It's not right

I don’t think I had a particularly negative introduction to religion. I can’t think of any other way I could have been introduced to it where it could have taken on me.

I do read pretty extensively about the history of the church though, mostly early Christianity and the Reformation. Reading right now about how the idea of wealth commingled with early Christianity as it was beginning to take over Rome. The Roman’s idea of giving was to build like baths for the public and the public would be grateful and would remember their names for future generations, but not the poor, or that is not the poor who weren’t citizens. All those bread and circuses they were for citizens only, if you weren’t a citizen you weren’t allowed into the circuses and you didn’t get any bread. Giving was kind of a civic tradition and that didn’t include non-citizens.

Christians had good and bad times in the empire, at this time, 370 AD, they are beginning to emerge from something like the lower middle classes. You know there is something there like with the communists or other mass movements. At the beginning there were no real advantages to being a commie or Christian, it was just something you did because you believed in it. But as it grew, paying jobs like commissar and priest began to appear where you could also have power and a path to more power and people began to join it just to get ahead.

I think that’s about where the church began to get a hierarchy and the hierarchy set up rules where the only way you could be saved was through them, and by the way if you had other ideas about the trinity, off with your head.

Of course I remember Turn, Turn, Turn, how do you think I ever heard of Ecclesiastes?

Let me speak to two recent developments which I think illustrate something I find disturbing.

The first was that Bundy guy, a wacko bunko artist if I ever saw one, but quickly the darling of the Foxies because here he was defying the awful government so much that he refused to recognize the United States. In these troubled times the best way to prove that you are a true patriot is talk about how much you hate the United States. And he was riding high until he made that little speech about Negroes, and everybody, especially the Foxies, turned on him justlikethat. All I saw were snippets and I never was able to put it together entirely, but it seemed to me that the gist of what he was saying was that Black people in the welfare state weren’t doing any better than when they were slaves. I don’t hold with that personally, but it’s not that different from what others have said. But the firestorm was that he said something racist, and of course that incites my side, and the Foxies don’t like to be identified with that kind of speech so they joined in, and bam he was gone. Well he still has his gun-toting posse around, though you have to wonder, armed bands that don’t have to go to work, how much good can they be up to?

Then this Sterling guy. Well this was really nasty racist stuff that he was saying, the kind of stuff we haven’t heard since we were growing up on the southwest side where we heard it all the time. But here’s a thing, it was a private conversation, he wasn’t making a speech, he wasn’t lobbying for some racist law. But again the firestorm, an even bigger one, because you might have some sympathy for a cowpoke, but nobody has any sympathy for some philandering fat cat.

I don’t think much of either guy, but what I found disturbing was the sheer force of the firestorm. People saw immediately that this was rolling the nation and even some guy like Buchanan knew better than to say something against it, or he would be forever linked with Sterling and wouldn’t even be able to get on Fox anymore. I wouldn’t even be talking about this if I didn’t know nobody else reads this.

This is what I don’t like, the fact that here is this firestorm raging the land, and everybody is in agreement and nobody better say anything that deviates from the firestorm. It’s just not right, people shouldn’t work themselves up to a fury like that. If we were in a crowded café and I wanted to even express the mild objection I have made, I would first have to look around, and then lower my voice, like I was saying something against the state in a dictatorship.

And a lot of it is my side’s fault, the way they sling around the term racist at anybody they don’t like. I think it’s bad strategy because it’s insulting to people they would like to convert, and it’s also dangerous because once the populace decides you are racist you are beyond the pale. On the Sunday talk shows they may get the democratic, or republican, or libertarian, or socialist view, but they never get the racist view.

And the worst thing is you don’t even have to be a racist, all you have to be is accused of it, and if the roar is loud enough, nobody will dare to defend you lest they get accused of being racist too.

It’s not right.