.
Never ever.
The relatively trivial sins of the flesh always make an appearance.
But not "The Spiritual Sins."
Not the sin against the Holy Spirit, the comforter and consoler.
In the popular imagination there is no comfort or consolation awaiting the damned for Satan is deemed stronger than The Paraclete and the boundless reach of mercy, forgiveness and compassion.
To devise (or even applaud), never-ending punishment - with no prospect of restoration or pleasure or joy -- is, as I see it, a form of hatred which many Christians bring to fever pitch as a way of venting inner demons in order to avoid the counsels of Love.
'You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.' Tom Weston S. J.
***
The Hard Central Fact Of Contemporary Conservatism
The hard, central "fact" of contemporary "conservatism" is its insistence on a socio-economic threshold above which people deserve government assistance, and below which people deserve to die.
The sooner the better.
Unless conservatives are showing n'er-do-wells The Door of Doom, they just don't "feel right."
To allay this chthonic anxiety, they resort to Human Sacrifice, hoping that spilled blood will placate "the angry gods," including the one they've made of themselves. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/harvard-study-45000-americans-die.html
Having poked their eyes out, they fail to see that self-generated wrath creates "the gods" who hold them thrall
Almost "to a man," contemporary "conservatives" have apotheosized themselves and now -- sitting on God's usurped throne -- are rabid to pass final judgment.
Self-proclaimed Christians, eager to thrust "the undeserving" through The Gates of Hell, are the very people most likely to cross its threshold.
Remarkably, none of them are tempted to believe this.
***
An outbreak of candor in the Obamacare debate
BY GREG SARGENT
You’ll be startled to hear, via Bloomberg News, that House Republicans have once again put on hold their plans to release their alternative to Obamacare. Bloomberg quotes Republicans claiming they are in the midst of making process-y decisions about how to offer their alternative in legislative terms.
But it may also be that Republicans are running into the same old problem: There just isn’t any real policy space for an alternative that would meaningfully accomplish what the law accomplishes. Indeed, along these lines, one GOP aide was remarkably candid in an interview with Sahil Kapur:
One congressional GOP health aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said his party is as determined as ever to fight Obamacare, and will remain so as long as it exhibits failure. He said devising an alternative is fraught with the difficulty of crafting a new benefits structure that doesn’t look like the Affordable Care Act.“If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that’s absolutely true,” the aide said. “As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act…To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.”
You don’t say! This is just one anonymous GOP aide, but when you take these comments alongside what Paul Ryan admitted to the other day, we’re really getting somewhere. Ryan forthrightly claimed that, once Obamacare is repealed, its popular provisions shouldn’t be replaced, because so doing would be too costly.
Before Obamacare’s benefits kicked in for millions, it was easier for Republicans to resort to “repeal and replace” rhetoric while remaining in a policy-free zone. But now that those benefits are no longer theoretical, it’s becoming harder and harder for Republicans to advocate “repeal and replace,” without getting forced into an uncomfortable choice. Either they offer an alternative that, under scrutiny, would be revealed to accomplish a fraction of what Obamacare would, meaning it would fall far short of the law’s popular goals. Or they can claim to support those goals, but that then invites questions as to whether they are willing to accept the tradeoffs necessary to accomplish them.
All signs are that House Republicans, if they ever do introduce an alternative, will opt for the former, sticking by tried-and-true GOP ideas like allowing insurance sales across state lines. But some GOP candidates are finding that they feel politically obliged to opt for the latter — indicate support for the law’s general, and expansive, goals. However, this is obliging them to remain vague on the trade-offs they are willing to support. Hence North Carolina GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis insists he supports protections for the sick, and Michigan GOP Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land insists she supports extending coverage to the poor, even as neither says how they’d accomplish such things.
Perhaps Obamacare will remain so unpopular in red states that Republicans will be able to get away with vague “anything but Obamacare” evasions. But it’s also possible that the intense scrutiny that Senate races bring will make them increasingly difficult to sustain. And this is how you can see Obamacare fading as an issue. As Brian Beutler explains, conservatives are slowly transitioning from “repeal and replace” to a broader recognition that the best way to move the health system in a conservative direction is to enter into relatively conventional negotiations over its future. Polls already show majorities want to move on from the Grand Obamacare Debate. If mounting enrollment and a general sense that the law is functioning adequately force Republican candidates to agree Obamacare’s goals are worthy — even as they don’t particularly want to discuss how they would accomplish them — is it all that fanciful to imagine the law getting neutralized as an issue, even as campaigns move on to other topics?
These are not real burns. Real burns are way worse. For one thing, the liquid in the right eye would have boiled and popped.
***
"Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) English journalist and writer
***
Chesterton's Universalism by Edward Babinski
Chesterton's Universalism by Edward Babinski
***
Pain/punishment with no possibility of surcease would be the work of a sadist.
I cannot imagine a loving God who would not, at minimum, arrange for consciously evil souls to exit existence just as death exits life.
No comments:
Post a Comment