The "ham-faced pundit", Erick Son of Erick, would fit right in here in England (if not in any other UK nation), as a "gammon". Aka the type of Brexit fundamentalist who is fullest of angry self-righteous certitude, and shit. A short induction course (up to five minutes) would be more than sufficient to bring him up to speed on everything he wanted to know concerning the EU.
Poor bastard Erick. He's had to deal with whole months of people making his kind into villains and jokes in their fiction about Thor and Arachne and Wiccan! Imagine if he was gay. Or a woman. Or a Muslim.
I'm not going to deny that you guys *feel* persecuted and all, but even if you were being, there's a line over there that you need to get waaaaay to the end of before we start addressing your victimization at the hands of society. Take a number, sit down, shut up, and we'll get to your hurt feelings when you have to watch OTHER PEOPLES' GODS ACT LIKE THE CHRISTIAN GOD IS NOT THEIR LODESTONE IN LIFE right after we've addressed people who are actually being hurt and killed. We're a little busy.
Who would win a "most ham-like" contest, Erick or Karl Rove? Place your bets.
Meanwhile, neo-confederacy scholars Loewen and Sebesta accurately delineated the world view of the Confederacy, which lives on in Trump supporters. There is a hierarchy with the Christian God at the top, then white males vouched safe by God to rule the natural world, then white women and children under the protection of those white males, and lastly everyone else at about the same level as beasts of the field, good for labor and needing dominion by guess who? Whatever threatens that hierarchy is evil and unnatural, including uppity women, smart-ass youngsters, blacks who don't know their place, foreigners who don't speak English, unacceptable types of Christians*, other religions, homosexuals, scientists, etc. This model accurately predicts every animosity uncovered during the Cletus safaris into Trumpland.
*Definition of unacceptable Christians varies from time to time. Catholics now more acceptable than in the 19th century.
The United States is a Christian nation. Which is why Christians are under constant attack. Because Christians are the majority, which is what makes them the minority. And the only way to keep them from being persecuted is to let them persecute everyone else. Because if Jesus taught us anything, it was to pre-emptively attack your neighbor based upon false witness.
As everyone knows, this didn't start with the Covington Catholic kids and their MAGA hats. For that matter, CCHS has had a terrible reputation for racism and misogyny for quite a long time. So too I've been hearing about the assault on the "Christian nation" since at least the decision to ban mandatory prayers in public schools, i.e. decades long. Conservative "Christians" have a zero sum mentality: the extent to which religious recognition is extended to non-Christians results in an equivalent loss to Christians. Same with civil rights. It's a deeply perverted POV and, needless to say, not actually Christian at all. But there you have it.
I almost feel bad for rightwing religious nuts -- and I think that's why they've been attractive to pop culture as villains for a century: There's a built-in grain of almost-sympathy you can feel with them, because while implacably cruel and ambitious, all their problems are also all so obviously based on a core misunderstanding. And although it's one that they were perhaps constitutionally doomed to make, you can also hope that they might, in an occasional glimmer, perceive it, and choose to be redeemed, rather than force an apocalypse.
(tl;dr appendix: In real life, seems they're hardly ever redeemed from their original sin of mistaking religion for authority. They're not built to heed actual religion, which is about creating peace by listening to the world, not by telling it what to do. I mean pretty much every public statement from Jesus amounts to "You dopes. Pay attention to other people, and fuck all the various authority figures" -- he couldn't be clearer, and still they miss it. Meanwhile democracy is becoming more cosmopolitan/borderless, and pop culture and social media are putting the hood and barrio and every Mary Magdalene cam-girl increasingly on an equal playing field with the White House -- so maybe we're actually improving our chances of pulling off what Jesus asked us to try. But nuts like Erickson and Dreher, every two-bit Pat Robertson and follower therelike, is determined never to notice, because noticing means ceding authority. And authority is really what they want, not peace. Thank you for attending my TED talk.)
<blockquote>“Are liberals declaring war on Christians and Catholics?” asks Fox News; </blockquote>
Pretty much a tell from that WASP-y lot. Catholics ought to watch out for those fundie fucks. Jack Chick didn't consider Catholics as Christians, and neither do a lot of hardline American fundamentalists.
A many years ago at Catholic boys school a Brother told me of early Rome era Christians destroying the temples of Jupiter et al. He was particularly impressed that because the temples were so well and heavily built, the Christians used to tunnel under them to burn the wooden pylons they were built on causing collapse. I've never seen any evidential reference to this but I'll never forget how pleased he was that the saboteurs had showed those polytheists what for.
Devastating last line.
The "ham-faced pundit", Erick Son of Erick, would fit right in here in England (if not in any other UK nation), as a "gammon". Aka the type of Brexit fundamentalist who is fullest of angry self-righteous certitude, and shit. A short induction course (up to five minutes) would be more than sufficient to bring him up to speed on everything he wanted to know concerning the EU.
Poor bastard Erick. He's had to deal with whole months of people making his kind into villains and jokes in their fiction about Thor and Arachne and Wiccan! Imagine if he was gay. Or a woman. Or a Muslim.
I'm not going to deny that you guys *feel* persecuted and all, but even if you were being, there's a line over there that you need to get waaaaay to the end of before we start addressing your victimization at the hands of society. Take a number, sit down, shut up, and we'll get to your hurt feelings when you have to watch OTHER PEOPLES' GODS ACT LIKE THE CHRISTIAN GOD IS NOT THEIR LODESTONE IN LIFE right after we've addressed people who are actually being hurt and killed. We're a little busy.
Who would win a "most ham-like" contest, Erick or Karl Rove? Place your bets.
Meanwhile, neo-confederacy scholars Loewen and Sebesta accurately delineated the world view of the Confederacy, which lives on in Trump supporters. There is a hierarchy with the Christian God at the top, then white males vouched safe by God to rule the natural world, then white women and children under the protection of those white males, and lastly everyone else at about the same level as beasts of the field, good for labor and needing dominion by guess who? Whatever threatens that hierarchy is evil and unnatural, including uppity women, smart-ass youngsters, blacks who don't know their place, foreigners who don't speak English, unacceptable types of Christians*, other religions, homosexuals, scientists, etc. This model accurately predicts every animosity uncovered during the Cletus safaris into Trumpland.
*Definition of unacceptable Christians varies from time to time. Catholics now more acceptable than in the 19th century.
The United States is a Christian nation. Which is why Christians are under constant attack. Because Christians are the majority, which is what makes them the minority. And the only way to keep them from being persecuted is to let them persecute everyone else. Because if Jesus taught us anything, it was to pre-emptively attack your neighbor based upon false witness.
Heard that Maddow referenced this movie in explaining The Idiot's recent claims about duck tape, mega-vehicles etc. at the border,
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052474/
As everyone knows, this didn't start with the Covington Catholic kids and their MAGA hats. For that matter, CCHS has had a terrible reputation for racism and misogyny for quite a long time. So too I've been hearing about the assault on the "Christian nation" since at least the decision to ban mandatory prayers in public schools, i.e. decades long. Conservative "Christians" have a zero sum mentality: the extent to which religious recognition is extended to non-Christians results in an equivalent loss to Christians. Same with civil rights. It's a deeply perverted POV and, needless to say, not actually Christian at all. But there you have it.
I almost feel bad for rightwing religious nuts -- and I think that's why they've been attractive to pop culture as villains for a century: There's a built-in grain of almost-sympathy you can feel with them, because while implacably cruel and ambitious, all their problems are also all so obviously based on a core misunderstanding. And although it's one that they were perhaps constitutionally doomed to make, you can also hope that they might, in an occasional glimmer, perceive it, and choose to be redeemed, rather than force an apocalypse.
(tl;dr appendix: In real life, seems they're hardly ever redeemed from their original sin of mistaking religion for authority. They're not built to heed actual religion, which is about creating peace by listening to the world, not by telling it what to do. I mean pretty much every public statement from Jesus amounts to "You dopes. Pay attention to other people, and fuck all the various authority figures" -- he couldn't be clearer, and still they miss it. Meanwhile democracy is becoming more cosmopolitan/borderless, and pop culture and social media are putting the hood and barrio and every Mary Magdalene cam-girl increasingly on an equal playing field with the White House -- so maybe we're actually improving our chances of pulling off what Jesus asked us to try. But nuts like Erickson and Dreher, every two-bit Pat Robertson and follower therelike, is determined never to notice, because noticing means ceding authority. And authority is really what they want, not peace. Thank you for attending my TED talk.)
<blockquote>“Are liberals declaring war on Christians and Catholics?” asks Fox News; </blockquote>
Pretty much a tell from that WASP-y lot. Catholics ought to watch out for those fundie fucks. Jack Chick didn't consider Catholics as Christians, and neither do a lot of hardline American fundamentalists.
A many years ago at Catholic boys school a Brother told me of early Rome era Christians destroying the temples of Jupiter et al. He was particularly impressed that because the temples were so well and heavily built, the Christians used to tunnel under them to burn the wooden pylons they were built on causing collapse. I've never seen any evidential reference to this but I'll never forget how pleased he was that the saboteurs had showed those polytheists what for.