A lot of things have happened since the last time I made a post on this blog. Concentration camps are here in America, though I was wrong about them targeting the LGBTQ+ community and they decided to go after immigrants first. I suppose that makes sense, textbook fascist ultra-nationalist horseshit.
They are now raping and killing people in ICE “detention centers” on a regular basis and detaining people with protected legal status as well as actual American citizens. This is now ramping up to insane levels and it is only a matter of time until they announce that they don’t have to deport these people and start using them as forced labor.
And keep in mind that after the forced labor part comes the part where they kill them, either by working them to death, or by extermination when the camps “become too crowded”. And btw 38 billion is about half of what it costs for SNAP benefits every year, so much for being fiscally responsible.
Now it remains to be seen whether they are going to use these camps for mass detainment of American citizens but rest assured that THAT is the point of all this in the end. They want to take “undesirables”, anyone who speaks out, the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill, etc, and throw them into prisons to extract free labor and build their white nationalist utopia.
It may well be that they are going to build bespoke private prisons for the mass detainment of American citizens they hope to eventually enact. And again, for anyone who doubts this because it seems like a bridge too far – HOW MANY BRIDGES HAVE WE CROSSED THIS YEAR ALONE? I’m not talking about something that is likely to happen this year but is coming down the pipeline.
For now the cruelty is the point as they tighten their grip and slowly ratchet up the temperature. They’ve already gotten away with so much, including beginning to murder American citizens in the streets with impunity. Of course police already do that, but this is the first time we’ve seen Border Patrol and Immigration Enforcement, two bodies that have 0 power over American citizens, executing people in broad daylight.
The African American community and people of color in general in this country have already seen the cruelty and racism baked into the DNA of this country and into the genetics of policing for generations. But for many white Americans this will hopefully serve as a wake-up call.
The Media has also remained silent on the ongoing unrest in cities across America, proving that they are complicit with this regime and also need to be held accountable when all of this is over. It’s not just ICE and Trump and every fascist pig piece of shit it’s the people who had a duty to speak up and did not that must be routed out.
Their silence has a chilling effect as people are being raped and murdered by this unconscionable administration.
I want people to understand that this isn’t some new blight on America though. It is accelerating far faster than we might have expected because we were boiling in this pot for at least the last 50 years. Arguably since the Civil Rights act passed racists like Trump have been waiting to go back to a world where they could exploit, subjugate, and build on the backs of slaves. In fact this all goes back to the Civil War. Keep in mind that much of the racism we know today came out of the economics of that era.
Slaves made an entire class of people filthy rich in the South, so rich that they started to feel like they were actually superior to the people they were subjugating. They started making up myths, reading out scriptures from the Bible, and solidifying their place the higher race through fake race science. All of this so that they could justify an ancient practice being carried into their modern “civilized” world.
Those people never went away. The racists, the eugenicists, the Confederates, the Nazis, they never left us and they don’t all look like Trump. They look like your neighbors, hell, they might be your neighbors. The world is filled with sycophantic bootlickers who think that being at the right hand of the devil is better than being in his path.
Doom and Gloom Up In His Room
But all of this doom and gloom isn’t the end of things. This attempt at fascism has already shown that it is weak and it is worried about its own self-image. If there’s one thing we know about ole Trumpy boy it’s that he’s a fucking thin-skinned little bitch who can’t take an insult or anything that makes him look back.
Of course there’s the fact that he’s a rapist pedophile and that may well be his undoing eventually. But it is going to take time and it is going to take all of us. Organizing is important but I regret to inform you it is something I know very little about.
We are going to, eventually, get out of this, but the key is that we have to be ready to chase these Nazis across the world and back into their holes. And we cannot allow the Democrats or Republicans to continue flirting with fascism because right now both parties are complicit. We cannot allow them to adopt these fascist policies because that is how we got where we are today.
Obama inherited Bush era War on Terror policies and continued the mass deportations, putting kids in cages, drone strikes, all kinds of fascist shit. These people are captured opposition most of whom are bought and paid for by the same folks the Republicans are. If we allow the Democrats they will 100% keep a bunch of the fascist policies going that we are seeing right now.
Conclusion
Fuck Ice, Fuck Trump, Fuck the Supreme Court, Fuck the Republicans, Fuck the Democrats who are doing nothing. Power to the people, the protesters, the dissidents and disobedient, and everyone who remembers the shape of freedom.
The fact that things are still continuing to happen is a fucking joke. In my lifetime alone there have been so many world-shattering events and so many false promises that something big was going to happen.
The world was going to end in the year 2000, the Rapture was coming in 2011, the world was going to end in 2012, and so on. And yet we’re still here? What the fuck?
Stop promising me the end of all things if you aren’t going to deliver it to me. Stop promising me World War 3 when there’s already a Nazi in the White House and clearly we haven’t resolved things from World War 2 anyway.
I’m tired of going to work for peanuts while these hoity-toity billionaire fuckbois get to jerk each other around in endless wars with drone strikes and bloodshed that only involves the poorest and brownest among us. Fuck these racist motherfuckers.
Can we pack it in already? I’m done. I’m so tired of being aware of global geopolitical bullshit. My brain evolved to eat berries and shit in a cave behind a big rock and avoid bears and instead I have to watch as we shit the bed collectively as a species.
And none of this was our fault strictly speaking. We were born into a prison that we cannot taste or see or touch, a prison built from the baggage of the dead. Each generation of human beings is born into a system that they and even their parents are only marginally responsible for building, at least individually.
But with all the promises of something happening, from mutually assured destruction, to alien invasions, to Jesus Christ himself returning, I just wish there was anything at all behind these promises.
I wish aliens would invade or giant Kaiju would just start rising from some abyssal plane beyond our understanding. Eldritch horrors would fill me with comfort at this point, rather than having to watch literal children be blown to bits by genocidal pieces of shit.
Stop teasing us with promises of the end of the world and just let it end already, I’m done, I’m ready to go back to living in caves somewhere in the South of France with my little tribe of weirdos. We can chase down mammoths and just chill, it’ll be great.
Giant monsters? Hell yes. Step on me Godzaddy, tread right on me as if I’m Tokyo. Just get it over with already, please, this is exhausting. I’m tired of these fevered egos tainting our collective unconscious.
Cthulhu? More like YES BOO! Bring it on. I’m into tentacles now. Stretch out your stygian wings as you traverse the luminferous aether and descend from the great gate in the sky.
IA IA! Let our ululations praise the Old Ones as they usher in an age of true darkness and teach us to revel and sing and worship beneath the stars.
I for one can’t wait to haul the great cyclopean stones, and place them into non-euclidean shapes that would snap a lesser mind in two, as we build their temples and cities.
Crawl out through the Fallout? Yes please. I belong in a super mutant’s evening stew. Please insta-gib me and use me as ingredients! Keep the rads high and the flag of the Minutemen flying even higher. Or maybe Liberty Prime can sit on my face. Show me how Democracy actually tastes.
I don’t know what Max was so Mad about, his world seems great, you can just slap on some football pads with metal spikes and BOOM, you’re a wastelander. It seems pretty fucking chill to me.
Bladerunner? Well let’s just say I’m a replican, not a replicant, let’s get it started and if it rains hard enough all my tears can truly mean nothing just like the moments in Rutger Hauer’s fucking head. I’m done chasing paper unicorns, get on with it already, I’m done running and I’m not asking the company for any more life.
Can the Dead just Dawn already? We’ll even let Zak Snyder direct the end of the world for all the Snyder bros out there, as long as James Gunn gets to still write the script. All I know is there’s no way on Earth that there’s any room left in Hell.
28 Years Later? How about 4 billion? When the sun has consumed almost all of its fuel and begins to expand. Swelling to consume the Earth? I love that for her. Slay. Eat the whole thing as a little treat.
The calm and peace of the heat death of the Universe, which, if you think about it, is really poorly named. Because in actuality it’s really really cool. Just sit back for a few quadrillion years as the Universe expands like a piece of taffy stretched until all the particles are so far apart from each other and the energy of it all just dissipates and breaks down.
I like to think of it like the Universe is lounging in an isolation tank and finally gets a moment to itself without the noisy apes of this trash-ass planet bothering it.
Are these humans bothering you King? Because they’re bothering the fuck out of me and I’ve about had it.
or how I learned to start wishing the Supreme Court had been aborted as fetuses…
It’s been a long time, getting from there to here. Over the years I personally have taken quite the spiritual and political journey, from being raised by Evangelical fundamentalist parents to reading the Bible, deconverting, and slowly questioning all the BS I was raised with to arrive at where I am today. This Blog itself has not seen a post since 2015 but I feel that recent events are going to pull me back in – back into the world of firebrand atheism and of saying Fuck the Bible.
America too, it seems, has been on a journey of her own, one that involves backsliding away from democracy and towards a growing fascistic threat that we have to discuss if our nation is going to survive the future. When Trump first rose to prominence in 2015 during the run up to the election and even for that first year of his Presidency I thought, like many did, that cries of him being a fascist were greatly exaggerated. I didn’t understand how fascism worked or how it had remained hidden, boiling just beneath the surface, watching and waiting as the right wing of this country slowly but surely became more and more extreme.
At least Cthulhu admits he’s evil
My wake up call did not come fully until the latter half of Trump’s Presidency, as Covid-19 hit and the President’s true incompetence was revealed. I began to look deeper at what was happening with the MAGA movement, with Trump, and in the broader political spectrum. The pieces began to fall in place. January 6 was another wake-up call and it told me that things had accelerated to the point that our democracy, and the lives of millions, are genuinely at stake if the GOP is allowed to continue on its current trajectory. They are currently an existential threat to life, liberty, happiness and democracy in America.
I’m not going to pretend to be some great researcher, political activist, or even someone who fully understands everything that is happening. I don’t have a political science or sociology degree. Instead I want to argue – in an almost Conspiracy Theory style way – what I believe to be happening. Maybe that poisons the well of my own post, so be it, but I can’t pretend to know for sure what is coming next or what is happening. I just know that there are dots that I have connected here and that whether you believe me or not I think it is worthwhile for me to lay them out.
All I can say is buckle up and hopefully join me in saying: Fuck the Supreme Court.
Part I – Christian Dominion and the Long Game
The first thing we need to understand to set the stage is something that I used to rail about a lot on the internet back in the day, Christian Dominionism. Similar to Christian Nationalism (or perhaps borrowing elements from it) Christian Dominionists believe that our country, laws and government should be Christian and that Christian morality and beliefs should be the predominant basis for those laws.
The belief that America is a Christian Nation founded on Judeo-Christian values has been repeated and peddled by everyone from Ronald Reagan to modern day figures like Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, etc. While it is a staple of the Evangelical “Christian Right” the truth is that anyone of any Christian denomination can be persuaded to believe that Christian beliefs helped found this country and form the basis of our laws and make the leap to the belief that the “Separation of Church and State” is a wishy-washy guideline at best and something to be entirely done away with at worst.
Growing up during the “War on Terror” I can remember pearl-clutching Republicans decrying the coming of SHARIA LAW. The spooky scary Muslims were going to come, the Islamophobes said, and turn America into a religious theocracy similar to Saudi Arabia. I find it ironic that, with the current way the Supreme Court is rolling back our rights, and the constant reactionary hatred spewed against the LGBT community by the Right, we are more and more starting to resemble Saudi Arabia. Apparently Conservative Christians want the exact same restrictive and hateful laws and traditions, the kind that subjugate women, gays and other groups, that a country like Saudi Arabia has they simply want to worship Jesus instead of Mohamed.
The other frightening thing about Evangelicals is that they believe the world is coming to an end soon. I remember growing up terrified of the rapture. It was coming any day. Better not sin. Better not make any long term life plans. God was on his way and it was our job as Christians to be ready to be taken up to the clouds. Meanwhile those LEFT BEHIND must endure a tribulation.
When an ideology believes that the world is inevitably coming to an end they can justify anything, either in an effort to stop the end and save the world (ie establish God’s Kingdom here on Earth early and avert the tribulation) or in accelerating the end times by trying to put the global chess pieces where they all need to be in order to force God’s hand.
I want to be clear here that I do not think every Evangelical or Christian in general is a fascist , I simply think that Trump and the fascists use this Christian Nationalism and these delusional beliefs about the end times to their advantage in order to position the Christian Right exactly where they need it.
As long as I’ve been alive I’ve heard Christians talk about one of their Holy Grail goals, overturning Roe V Wade. They’ve been waiting for this for fifty years, biding their time, trying to influence politics and in-turn being influenced by politics. Roe V Wade accomplishes no goals except to subjugate and harm women and roll back rights that they see as illegitimate because they go against God.
(Of course abortion does not go against God in any way shape or form. The Biblical God not only slaughters children by the thousands but openly calls for genocides of entire peoples but there is even a special potion mentioned in the Bible meant to induce a miscarriage if a woman has been unfaithful to her husband (Numbers Chapter 5, Also called the Ordeal of Bitter Water). God does not give a shit about the lives of babies or children and, to be clear, neither do most of these anti-choice Christians)
1 Samuel 15, God Commands Genocide
My ultimate point here is to drive home the fact that they are willing to play the long game. All it takes for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing and right now we have an openly evil political party that is almost entirely unopposed by the ineffectual milk-toast Democrats.
Part II – The Great Replacement and What Overturning Roe V Wade is About
The first set of major dots I want to connect is between the White Nationalist talking point called the Great Replacement and the overturning of Roe V Wade.
For years folks like Tucker Carlson have been ranting and raving like lunatics about the so-called Great Replacement, often hiding behind dog whistles and coded language to hide the more racist and objectionable aspects of the “theory”. Put simply the “Great Replacement” is a racist White Nationalist conspiracy theory about how non-white ethnic and racial groups are slowly but surely replacing white ones in majority white countries. That is to say that people of color are having babies and immigrating to places like the UK and USA at a faster rate than white folks are reproducing.
Now first thing is first, the Great Replacement, even if it was happening, is only a problem if you’re a fucking racist. I don’t know who, other than a racist, would give two fucks about whether or not white people are the majority or not. The fact of the matter is, though, that the language surrounding this racist theory is often so coded and politicized that it can come off as having absolutely nothing to do with race or ethnicity.
Tucker Carlson is the expert here, getting on national TV to talk about how Democrats WANT an influx of immigrants so that those immigrants will vote Democrat. Often times the line between whether these are illegal immigrants or legal ones is blurred, despite the fact that illegal immigrants can’t vote in our country.
The point of the whole immigration angle is, of course, to justify abuse of both illegal and legal immigrants and asylum seekers and to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment in a way that SEEMS to take race out of the occasion. After all if you are Republican and find out that Democrats are trying to pad the stats with immigrants that makes it seem like the Democrats might get an advantage.
So even a native born Conservative person of color might take offense to the idea of immigrants coming here.
Not many young people are Conservatives and, in fact, the Republican party is a fairly small minority of the people of this country in general. In addition many are waking up to the extremism that is in the GOP. So how can the GOP get new voters? If they genuinely believe that immigrants are flooding into our nation and all registering Democrat how can they fight back?
Raising the (White) birth rates of course. But how to do that? Republicans claim to be the chaste ones, they always want to keep sex education away from kids in schools and their Christian wing believes that sex outside of marriage is a sin – plus people just aren’t having as many kids these days – so how can they force people to procreate? Banning abortion, of course, is part one of a plan to create a new generation of fascists. Forcing women to bring unwanted children into the world, children that Republicans are now claiming they will take care of and adopt.
ABC News
Recently a politician in South Dakota was asked what their state would do with all of the kids forced into the world by the insane draconian abortion bans. Her answer was that charities and churches would step up to help those women and those children. This is their plan. They will supplement the supposed influx of Democrat immigrants (despite them being largely imaginary) with a new generation of kids raised by the Church.
As I said before they are willing to play the long game but right now things are accelerating at an alarming rate.
Part III – The Erosion of Church and State
There are two key recent Supreme Court decisions that have already begun the rollback of the Separation between Church and State, specifically in regards to education. The first is a decision of a case from Maine in which the Supreme Court ruled that PUBLIC TAX MONEY cannot be withheld from Private (read RELIGIOUS) schools.
As the forced births in this country begin where do you think those children are going to end up if the Church does indeed step in to care for them? Many will end up in Private Religious Education while others may end up home-schooled by Christian Adoptive or Foster families. Now that our completely secular tax money can be siphoned off into Christian schools there is nothing stopping them.
The second erosion was a decision about public prayer. For a long time coaches, teachers and those acting as employees of the school could not force their sports-teams, students, etc to join together in prayer. After all bowing your head with your Catholic coach when you’re a Protestant might violate YOUR rights as a student to practice religion as YOU see fit. Well that right to practice your religion free from the interference of a school employee was chipped away in this decision.
Now don’t get me wrong, this second case in particular is a small step, a relatively minor erosion, but it is important and as I stated before the Long Game is in effect here. These people don’t have to get what they want right now, remember, the Supreme Court is a LIFETIME appointment and despite most of them being fairly old I feel like they have plenty of time left to lay the ground-work for the total dismantling of our democracy.
They will continue to chip away at the line between Church and State and they will continue their assault on education that they deem inappropriate for children.
Part IV – Education Connection
Get Connected for Free
In the past few years a completely phony outrage has arisen around something called Critical Race Theory and a lot of Conservative pearl-clutching has been done related to whether CRT was being taught in public schools. Of course Critical Race Theory, a branch of Critical Theory, is mostly taught in SOME colleges and universities and is not the kind of thing required for most degrees to graduate. Instead of its actual meaning Conservatives were just using it as a catch-all, a buzzword, because they are tired of doing constant damage control about race relations and systemic racism in America.
CRT became short-hand for any discussion about race, privilege or inequality either in present day America or in the past. State and local governments rushed to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory. They don’t want children in this country to have any understanding of the road our nation has walked through its history. They do not want a critical lens or critical thinking to be applied to racism either in the past or still living inside our systems today.
During rallies and speeches Trump often alluded to something he called PATRIOTIC education, a thing he wanted back in America. The Texas GOP recently outlined their platform and goals and the document reads like absolute fascist insanity despite being the platform of one of the largest branches of one of the two predominant parties of the United States of America. They call for a reinforced “AMERICAN IDENTITY” in education, banning discussions of race, racial sensitivity or “critical race theory”.
The fascists are openly coming for the education of our children, the mask is off, this shit is fucking insane.
We are talking about open indoctrination and willful ignorance and if you think that’s hyperbolic, the next line is about them TEACHING CREATIONISM IN SCIENCE CLASS. Spoiler alert: They want to be able to indoctrinate your kids with religious beliefs in SCIENCE CLASS. They go on to say that Texas should not be beholden to national standards of education, so they want complete control over the curriculum. They want the right wing Christian equivalent of local Sharia Law.
This document is insane and it shows just how far we’ve fallen as a nation. This is how backwards they are willing to ADMIT they want to take us, and keep in mind that if we give them an inch of ground on any of this they will take a mile, they are already taking miles with overturning Roe V Wade. This is Mainstream Republican ideology now, imagine how much crazier shit they believe that they aren’t saying out loud.
Part V – Education Connection 2: LGBTQ Boogaloo
All fascists need an ‘other’, some kind of external or internal enemy to focus their anger upon. Of course many on the far right will focus their attention outward toward immigrants and other ethnic or racial minorities but I think it is clear from paying close attention to the reactionaries on the Right that the LGBT community is their ultimate scapegoat.
In his landmark evil decision Clarence Thomas talks about revisiting certain other Supreme Court cases that are privacy and equality based, two of those are related to Marriage Equality and Anti-Sodomy Laws. So many may not know this but Christian fundamentalists believe that sex is meant to take place between a man and a woman but also many believe that sex is meant only for attempting procreation. Many States used to have anti-sodomy laws, prohibiting or discouraging sexual encounters that weren’t between one man and one woman. These laws primarily were used to discriminate against gay folks.
So the Supreme Court has openly announced that it is open season on gay rights and even on what goes on in private bedrooms between LGBTQ folks. In addition to a bevy of anti-trans legislation attempts and just general bigotry spewing openly from the Right there has been a particularly dangerous push to ban many LGBT people as “GROOMERS”.
Never mind that people like Trump and Bill Clinton were both personal friends of Epstein and both directly tied to actual sex-trafficking and grooming, instead they want to fear-monger about supposed “TRANS IDEOLOGY” and sex being taught to kids. This, again, is just pearl-clutching and “won’t-someone-think-of-the-children-ing”. Never mind that most television commercials contain more sex than any Drag Queen Story Time ever could, it doesn’t fucking matter to them, because they hate LGBTQ people.
And they want your children to be ignorant of sex, gender, and any kind of nuanced understanding of LGBT rights in this country. Keep in mind that these same folks, banning abortion, are coming after Contraception next (another case Thomas wants revisited) and now, in Florida, they want to ban any discussion of gender, gender identity or sex in the classroom completely. This Bill, considered legendarily harmful, is vague enough to not just restrict teachers from talking about sex and gender but also seemingly stops teachers from going into any detail about their personal lives.
I for one remember being in elementary school, I remember teachers would establish whether they were Mister, Misses, Miss, etc on the first day of school. Now we are in a time and place where many non-binary and trans teachers exist and they deserve to be able to tell kids their pronouns and even their marital statuses. Throughout a year of schooling things are going to come up in class and teachers are going to have to discuss at least some cursory details or who they are and what their life is like.
from that same Texas GOP document
People like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and other fascist pricks, have made it very clear that they don’t want gender and gender identity being discussed in public or in school. Trump, who did a great deal in his presidency to set back trans rights, now often incorporates anti-trans rhetoric in his speeches, saying that teachers should not be able to “teach transgender” to our kids. They want prayer in schools, religious teaching in schools, but do not even want LGBTQ students/teachers to feel safe, welcomed, or included in schools.
My prediction is that if fascism rises and is allowed to erode our rights and our education system further we will see an ousting of a great many LGBTQ teachers under the guise of anti-grooming or “Don’t Say Gay” type legislation. They want to reinstate PATRIOTIC education remember and they want to erode away with line between actual education and religious instruction so they will slowly start putting in place teachers that they want.
Also please remember that for decades now the Right has been complaining that “Marxists” and “Post-Modernists” have taken over universities. Steven Crowder and Ben ‘Wet Ass P Word’ Shapiro both made their careers debating college kids and the anti-SJW and anti-Feminist crowd have made it their ongoing mission to point out so-called “WOKE” ideology at work in colleges and Universities. So they will replace the teachers with people who will tow the party line and, of course, we know that the GOP wants teachers and school staff armed to the teeth to “protect from mass shooters” but this will also allow them to arrest or assault anyone protesting what they are doing in these schools including students that speak out.
The Fascists already believe that the education system is controlled by their opposition, they will not hesitate to dismantle it and put propagandists in place.
Part VI – Mask Off, Armbands On
I used to scoff when I heard people on the Left refer to others as Nazis, White Nationalists, or Fascists. I used to think it was hyperbolic and uncharitable and that it diminished the meaningfulness of those terms. I stopped thinking that and came to my senses, especially after January 6.
Many Democrats, Liberals and Progressives might agree with me that January 6 was an Insurrection, an attempt at keeping an illegitimate President who had lost an election, in power. Many would also agree that it was a limp-dicked and pathetic attempt that was rightfully a failure. But I feel like I would get push back in suggesting that January 6 was merely a dry run to test the rest of us on our resolve and that we failed with flying colors.
Of course we have yet to see, as of me writing this, if the DOJ ever will hold Trump and the Republican establishment to account for their seditious attempt to overthrow our democracy but I would like to point out to anyone who thinks the danger has passed that TRUMP did not storm the Capitol. Instead it was an angry mob made up of White Nationalists, MAGA zealots and fascist groups like the Proud Boys. Trump openly told the Proud Boys to “Stand By” on live television, in the midst of a Presidential debate and on January 6 we saw that they took his command to heart.
This is not about Trump, in the same way that the rise of the Nazis in Germany is not about Hitler. We have a tendency to focus on the deluded narcissists that head fascist regimes instead of focusing on the average everyday Nazi who carried out the inhumane and cruel orders of the regime itself. We pretend that Hitler was some super-villain of a figure, essentially Evil with a capital E when in actuality the average Nazi, carrying out evil, was just an ordinary person pushed into place by the political forces and reactionary ideology around him.
In November of 1923 Hitler and the Nazis attempted to storm the HQ of the Bavarian State Police in Munich, Germany. This was the famous Beer Hall Putsch, a failed coup attempt for which Hitler was arrested and charged with treason. But Hitler did not fade into obscurity and while in prison he dictated Mein Kampf and began strategizing a slightly more legally sound strategy to seize power. Rather than attempt a coup by force the Nazis would instead seize power slowly.
Despite being arrested for treason and despite being fought by the German political establishment at the time Hitler still became Chancellor of Germany and after the false-flag of the Reichstag fire he was given emergency powers. The rest, as they say, is history, because once fascists get power they do not give it up even if that power is obtained, in its original form, lawfully.
Even if we do, by some miracle, hold Trump and members of the GOP accountable their base has already been sufficiently radicalized to still pose a threat. Hitler was in prison in 1924 and still rose to power so even if Trump ends up in prison (instead of the White House) by 2024 we still cannot give up the fight against fascism in this country. It is here, it is showing its face in all kinds of ways and places, and the time has come to admit to ourselves that IT CAN HAPPEN HERE. In less than ten years the Nazis went from a relatively obscure movement, to absolute control with Hitler declaring in 1933 that all other political parties were dissolved, the Nazis were all there was.
The average Nazi citizen was not some monster or radicalized zealot and so if fascism rises to power here the average Republican will not suddenly become a monster and it is important to remember that. It also important to remember that ordinary people are capable of immense cruelty especially when under pressure. Even if the average citizen maintains some decency all it takes is the pressure put on them by those who are zealots, by those who are radicals, to drive good men and women to do unspeakable things or merely to turn a blind eye to those unspeakable things.
People often do not realize that the first victims of fascism are the citizens living beneath it. In 1933 the first Concentration camp, Dachau, was built, initially as a place to imprison leftists and any political enemies of the State.
Today we have folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about the January 6 rioters as if they are political prisoners instead of treasonous criminals. Rest assured that if the fascists take power they will do to the rest of us what they PRETEND in their deluded fantasies that we are doing to them. Don’t believe me? The ground work has already been laid thanks to years and years of Mass Incarceration, insane anti-immigration policies and a very special Constitutional amendment.
Newsweek
Part VII – They’re Trying to Build a Prison
America incarcerates more citizens, per capita, than any other developed nation and this system has long been biased against racial minorities and the poor in this country.
In recent times this mass incarceration rate has sky-rocketed thanks in no small part to Tough-on-Crime legislation and the War on Drugs that began in the Nixon era. Our current prison industrial complex is, arguably, an outgrowth of slavery itself, as when the slaves were freed they were not given reparations or any kind of wealth-base to start with. Many Americans were never taught – I know I never was – about the loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows the State to extract free labor from prisoners. I was also never taught about so-called Black Codes and the system of Debt-Slavery established in the South in the post-Reconstruction era. These laws were often arbitrary and were applied without any kind of due process.
The 13th Amendment literally states that slavery is illegal EXCEPT if you are a prisoner. So if you don’t think work-camps are coming for those the fascists deem undesirables I can assure you that they are already here, in-built into the American way of life, and there are tons of ways that the Republicans can make things worse if they gain absolute power.
Near the Southern border, of course, America has concentration camps for those “undesirables” who are not citizens. We’ve all seen the images of kids in cages. Many who are imprisoned in regular US prisons are sterilized and stories of forced sterilizations have also emerged from the detention facilities set up at the US border. Eugenics has a long and sordid history in the United States and it continues in remote pockets to this day and rest-assured that if they gain power it will be a part of the coming fascist regime. They might start with the immigrants but clearly with the overturn of Roe V Wade and them openly admitting they want to roll back contraception both forced pregnancy and forced sterilizations are on the to-do list for these sick fucks.
Forced pregnancy and forced birth are both violations of human rights recognized by international law as potential elements of genocide. All of the pieces are here for a new fascist regime, right down to the fucking genocide, WE ARE NOT THAT FAR OFF FROM THIS SHIT.
Some of the racist and genocidal tendencies of the current far right are hidden beneath dog-whistles, coded language, and other attempts to mask their true evil and how far they are willing to go. In recent times, however, there have been more and more people openly condemning LGBTQ “lifestyles” in ways that explicitly call for the death of LGBTQ people.
I want everyone to keep in mind that stoning people to death in the street, executing homosexuals and “immoral” people is called for in the Old Testament. In the worldview of a Biblical literalist it can all be justified. I feel a sense of guilt that I did not keep this blog running, that I did not continue my fight against the Bible and the Fundamentalists who believe in it.
It seems like not a week goes by when another pastor is hot water for wishing death on homosexuals and LGBTQ people in general. For every one of these pastors OPENLY calling for this there are likely another five who would call for it, if they could get away with it, and for those five there are dozens and dozens who would go along with it. All it takes is a few zealots to rile up a mob and get ordinary folks to do horrible things in the name of God.
In the coming fascist regime immigrants and LGBTQ folks will be the primary targets, along with anyone who speaks out against the Party. It is time to speak out now, it is time to point out all the movements and little victories, all the dominoes that are now falling, as they move into position to take over.
Part IX – The Night of Broken Glass
In 1938, five years after seizing power, the Nazis executed a brutal attack on German Jews after riling up anti-Jewish sentiment for decades within Germany. This event is considered a turning point, as after this the Final Solution could be put into practice. Of course the pretense of this retaliation was mostly fictitious fears, reactionary mutterings. Jews were smeared constantly by propaganda, believed to be a disease, sick, vermin.
Today many on the right consider LGBTQ folks to be sick, deluded, to be groomers trying to indoctrinate children into their way of life. They want to be ban things like puberty blockers and HRT because they want trans-kids and trans people in general to die. Remember that not all of them are calling for open executions in the streets, not all of them have to, many just have to stir up sentiment, fear, foment anger, and set things in motion to move us toward a tipping point.
Fox News recently ran a piece about a transgender kid who was happy, well-adjusted and living his best life with a fully supportive family. This positive outlook on a trans youth was derided immediately by others in the Republican party and right wing media as being outrageous, disgusting, and a betrayal of everything they stand for. They are now openly standing against the very existence of LGBTQ people and their happiness and every moderate voice of acceptance and tolerance among their ranks is being drowned out by the zealots.
By the time of the Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, it was too late for the Jews that remained in German occupied territory, their fate was already sealed, and it was too late for anyone in Germany to fight back on their behalf. After all, by this point, the Nazi party was the ONLY party legally allowed to exist in Germany and those deemed undesirables or political agitators had either been executed, arrested, expelled or at the very least disarmed.
We do not want to wait until the tipping point, until it is too late, to stand up for the LGBTQ community and to stand against the fascists that have now infiltrated the mainstream of the Republican party in America. We do not want it to happen here. We still have time to stop it if we realize that it is happening and work to prevent it, if enough awareness is raised and enough people see the truth before history repeats itself.
It is important that we do not “trust the process” either, that is to say it is important we do not pretend that we can only defeat fascism through entirely civil means. The fascists will use any excuse to fight back, they will find any justification. The pretext for the Night of Broken Glass was the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish man. They will paint with a broad brush. Our fight cannot be done by relying on merely the Democratic establishment and the processes we already have in place.
If we wish to avoid the tipping point we need to shift our country Left, or, at the very least, get the rest of the reasonable masses, the centrists and liberals, to understand just how wildly unhinged the GOP has become and how dangerous they are to our democracy.
Part X – Conclusion
There is a lot more I could say. I could talk about race and how racism and White Supremacy play a part in their plan. I could talk about gun policy and how I believe the GOP will crack down on handguns in “crime ridden” (read: racist dog whistle) areas before they ever relinquish their Assault weapons. I could talk about how the coming subjugation of women and LGBTQ people will make it difficult for us to rally together and that will be done on purpose. It has long been a way of silencing the poor to keep us from being able to use our free time to protest and rally and fight back.
I think that I have provided an overview, however scattershot, of what I believe is going on in present day America. I understand that to most on the outside it looks like a tangled web of conspiracy. Understand, however, that movements like the current fascist one need only a select set of true believers and zealots.
Not everyone is an occultist esoteric SS officer drinking blood from a skull, it only takes a few thousand of those to keep hundreds of thousands in line.
I think the most important take away, however, is that the long game is here. Remember that this abortion ban, if it stands, will lead to a new generation of unwanted children that they are setting the stage to indoctrinate into their way of thinking. Fascism may not come to America in 2024 or 2028, it may come in 2044 or 2048 and we must remain vigilant even if this current wave is somehow defeated. Unless we expunge them from our democracy and strengthen it against their influence we will be wrestling with them for decades to come.
I think it’s safe to say that if you want a free and democratic America that you should be an anti-fascist.
Future generations will look back on what we did now, and whether or not we spoke out now and hopefully they will do so while living in freedom and democracy and not in a theocratic fascist state.
Alternatively Titled: Jesus told you to sell your possessions and give to the poor, so why haven’t you?
If you’re a Christian, a sincere believer that following Christ and his teachings is the best way to store up treasure in Heaven, I have a very simple question – WHY do you own a computer or web-enabled phone?
This question might seem out of left field, after all almost everyone in modern society owns a cell phone that can browse the internet and many people also own a laptop, desktop or tablet to surf the web. But if the Jesus of the Gospels looked at most American Christians today he would rather perplexed by their behavior. Many of them buy fancy clothing and dress up each Sunday to go to Church, they own houses, multiple vehicles, computers and electronic devices, television sets and more clothes than they need.
While many Churches these days do help out the poor and hungry in our communities the average individual Christian does not follow Christ’s directions in the Gospels. Which directions am I talking about? Why the ones that tell Christians to sell their possessions, give the money to the poor, and hang out with and help out the poor at every opportunity.
There is no ambiguity in the Gospels that Jesus is preaching a Gospel of poverty. People, he says, should give no care of tomorrow and let tomorrow worry about itself for God will provide for them. And repeatedly, over and over again, Jesus tells those who wish to be followers to give away all of their possessions in order to follow him.
Now there’s a handful of ways for modern Christians to skirt their way around this. They can pretend that Jesus was only talking to his followers in the 1st Century and not to those who would live thousands of years later… this kind of cherry-picking seems severely dishonest. Or those Christians could argue that God provided them the things they have, the cars, the money, the house, etc. The idea these people present, without any backing from the Bible, is that God has blessed them with Earthly treasure for their faithfulness.
Not only does this prosperity Gospel fly in the face of Christ’s actual teachings, which direct followers to give up Earthly goods to pursue treasures that are only in Heaven but it also doesn’t make any sense when you break it down. After all there are plenty of faithful devout believers who ARE homeless or poor and who can’t seem to catch a break and there are plenty of wealthy hypocrites and even wealthy non-Christians. So obviously being a sincere believer does not correspond to one’s worldly goods (duh). Jesus does say that God will provide food and clothing to wear but not any sort of riches or worldly things.
There is this weird contradiction I’ve noticed about many Christians here in America, the majority of them are REPUBLICANS. Republicans demonize the poor at almost every turn and deride the idea of their hard earned tax dollars going to help people on Welfare or Food Stamps. Yet this is exactly the sort of thing Christ wanted, people helping each other, helping to feed the poor, downtrodden or outcast. Jesus didn’t want Christians looking down on the poor, in fact Jesus liked to hang out with prostitutes and poor people an awful lot and only very rarely did he hang out with the wealthy.
Jesus’ philosophy is almost self-destructively selfless. Turn the other cheek, give to those who steal from you even more than they take, bless those that curse you and love your enemies – and do not worry about tomorrow. Judge no one and be sure to remove the sin from your life before you criticize anyone. Help the poor and freely do miracles.
Yet why do we not see any verifiable evidence of miracles? Why do we not see Christians selling their worldly goods so that they can take up their cross and giving the money to the poor?
While I, obviously, do not agree with all of what Jesus says there is wisdom in some of it and while I do not think every American should give up everything they have to help the poor I think a more charitable attitude would help a great deal. Rather than despising those who are own Food Stamps are freeloaders perhaps Christians might look at them as Christ would have, as other fucking people who happen to be in a bad financial spot where they could use a little help to make ends meet.
Obviously this post is a bit different from other Fuck the Bible posts, because instead of saying Fuck the Bible, I am essentially pointing out that Christians aren’t following the book they purportedly think is the Word of God.
As I said though there’s plenty of self-destructive nonsense in what Jesus is talking about when he tells people not to resist an evil person but to submit to them. I understand that Christ was a pacifist (another fact many Christians would angrily disagree with) but he takes it to an extreme degree even telling his followers not to defend themselves. This seems like madness! If some burglar demands my wallet I am meant to give him my shoes as well? No thank you.
Jesus, being an apocalyptic prophet, believed that there was no reason to worry about tomorrow, the Kingdom of God was on its way. But today the advice to let tomorrow worry about itself is itself worrying. How can we possibly not worry about tomorrow? There are goals to be set and achieved, obstacles to overcome, and an uncertain future that we must attempt to shape as best we can. But, if, as Jesus believed, the world was fast coming to an end, there would be no reason to plan.
Dangerously there are some end-times minded Christians to this day who hold to the dangerous belief that the end is coming soon and that we don’t need to worry about abusing the planet and misusing our resources. They look forward to the end, to seeing God descend with fire and wrath and unleash slaughter on all the “evil people” of the world.
If you are a Christian reading this I wonder how closely you truly follow the word of your Savior. Do you keep the commandments, as Jesus instructs? Do you give to the poor regularly and keep yourself from becoming rich? (A rich man cannot pass into heaven, the Bible describes it as nearly impossible, as a camel passing through the eye of a needle). If you do keep the commandments very closely I wonder how you are even reading this, unless you’re at a local internet cafe or public library. Do you love Jesus more than your own family? Because if not you are unworthy. Have you ever been divorced and remarried, than Christ believes you are guilty of adultery, a capital offense in the Old Testament.
How many demon have you cast out? How many miracles do you have under your belt? Because we are meant to know Christ’s followers by their “FRUITS” and if you are not bearing fruit Christ says you may be cut down and cast into the fire.
If you don’t follow after Christ all that closely than I wonder WHY you believe in something you are unwilling or unable to follow. Why not discard it? Give the Bible a much closer examination and study how it came together and then decide whether the commandments are worth keeping and the beliefs worth holding onto. And if they are, then I bid you farewell as you will no doubt sell your possessions to follow Christ. If they aren’t worth believing then I hope you will one day join me when I say, Fuck the Bible.
Alternatively titled: God Is like Immortan Joe from Mad Max Fury Road
One element that is crucial to modern Christianity is the doctrine of God’s mercy and grace being almost limitless. In fact there are numerous verses of scripture about just how kind and forgiving God is. Thanks to Jesus’ brutal ritualistic death and supernatural Resurrection God can forgive just about anything.
However as I hope I have shown on this blog God’s mercy is actually extremely limited. In fact any reasonably moral human being who behaved like God does would be labeled a serial murderer, psychopath, and be thrown in prison for life. When judged by human standards God is a supernatural maniac who kills at the slightest offense and often for things that no sane person would consider offensive. Yahweh is a dangerous war criminal, a spreader of plague and famine. The Bible paints a portrait of a terrifyingly tyrannical celestial dictator bumbling about with some illiterate people in the desert before carving out a swath of land for them via conquest and slaughter.
The Bible also makes sure that we are aware that God’s mercy is not infinite, not only by depicting God as a short-tempered wrath-bringer but by specifically mentioning sins and misdeeds that simply cannot be forgiven.
Take, for example, a story in Deuteronomy 29. God is reminding the Israelites of their escape from and captivity in Egypt when he mentions the detestable religious practices of that land. See God, for superstitious woo woo reasons, doesn’t like idols or depictions of things. God doesn’t like graven images of anything on Heaven or Earth and get’s jealous that people might like the creation more than they like the creator.
He cautions the Israelites not to let idol worship or the worship of other gods enter into their communities and announces that he will never forgive and has no mercy for those who commit this violation of the Covenant.
Not only does this passage mention this as an unforgivable sin but also further indicates the superstitious nonsense we’re dealing with by invoking the “curses in this book”. Spooky huh? And yet Christians are always bragging about how different their religion is, how it can be reconciled with reason and logic and how it is compatible with science. Does a warning about curses set to befall people for building idols REALLY sound enlightened or spiritually deep? Because to me it sounds like primitive Iron Age horseshit.
Of course most believers will be very familiar with the supposed Unpardonable sin talked about by Jesus as the Blaspheming of the Holy Spirit. On what exactly the unforgivable sin entails it’s hard to find two Christians that agree but they all seem in agreement that it is the only unforgivable sin, at least in the so-called New Covenant. But we don’t even need to bring that up to show how merciless God can be…
Meanwhile back in Deuteronomy, which is a great book to read if you’d like to become an atheist, God sends out the Israelites against their enemies and tells them to have no mercy or pity, to spare no one, and to utterly destroy every trace of them.
Before this God is telling the Israelites all the blessings he is willing to give them if they do follow after him. Much like a dictator God repeatedly cautions the Israelites that he will revoke the blessings if they trip up or don’t follow orders. In fact given that all of this is taking place in the desert Yahweh is very reminiscent of the Mad Max villain Immortan Joe, only Yahweh is more evil.
In the book of Jeremiah the prophet talks about the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrew people. Jeremiah is believed to have multiple authors, one reason for this is because it often switches between narrative and poetic verse on very short notice. Jeremiah 13 contains a pretty awesome, but merciless, poem where God plans on bringing down darkness on top of Israel but before this there is an even more outright statement of God’s less than benevolent intentions.
So is God merciful? Obviously only up to a point and, as the Bible indicates, that point is a razor’s edge easy to cross. Many far-right Christians here in America talk about how our nation is going to be punished for allowing things like abortion and gay marriage and yet they fail to recognize one of the biggest reasons God would punish us – religious plurality.
The God of the Bible, if it existed, would be vehemently anti-American, after all our nation allows people of all faiths, not just Christianity or Judaism, but those who worship other gods as well. And it is that act that constantly get’s the nations surrounding the promised land into trouble in the Bible. In fact their cultures and gods are seen as so abhorrent to Yahweh that he wants those nations wiped away and every man, woman and child slaughtered without mercy or pity.
In Deuteronomy chapter 7 God directly warns that letting even the children live and be adopted might lead Israel astray.
So when completely insane terrorist groups like Isis threaten America with their fundamentalist version of Islam they are thinking in much the same terms, that Infidels and unbelievers must either be converted or killed. And remember that to them Yahweh and Allah are basically equivalent beings because, hey, they have the same brutally evil personality traits and dictatorial insanity.
In truth the unforgivable sin would be to allow bullshit like the Bible (and Koran) continue to weigh down society and drag us backward. It offers no true redemption, not with blood-soaked pages full of wrath and magic. We’re better off saying fuck the Bible.
Alternately titled: Moses shows patience and restraint while God just wants to slaughter everyone.
In my last post I talked a bit about the oddly comedic incidents scattered throughout the books of Moses wherein God gets pissed at the Israelites and decides that the best course of action is to either kill them all or just kill some of them. In these situations the stories typically depict Moses and Aaron having to talk God out of it in a VERY similar way to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
You might remember that in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah God warns Abraham that he is going to destroy those cities but Abraham talks God down to the point where if God finds ten righteous persons he will spare the city. To modern Biblical believers this should be frightening. Here is a supposedly perfect and Holy God compromising his morality based on the advice of human beings. Here are human beings talking God into being MORE loving. MORE patient, MORE merciful and all around MORE moral. This is one of those red-flag hallmarks that makes it obvious that these are stories, not historical accounts of actual interactions with any god.
As I said similar scenes occur between Moses and Aaron and God several times in the Old Testament. One example happens during the story of the 10 Commandments. God is coming down to Mount Sinai in a rumbling thundering fiery cloud (you know, the sort that might spew out of a volcano, the sort that ancient superstitious people might mistake for the glory of a god). There’s been plenty of weird superstitious rules and rituals imposed by God thus far but here, at the origin of the Mosaic Law, is where things get really bad, where something as simple as setting foot on the wrong mountain or working on the wrong day of the week meant your neighbors and family were commanded by GOD HIMSELF to execute you brutally.
Now what reason, other than superstitious horseshit, could there possibly be for God to set up this kind of rule? Sure, okay, Moses is his chosen one who is the only one who is supposed to be up there but what, exactly, is the benefit of executing anyone who so much as touches the mountain? Usually rules and laws are meant to maintain the public good or the welfare of people but here we have a rule that just puts people in danger of the death penalty for no reason.
Of course you might say, “well God wanted them to stay away because his glory and power might harm them if they get too close”. There is a recurring theme in some parts of the Bible (but not all) that seeing or being in the presence of God can be fatal to an ordinary human being, even one who believes. But this is superstitious horseshit as well because an all powerful God, especially one who was once incarnated in human form as Jesus, could easily decide to appear without any harm to anyone in a totally benign form. All the pomp and circumstance of mimicking a volcanic eruption and appearing in a form that would be so harmful to human beings it apparently requires their execution if they attempt to be subjected to it does no one any good and makes absolutely no fucking sense…
All of that without mentioning how immoral it is to kill someone just for touching a mountain and how even more bizarre and cruel to want the animals killed as well.
Most Christians know that while Moses is being talked to by God Aaron and company are down below making idols and worshiping them, apparently forgetting the shit they just went through with the plagues and apparently turning a blind eye to the fire and quaking and the very voice of God which God himself tells Moses he will be able to hear.
The Lord said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.” Then Moses told the Lord what the people had said.
– Exodus 19:9
“Mount Sinai was covered with smoke,because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountaintrembled violently”
– Exodus 19:18
Admittedly God’s words to Moses do go on for quite a few chapters as God details a whole bunch of pedantic overly detailed and obviously manmade nonsense that is supposedly the basis for the ancient Jewish faith. It isn’t until Chapter 32, when Moses is about to come down the mountain, that the idols are finally cast by Aaron and the other Hebrews. Of course God’s first instinct isn’t to show restraint or mercy or understanding but to shed blood.
To someone like me this screams, “We made this story up!” and “This isn’t meant to be taken literally” but to a Biblical literalist this is ACTUALLY what happened and why it happened. God is actually such an evil monster that his immediate reaction is to wipe out his own people, or, at the very least, to slaughter all those who worshiped the idols. Idol worship of any kind is forbidden under penalty of death by Yahweh as does any attempt to practice religious liberty. In fact taking the Bible at its word Yahweh is 100% opposed to the idea of religious liberty and if our legal system mirrored the Biblical one we would be executing anyone who did profess their belief in Yahweh and Jesus.
Moses, as I stated before, becomes the voice of reason against God’s insane knee-jerk blood-thirst.
The same story is actually retold in Deuteronomy Chapter 9 but this time it is written from Moses’ point of view. And, surprise, Moses’ version is much the same with him claiming that only through fasting and prayer and begging God not to do it he manged to save Israel from disaster… and by disaster I mean the furious wrath of God.
So now we come to the end of our wonderful tale. Moses manages to convince God to spare some of the Israelites but Moses, being only slightly less of a dick than God, isn’t going to spare everyone, not even close. And, just with all punishments in the Old Testament law, the brutal executions will be conducted in the name of God and upholding righteousness and will involve people killing their friends, family and loved ones themselves.
That is some fucked up shit right there and kinda explains Jesus’ whole spiel in Matthew about how “anyone who does not hate their Father or Mother is not worthy of me” and how all of his followers are required to love him more than they love anyone else or they are unworthy.
If you accept the Bible as the word of God than THAT is the kind of God you serve.
Alternatively titled: Yahweh the Plague Bringing God of Disease, Decay and Death
Most Christians are familiar with the 10 plagues of Egypt, you know, the ones that God made sure to carry out to the bitter end going so far as to harden Pharaoh’s heart to make sure he could get to the part where he murders children in an act of cruel revenge. The story of the Exodus is one of the most popular and, bizarrely, beloved tales from the Bible.
We’ve established in past passages that Yahweh is a warlike God who enjoys giving over other tribes to complete slaughter or enslavement to the Israelites but the God of the Bible also has a habit of causing famine, disease/plague, death, etc. In fact all Four Horsemen are the sole domain of God and are under his command, not Satan’s. Almost all the evil done in the Bible is done by God or at God’s command.
(okay wrong Apocalypse but you get the idea ^)
The first story I want to focus on comes from Numbers Chapter 14. In this Chapter Moses and the Hebrews are STILL wandering around waiting to get to the promised land but every time they seem to get going on the right track someone disrespects or disobeys Yahweh and he sets them back a few steps. In fact this comedy of errors goes on and on for forty years according to the story, with the Israelites disobeying a God who literally rains down food from Heaven.
So God shows up and is pissed about the way the Israelites have been behaving, particularly because some scouts went to the promised land and returned with reports that it actually kinda sucks. God says to Moses,
“How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them?I will strike them down with a plague and destroy them, but I will make you into a nation greater and stronger than they.”
So here’s God threatening to strike down his own people and just set off with Moses and his elect few to start a separate nation of their own. Moses talks God out of it by saying this:
“If you put all these people to death, leaving none alive, the nations who have heard this report about you will say,‘The Lord was not able to bring these people into the land he promised them on oath, so he slaughtered them in the wilderness.” (Numbers 14:15-16)
Here is Moses showing better moral restraint and more patience than God, if you ask me there are few verses that make it MORE obvious that this is a STORY and was never EVER meant to be taken as a literal history of shit that actually happened. God never said these things – how could he? How could Moses ever be right and show more compassion and more restraint than a PERFECT and MERCIFUL God?
So what does God do?
That’s right, he decides that the people responsible for all the bitching and moaning of his people should be punished rather severely by striking them down with a plague. For sharing their opinions of the promised land in a less than positive way these scouts weren’t just denied a place in that land they were actually executed by God via some kind of disease or plague.
A few chapters later we have another plague and we have a Bible quote that is easily one of my favorites, and here I’m not being sarcastic, taken totally out of context this would easily be one of the most metal-as-fuck Bible verses:
“He stood between the living and the dead, and the plague stopped.” – Numbers 16:48
Kinda reminds me of a kickass movie I just saw:
The story is about a group of “sinful” Israelites who rise up against Moses. God decides its time to deal with the rebels, the unbelievers and those who just have it coming.
Interesting thing about this verse is the use of the phrase “realm of the dead”, other translations render it grave, still others prefer the term Sheol. This is because in Jewish belief there isn’t a Hell perse but rather a realm of the dead called Sheol. Some books of the Bible espouse this idea and suggest that everyone goes to Sheol not just the damned while other books, like Ecclesiastes, do not support the idea of ANY AFTERLIFE at all. I know, I know, I’m repeating myself, but it bears repeating that Jewish teachings and ideas on the afterlife are vastly different from Christian ones.
Immediately the ground does open up and swallow the followers of Korah, who was the on inciting the whole would-be rebellion. The Israelites decide the best course of action is to blame Moses and Aaron for killing off those who were swallowed up. God shows up and decides he’s done enough fucking around with the idea of punishing the Israelites. While Aaron is begging for God’s mercy on his fellow Israelites Yahweh is out amongst them spreading a plague and wiping out over 14,000 people.
You read that correctly – not only is the Biblical God obsessed with and continuously carrying out or commanding genocide against enemies of his people but he frequently murders entire swaths of his own chosen people when they disobey him. The verse I quoted before about standing between the dead and the living is in reference to Aaron who intercedes on the behalf of the Israelites and gets Yahweh to stop his murderous outburst.
Moses and Aaron once again are trying to prevent the horrible thing God is doing just outside their tents:
This whole exercise in story-telling shows a constant tug and pull, ebb and flow, with Aaron and Moses standing between God and absolute annihilation of the Israelites. The danger of the Bible comes from those who seek to make it more than mythology, more than theology, they seek to make it history, to live by its morals and passages as literally written. Of course even most Biblical literalists are not actually literalists, they do not practice the Jewish laws and cherry pick from them at will – BUT they are still trapped in a dangerous mindset.
They celebrate their chains, rejoice at the wickedness of their fictitious God and go headlong toward death with a fantasy of bowing and reveling beneath a massive throne where there is no escape and no end.
That is why Fuck the Bible exists, to get these people to see what the Bible actually says and, perhaps, after they think about it and actually read the damn Bible, get them to see it for the manmade fiction it is.
According to a search of the NIV Bible the word plague occurs well over a hundred times. If you are a Christian you serve a God of disease, or genocide, of mayhem and of war and no amount of pretending is going to change what the Bible actually says.
Alternatively Titled: Genocide, Murder and Rape in Genesis
The Bible is a collection of completely human-made stories and myths, well really I should say man-made since no woman ever contributed to the Bible. The Bible, after all, is very primitive and immoral in its view and treatment of women. One doesn’t have to read far into the Bible to realize how primitive and obviously human a creation it is… but then most Christians don’t read their Bibles from front to back, they jump around cherry-picking. It’s the reason why the story of David and Goliath is one of maybe three stories involving King David that the average Christian even knows, because your local pastor knows what scriptures to avoid and what ones he can work into a sermon.
God’s actions in Genesis are a mix of his typical evil bullshit and basic incompetence betraying the fact that the ancient Jews who wrote Genesis did not believe in the omnipotent omniscience disembodied mind that God has become today. Rather the God of Genesis, walks, talks and can even have his mind changed by human beings.
I could talk about any number of stories from Genesis. The Flood, God’s worldwide ethnic cleansing in which infants, children, and animals are all slaughtered for the sins of the rest of humanity. I could talk about the Tower of Babel, where God somehow fears that human beings will build an actual stairway to heaven tall enough to reach him and thus, in his fear, he decides to cast a spell on everyone creating the languages of the Earth.
Really though I think I will start even earlier, with the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Cain and Abel are the first human beings to offer God offerings. God, being that he is the primitive creation of ancient people, prefers Abel’s offering of dead animal parts with favor but looks on Cain’s offerings of vegetable matter not-so-favorably. The Bible never tells us why God requires rituals and blood-magic as offerings but for the ancient superstitious people that wrote this stuff it would have likely seemed obvious that such things were what God wanted.
The story also never tells why God doesn’t like fruits and veggies. It makes very little sense as God created all things and had previously declared his creation GOOD. One would assume that God would therefore look upon Cain and Abel’s offerings, and the toil it took to gain them, equally. In fact its arguable that Abel’s offering is morally lesser, as it involves the suffering of an animal.
Either way Cain is jealous and kills his brother. God arrives and God apparently doesn’t know where Abel is because he asks Cain. Now conventional Christianity holds that the “wages of sin is death” so one would think that God might strike down Cain. Instead God banishes Cain from his little plot of land and tells him that he will be a wanderer for all time. Cain laments that surely those who discover him will kill him, presumably for what he’s done. I’m not sure who Cain is worried about killing him, unless he thinks that Adam and Eve will murder their only remaining son for his act of murdering their other son.
We have to assume he’s talking about his Mother and Father, Adam and Eve, because there aren’t any OTHER people yet. God, stupid fucker that he is, has created a massive population bottleneck when it comes to human beings and the only way out, unless he creates some more people, is for Adam and Eve’s kids to commit incest in order to populate the Earth. The Bible never solves this issue.
God shows mercy to Cain for some reason and places a “mark” on Cain that somehow prevents people from murdering him.
The next verses are rather confusing. Cain fucks his wife, has a son and starts building his own city. Now unless the book of Genesis takes place in Minecraft this makes very little sense. For one thing where did Cain’s wife come from? For another thing what benefit is a city for a family of three? And how does Cain plan to feed his family when God has just cursed him to be permanently bad at agriculture? I suppose he’ll just go into the city and buy food in the markets? The markets that no one works at because a city can’t be for three people.
Another point of interest in this story is that Cain departs from the presence of the Lord by way of going to a place called Nod. God’s presence, in the book of Genesis, appears to have a limited geographic range.
Later on in Genesis, when we get into the Abraham story, there is an interesting visitation of God into Abraham’s life. In reading Genesis Chapter 18, in which this story takes place, remember that in Genesis 3 God walked in the Garden AND couldn’t find Adam and Eve when they hid themselves so he had to audibly call out to them.
In Genesis 18 we have the story of Abraham being visited by three men. Interpretations of who these three men vary wildly. Regardless of who they are one of the men must be Yahweh himself because he begins talking to Abraham after Abraham prepares a feast. God tells Abraham that Sarah will have a child, despite the fact that Sarah is beyond the child-bearing age and Abraham is also far too old. Sarah disbelieves and scoffs at the idea.
God and Abraham depart the tent and God begins telling Abraham about his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah because they have been so corrupt. But God isn’t sure if the wickedness is as bad as the terrible things he’s heard out of Sodom. Yes God it seems is NOT omniscient in the book of Genesis. God does not know whether or not he’s going to have to destroy the city.
Abraham actually calls God’s morality into question, begging Yahweh not to destroy the innocent alongside the wicked in Sodom and Gomorrah. So Yahweh makes a deal with Abraham that if he can find fifty righteous people in the city he won’t rain down hellfire on it. What comes next can only be described as haggling, and yet, despite the fact that it is God Abraham is arguing with, it works.
Here is Abraham trying to talk Yahweh out of his genocidal tendencies and actually managing to make some headway! Kudos to Abraham for showing himself to be more moral than the God he serves, though that changes later on God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham was actually going to go through with it – a test that an omniscient God would have no need of running, but the Biblical God in Genesis is NOT all-knowing!
The last Genesis story I want to touch on comes from Genesis Chapter 34 and demonstrates how the Bible treats women. As the story opens Jacob’s daughter Dinah has caught the eye of a man named Shechem, who is a Hivite and not one of God’s chosen people. Shechem jumps the gun and rapes poor Dinah. After he rapes her he decides its for the best if he goes through the direct channels to try to earn her hand in marriage. Now an ordinary moral human being might think that the correct channels would be for Shechem to have asked Dinah to marry her…
But no, in the Bible we have a strict system of arranged marriages (or else selling your daughter into slavery, brides had a PRICE). A daughter was like any other possession and she had something of powerful value, her virginity. Dinah’s family is angry about the whole rape thing but Hamor and Shechem call a meeting between the families. Hamor and Shechem petition Jacob and his sons that their families should intermarry, offering a marital exchange of daughters so that they can all combine forces. The girls have no say in this, they are pieces of property to be moved around, married off in marriages of convenience to help build wealth and social ties.
Jacob and company trick Hamor and Shechem into a deal in which Hamor’s entire group has to get circumcised (because God hates foreskins even though he created them). For some stupid fucking reason Hamor and Shechem agree and their entire group get circumcised. Then, while their enemies are injured, Jacob’s sons move in for the kill raiding the entire city and killing all the men.
And once again they take the women and children as plunder, spoils of war, to be done with whatever they will. Fuck the Bible. Fuck this barbaric horseshit. Why do people pretend this is the Good Book? If this is your idea of good you can fuck right off.
So I’d say that leaves Yahweh in the scrap-heap of history where he belongs. But let’s hear what Sarah Connor has to say –
Alternatively Titled: God Stages a Mass Orgy and Kills innocent Children
Probably the only thing harder than being a woman in the Bible is being a child. Not only are you subject to being taken prisoner as a spoil of war in the event that your parents are slaughtered in war with the Israelites but you may find yourself among those being slaughtered just because of your the sins of your parents. Yahweh often sends out the Israelites to do away with entire cities under the pretense that those people are somehow so evil and so corrupt that even the children and cattle deserve to be slaughtered.
But it isn’t just the bad side of the blood-thirsty Israelite army that you might end up on by no fault of your own, Yahweh is quite clear that children are subject to the sins of their parents in his eyes, not just in the eyes of his human killing squads. You might find yourself punished, held accountable, for the sins of something your ancestors have done.
As you can see this verse is part of the 10 Commandments in the Bible, part that everyone ignores or glosses over. No Christian has ever given two shits about the Graven Images commandment (except maybe the Amish), they even have crucifixes with Jesus on them, Nativity Scenes – they break this commandment all the time, blatantly, and give 0 fucks. And of course this is one of the Biblical passages that suggests Yahweh will punish people for sin that their parents, grand parents, great grand parents, etc, committed.
Of course the idea of punishing someone for someone else’s mistakes is an affront to the basic concept of justice and fairness that no modern person would be dumb enough to support. And yet, God it allowed to be as barbaric and immoral as the ancient people that created him and people will defend him.
But you might be wondering about when this involved killing children… Well of course the biggest instance is the revenge God gets against Pharaoh in the book of Exodus. God, having repeatedly hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he can finish all 10 unnecessary and evil plagues, takes his ultimate revenge by killing the first born children of Egypt.
This action by Yahweh is revenge, make no mistake, for earlier in the story Pharaoh has the Hebrew children killed. So for the sin of Pharaoh, for the sins of the Egyptians, children are made to pay the ultimate price. (And remember folks death is the ultimate price as Christians often say that Jesus paid the ultimate price).
Of course Yahweh’s thirst for revenge isn’t limited to the grandiose show-boating he does in the Exodus. Take the story of King David. After sleeping with a married woman named Bathsheba, a deed normally punishable by death in the Old Testament, God decides to commute David’s sentence. David also had Bathsheba’s husband, a soldier, purposely moved to the front lines so that he would get killed. David’s punishment will be to witness someone raping his wives, his Concubines. (The story is in 2 Samuel 11 and 12 if you’d like to read it).
At worst this is God having a bunch of women raped, but even if we assume that consent was given at best God is staging a massive reverse gangbang orgy in order to punish David.
The child murder comes a bit later when Nathan, God’s prophet, reveals to David that Bathsheba’s child will die. God is going to kill the baby. The baby is born sickly, suffers for seven protracted days of God’s vengeance, before finally succumbing to death.
So God murders children and infants, and sometimes stages mass public orgies, all to punish sins. Of course people will say that Jesus made all of this better, as if somehow Jesus’ death absolves their primitive morally backwards God of his sins as well. Fuck those stupid excuses and as always fuck the Bible.
Alternatively Titled: Mutilations, Sacrificing your Own Child and Why your Wife Should STFU until Church is Over
In the last post we started talking a little bit about how the Bible dictates ways in which we should interact with our families, particularly our children. The God of the Bible seems to support beating kids and, in numerous situations, gathering together everyone in town to help beat our own children to death.
Of course there are a host of other bizarre and disturbing passages of the Bible which demonstrate that it’s God considers himself owner of his chosen people.
Take, for example, the mass genital mutilation of circumcision. Once a Jewish custom in today’s world circumcision is the normal despite the fact that it provides little or no benefit while removing the most sensitive nerve endings of the penis from a child that isn’t old enough to understand or consent to ANY operation – let alone one as pointless as circumcision. Such genital mutilation is now considered normal in our society and we have the fucked up pages of the Bible to thank for that.
Yahweh, God of the Bible, is obsessed with foreskins, for reasons that are never fully explained he sates his fetish for foreskin by having his people mark their covenant with him by cutting off their own… but then he also has them do this to their unsuspecting children. This alone is stomach-churning and sick. The idea that God, after having created his amazing and perfect creation, would want men to disfigure themselves in such a way is weird and disturbing but inflicting it on children who don’t know any better, when it serves no purpose other than as a ritual, is immoral and evil.
God sets up this system of sex organ disfigurement through Abraham instructing Abraham to perform the act on himself before turning his blade on his eight day old son Isaac. Yes God apparently gives Abraham the surgical advice on how to do the operation, an act that I imagine would have raised eyebrows and been impossible to complete if Abraham had been a real actual person and God had not been fictional as well. Of course given what Abraham was later instructed to do, sacrifice his own son, it isn’t surprising that he was willing to go through with this small act of absolute horror when he would have put a dagger in his own son had God not revealed that he was just fucking with the old man.
The most disturbing verses about circumcision don’t have much to do with families but I’ll share them here. While David and Saul are fighting the Philistines the Bible depicts Saul as descending into madness as David rises through the ranks following the slaying of Goliath. Saul is getting really jealous and what’s worse God has sent an evil spirit to deceive him. No you’ve read that right, God has sent an evil spirit and revoked his own spirit from Saul. You can read along in 1 Samuel 18 if you’d like to confirm that this is indeed a real story.
Saul cooks up a plan to send David on a suicide mission by promising him that he could marry his daughter Michal if he can come back with One Hundred Philistine foreskins. Now please note he’s not going to talk the Philistines into voluntarily chopping off the skin at the end of their dicks, he’s going to do it himself, by force. David goes out and slays the Philistines and comes back not with the measly price of one hundred foreskins but with TWO hundred. They are counted in front of Saul so there can be no confusion.
This is a book that people hand to children and say it contains invaluable wisdom for living your life even in today’s modern world. Wisdom like, women are worth a certain number of dead-man dick-tips AND that God can send evil spirits when he’s pissed off at you. Yes, such wonderful and endearing wisdom as war, barbarism and bloodshed so often depict.
We touched a little bit on Isaac earlier and how Abraham was ready to carve up his son as a burnt offering to God before God finally revealed it was all a test. An unnecessary test, of course, for God knows the contents of the heart of every man and would have no need of putting Isaac and Abraham through such hell.
But the aborted sacrifice of Isaac is not the only instance of human sacrifice to Yahweh. In fact in one Biblical story Yahweh directed and accepted the human sacrifice of a man’s daughter after giving him victory in battle. I am, of course, talking about Jephthah and his daughter, who, in true Biblical fashion, doesn’t even have a name. The spirit of the Lord comes upon Jephthah just before he goes to war and causes him to make a vow to God. If God grants him the victory he will give as a burnt offering the first thing that comes out his door to greet him.
Now it seems to our modern tastes that this is a foolish bet to make with God but this is in ancient times where the first thing that came out to meet him might well have been a goat, a donkey, or a chicken. Far animals were often kept on the first floor of houses in that day and age. However it does turn out to be a fucking stupid bet to make as Judges 11 records.
After this his daughter actually volunteers to be sacrificed, goes off to weep for her virginity and then Jephthah does as he had promised and sacrifices her. Yahweh doesn’t intervene, he doesn’t come down and stop Jephthah at the last second. She is the only directly mentioned human sacrifice in all of scripture, other than Jesus, that Yahweh accepts as an offering. Only here one man and his poor brain-washed daughter are paying the price.
Outside the barbarism of the Old Testament the New Testament paints a picture of family relations that is not much better, although it doesn’t involve any foreskins or burning your own children (thank goodness). Rather it involves verses of scripture used to uphold the inequality of the sexes. The Bible is an absolutely terrifying book when it comes to how it treats women, they are second class citizens, chattle, and are made into slaves and property.
In the New Testament things improve only slightly. For example 1 Peter chapter 3 says that women should submit themselves to their husbands and that in their submission they would somehow help their husbands stay true to the path. It also says that they should call their husband lord and obey their commands. Women are later referred to as the weaker of the two sexes here:
I’m not really a feminist per se but I certainly do not support the idea that women are the weaker sex or are somehow lesser than men are nor do I particularly find the idea that women should be submissive to their husbands compelling. Of course the Apostle Paul also has some advice to Christians on whether women should become leaders in Church.
2 Timothy claims that women are never to have authority over men, certainly not in spiritual matters and are not allowed to teach in Church. This sexist nonsense was supposedly authored by the Apostle Paul, a man who claimed to be in contact with Jesus and the creator of the whole Universe. 2 Timothy chapter two also blames women for the Fall of man and says that women can be saved through bearing children. The childbearing verse is one of two big verses that form the pillars of the so-called Quiverfull movement, a far-right Christian movement that seeks to have as many children as possible.
1 Corinthians doubles-down on the whole submission thing claiming that women with questions in Church ought to just wait for church to be over to ask their husband
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Most Christian women, especially evangelicals, like to ignore these passages, as Christian cherry-picking causes most Christians to ignore a great deal of what the Bible actually teaches and says. Wives are to be submissive, women aren’t to talk or preach and a wife can be bought for a certain price in foreskins and sometimes it might be necessary to murder your own daughter and burn her as a ritual human sacrifice and those are just some of the wonderfully fucked up things we learned from the Bible today!
Join me next time for further exploration of the fucked up and ridiculous nonsense of the Bible, a book written by ancient people for ancient people held up as some kind of moral guide in today’s world because thousands of years of brainwashing are just beginning to wear off now. Thanks for reading!
Fuck the Bible 