I support religious freedom. If you want to believe that there’s an omnipotent omniscient guy in the sky you can pray to, or that you’ll have 72 virgins waiting for you in heaven if you live a good life, or that the one true deity actually has spaghetti for hair, flies and is the patron of pirates, that’s fine with me. I’m also fine with you believing in no deity at all (disclosure: that’s how I was raised), or not being sure what’s out there (perhaps the most intellectually honest position of all).
But if you are trying to manipulate the course of world events into matching a story claimed to be prophetic out of your religion’s scripture that involves hundreds of Holocausts’ worth of fatalities, I have a big problem with it.
Your religious freedom ends where harm to me and anyone else begins.
Therefore, no one in your fanatical sect of death-worshippers should be anywhere near a malignant narcissist (i.e. boiling ball of insecurities which can easily be played upon) with intellectual deficits (i.e. not too smart to start with, now suspected of dementia) who can legally launch weaponry capable of destroying human civilization in minutes.
h/t to FishOutofWater, emphases added:
www.latimes.com/...
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, 55, who is especially embroiled in the Trump-Ukraine affair, also has his eye on an End Times cleansing. “It is a never-ending struggle,” he told a Kansas church group, describing his work for the president. “Until the Rapture.”
[...]
www.washingtonpost.com/...
The secretary also spoke to President Trump multiple times every day last week, culminating in Trump’s decision to approve the killing of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, at the urging of Pompeo and Vice President Pence, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
[...]
On Dec. 29, Pompeo, Esper and Milley traveled to the president’s private club in Florida, where the two defense officials presented possible responses to Iranian aggression, including the option of killing Soleimani, senior U.S. officials said.
[...]
But recent changes to Trump’s national security team and the whims of a president anxious about being viewed as hesitant in the face of Iranian aggression created an opening for Pompeo to press for the kind of action he had been advocating.
There we were wondering why the military would present the “most far out” option, one that they didn’t want to have happen, to an idiot whose boiling insecurities are at top boil right now from having been impeached. Not only did Pompeo and Esper present it, but they tag-teamed with Pence, who also believes in this end-times madness, to repeatedly urge it, hinting to Cadet Bone Spurs that he’d look weak if he didn’t do it, as FishOutofWater noted.
Got it? This crazy decision was made for religious reasons. To use the military might of the USA to make a fairy tale that involves the deaths of billions of people get that much closer to coming true.
There I was, wanting to write to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to explain precisely what “malignant narcissist” means, and it turns out that the saner military people were cut out of the loop when the decision was made anyway.
Add to this that the dotard’s top Iran advisors are revenge-motivated. From an Iranian consultant quoting career U.S. government officials struggling to contain the damage (h/t to Mopshell):
Part of the reason I wrote my “to a narcissist you don’t exist” diary was that I think normal people don’t understand the implications of a malignant narcissist in a position of responsibility unless they’ve had experience with one. (“Spouse”, “parent”, “other parent of my child(ren)”, “co-worker” are all positions of responsibility.) If you don’t understand that a narcissist doesn’t really care if you live or die, or anyone else does, except insofar it affects him, you’re still (albeit unwittingly) normalizing him.
Now I feel the urge to do the same kind of blunt parsing of the belief in “end times” and “the rapture”. Super-short version for those who aren’t familiar: everyone but true believers in the one true religion (spoiler alert: theirs) dies and is cast into the fiery lake of hell to suffer an eternity of agony, while true believers are lifted up to a rapturous communion with God. And Jesus comes back.
Because people aren’t taking it seriously, and I’m looking at you, corporate media. The NY Times provides a fine example here. “Oh, hey, Pompeo mixes up religion with foreign policy, just a quirky thing, no big deal.” During an administration where normalization could translate into mass death.
Ask yourself if there is any compatibility in believing in end times/rapture with:
- freedom of religion
- equal treatment of all people
- tolerance
- separation of church and state
- weight of public opinion
- rule of law
- science
- normal human relationships with people of other creeds
- peace, inner and outer
- healthy raising of children (drumming this story into them is child abuse)
These things are not there for strong end-times believers, just as other people aren’t there for narcissists. They do not matter. This is why Pompeo and Pence kept the military adults out of the room, except the Iran-haters. This is why they doesn’t care that this move will destabilize the world, lead to American and Iranian deaths, end up costing trillions of dollars. None of that matters in the face of their sacred apocalypse. They think they’ll be okay because they’re true believers. This is where religion gets narcissistic: non-true-believers aren’t there.
When the deaths of most of humanity are seen as the path to the return of Jesus, nothing else matters including law (else Pompeo wouldn’t be an accomplice in the Ukraine deal, meant to keep the easily-led dotard in office), and morality (else none of them would be supporting Trump).
IMPOTUS has surrounded his incompetent, insane, irrational self with an incompetent cadre who believe and base their decisions on insane, irrational things, because that’s what happens: he is attracted to what he sees in the mirror, and they likewise.
The media must report this. The media must tell the truth of the situation America is in now. I know why they don’t. They don’t want to offend evangelical readers. They are thinking “We have freedom of religion in this country and can’t violate that; criticizing a religious belief would be religious prejudice.” And I am sure they are right to expect howls of indignation.
If journalists really do their job, howls of indignation from exposed perps is just an occupational hazard.
Religious leaders who support the separation of church and state must disavow this madness. Their more moderate interpretations of the Bible or of the will of God are just as valid and fair to express as the extremists’, and make us all safer. They’ll get howled at, too. I don’t think they’ll lose followers. (h/t to Heartrocks)
I repeat: Your religious freedom ends where harm to me and anyone else begins. Imagine if Hellenic Reconstructionists—people who worship the ancient Greek gods—started ritually sacrificing goats, oxen, horses, etc. on altars, as was routinely done in ancient Greece. How long would that last? Can you imagine the outrage? But foreign policy driven by nihilistic religious dogma in an era of nuclear weapons is vastly more dangerous.
These are people who see Trump as sent by God, and God acting through themselves while they whip up war. If the weapons that can make their insane fantasy a reality are used, they will attribute it to God, not themselves.
Get that? They will not hold themselves responsible for the murders of billions of their fellow humans. They see themselves as absolved from all crimes because it was all predestined.
Not forgiven—absolved. Not guilty. They committed no crime. They were “just following orders” from a book that’s been identified as a patchwork by several different authors, and has all kinds of internal contradictions, but they think was brought into the material word by an immaterial being, a loving God who wants to eternally torture most of humanity.
That makes it all okay.
Reporters need to inform the public of exactly what it is dealing with, to totally expose the threat. They must ask Pompeo and Pence directly, bluntly and repeatedly, with the cameras rolling, “Are you trying to bring or accelerate the end times and the Rapture?” They need to snoop into the places where these sick ideologues talk to others of their ilk, capture what they say when they’re being honest and blast it out to everyone, even more than they have. I agree with Adam Schiff that a House investigation into how the decision to assassinate Qasem Soleimani was made, not just to dispel the bullshit pretexts that are being spewed, but to examine the role of genocidal religious belief and expose it.
Then the majority of Americans, who are sensible about the role of religion (separated from state), need to vote these loose cannons out of office and keep on voting to keep them out of office permanently.
—
Please consider paying me if you think my diaries have value. I’m hoping for a day soon when I don’t need to be financially sustained by readers to keep writing for DK, but it’s not here yet. As always, the generosity of those who have already done so humbles me — thank you.
Tuesday, Jan 7, 2020 · 11:21:11 PM +00:00
·
KM Wehrstein
From a comment by democratos, drawing as always on Arendt, some crucial distinctions and useful terminology:
Neglected however is Christianism, another powerhouse political ideology like Racism, Nazism, Communism, Totalitarianism….
Christianism is not Christianity. It too can be succinctly characterized:
“Christianism means particular doctrines of Christianity made into a political system for the pursuit of worldly power, to be distinguished from Christianity in various forms of religious practices of denominations, such as Catholicism, Protestantism.”
— Wikipedia. christianism.
There is much more explanation and nuance in the entire comment, totally worth reading.