Religion as Victim
Where would religion (specifically, Christianity) be without its perpetual ability to victimize itself?
What if Christianity – all of the sudden! – was at the top of it all? Would it still be able to function? Would it even need to exist?
Contemporary religion has survived by always being against everything else. Its masochistic tendencies have rendered it useless on its own. It needs a battle. It needs to have its back against the wall.
Its ability to make every little occurrence or happening look like an Attack On Religion is one of its few well-articulated virtues. Christianity grew out of the need to rally together true victims: victims of real oppression, not “victims” of a no-prayer-in-schools-&-no-”in-God-we-trust” court ruling.
American Christians aren’t victims. They are antagonists.
Now, don’t get me wrong- there are real, honest-to-God victims out there. Many of them are even Christian victims. (Many more of them are victims of Christianity, but thats another conversation…). But these victims can only dream of living in America. Compared to their Hell, America is Heaven!
So, why do we who have more freedoms (religious and otherwise) and privileges than Anywhere else in the world find it so irresistible to whine and bemoan our “secularizing” nation?
The more freedom we are granted, the more freedom we demand.
The mammoth scope of our “religious freedom” is so far-reaching and all-accepting that Christians are forced to scream about the intricacies and fine-print.
We never appreciate what we have. We can’t even see it. We’re blinded by our unrighteous outrage (and the idea that because God created the world to serve Him, the world should then fulfill its destiny by serving Christianity’s every whim and want).
Where did this obscene arrogance come from?! To call it delusional would be an understatement – Its a god-killing fantasy about a world addicted to… them.
Updates
so, i’ve updated the About the Author page, as well as my What I’m Reading and What I’m Listening To lists.
David Foster Wallace, dead at 46
Author of Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion. Roughly two hours ago, his wife found him at home, an apparent suicide by hanging. According to the NY Review of Books, his works had given us “a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok.”
“You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.” –Infinite Jest
And, I think, his greatest contribution to the contemporary literary world was his palpable frustration and vehement rebuttals of our current writers’ (i.e. Dave Eggers, The Believer, David Sedaris, etc.) obsession with irony:
“[It] tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’” –E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
my standard for truth has gone awry
I feel like my version of truth is always bent in some way. You see, somehow I make things work (in my head) that just can’t be right in the real world. And then, there’s this part of me that thinks everybody else must have the same sort of bending (of truth) happening in their heads…Which then leads me to think that maybe they just aren’t being honest and admitting it…Which then makes me wonder if, maybe, I’m being more truthful, since I do admit it. So, because everyone else can’t admit their bent-ness, and I freely admit it, I must somehow be more…honest? And the absurdity of this circular logic shows how bent my truth must be, because I started out talking about how dishonest I must be, and have now decided that I might be the most honest person on the face of the earth. And the problem is – the logic kinda works. Which, of course, means that logic must be untrue…
”We can speak of pollution in terms of the historical pollution of fascism, the historical pollution of war, the historical pollution of hunger in the world, the historical pollution of murder, the historical pollution that we people – poor, oppressed people – in this world all over have been subjected to for too many years. That pollution is the basis of the pollution of the nature, the world, the universe. The only solution to pollution is a people’s humane revolution.” –Bobby Seale
‘Cynic’ comes from the Greek ‘κυνικός’, meaning dog-like
Maybe I’m sort of jaded, but it seems that we shouldn’t worry so much about politicians breaking their word. They’re all going to break their word for money. I think that the politician you back isn’t so much about their honesty, but about whether or not you agree with the people who funding them. Because that’s their word. Their finances are their word. It doesn’t seem to matter what they say – it’s about who they’re receiving donations from. It’s about whether the people “campaigning” (i.e. the people who are sending them checks) for your candidate are individuals (or corporations) you trust to run our country well.
2 comments