Of Rules and the Thumbs Thereof...

I heard something that roused my hackles no end, today.

A former colleague, whom I chanced to meet, brought up the subject of my salvation, or lack thereof. She teaches in a conservative/fundamentalist academy. She was always convinced that I was hell bound, the summers she taught in our agency school. I told her that I was happily liberal, and feeling good about it. She looked a bit down at that and said that she would pray for me like she prays for her father every day. "I love him a lot, but I know he will be burning in hell after he dies." It is to my credit, I think, that I just looked at her and did not say what I was thinking. I did not even use the words "Utter pile of runny bullshit!" I said "You really believe that??" in my best 'WTF' voice. "That is what the bible teaches." she said, authoritatively. I said I had to run etc. and got the hell (so to speak) out of that part of Borders.

I plopped down and read a bit of M.M.Knight's Taqwacores. It helped settle me a tad. How could a person so blithely condemn (albeit using God's, at times incoherant 'word') a parent who held their hands, cuddled them when they were sick, and walked them down the aisle?? I know she has a good relationship with her dad, so it was really...really..ah, shall we say delusional at best, and actually sickly neurotic at worst. As she drove off I did see a few bumper stickers on her car that looked like the slogans for a 9/12 gagglefest or a Glenn Beck Weep-in. It sunk in that her world view is the shared view of many of the right wing's 'watchdogs', as Beck calls them. God help us.

Yeah, I know I have trangressed the great unwritten taboo, and said that someone's belief is bullshit. Mea culpa. They can believe that all they want, just do not push it down my gullet, or try to get it written into laws that curtail everyone else's freedom.

The thing that saved my acid reflux from overpowering my Prilosec was something I had read, and it serves me as a rule of thumb when dealing with religious 'true believers'. A Rabbi I was reading said, responding to a student who mentioned that some of the commands of God seemed genocidal, as regarded the dealing of the returned-from-exile Jewish nation, and the inhabitants of Canaan. What the Rabbi said is a very good rule of thumb.

"Whenever what you believe seems more moral than God, you can know for certain that that 'God" is a false god."

Remember that!

If you would not send people who really loved you, and helped you through life, to a place of eternal, sadistic torture, because they did not share your belief in God, then know that God is a false idol of fear and bullshit, and does not deserve belief. Harsh? Yes, but a lot less harsh than sloughing Mom or Dad off to hell because some book, or pastoral type says that is what they deserve.

Enough.

Tim