I recently described why I think “woke” has become a vacuous word that means little more than “libtard” in modern parlance. It seems apropos, then, that Christianity Today also recently released a piece that saw the editor-in-chief claim (in a previous NPR interview) that evangelical Christianity is moving too far to the right.
It turns out that Jesus’s teachings are increasingly considered by many Christians to be too “liberal” and “weak.”
But they can. They have brains to think and eyes to see and ears to hear. Nor is it some obscure secret that their leaders are lying to them; it is common knowledge. Nor are they forced to listen to infamous liars; they choose to. Do not absolve them from responsibility for their disgraceful behavior.
All very good points.
Except they won’t. To quote my most favoritest person alive on planet Earth today (Jon Stewart): liberal media aims to be correct, while conservative media is effective. More than most people, he knows what we are up against.
To use another tact to explain what I mean: one tactic used by conservative media is to blame the other side - it is “them”, it is “they”, all the bad comes from “their” efforts. The opposite of that though is not simply to say the same thing in the reverse direction, but to question ourselves, and what we can do to make things better. It is hard, it is messy - and to be clear I don’t mean that diagnoses of the problems faced are irrelevant, just that if we never move past that then that is where it all ends: in a click bait media title, no matter how well intended. If Hillary had done this, then Trump would never have gotten elected.
I cannot absolve anyone else of their actions, but neither should I ignore my own - and the same collectively for “my” side.
I am not so certain of that as I once was. Setting aside literal stuff like blind / deaf people and the like, they may “have” brains but cognitive dissonance means that they do not “use” them, when applied to certain matters. A good fraction of people listen to authority more than they listen to their own brains, trusting those they have chosen to lead them, even right off of a cliff. THAT was their choice, but then everything else that follows they are not even in control of their own actions anymore. Sure, blame them, okay, but THEN what, in terms of doing anything about it?
Or as another famous sayings goes: “This is fine”.:-) :-(
Are they not free to resume thinking rationally at any time? Right-wing lies aren’t mind control. People choose to believe those lies, not just the first time but every time.
Then we take cold comfort in the fact that they will not be spared from the coming dystopia. That’s all we can do, as far as I can tell.
A perfect analogy is what is going on in Ukraine: the Russian soldiers, many of them not even FROM Russia at this point but rather from one of the controlled outlying neighboring areas, have literal guns pointed at their literal backs - but does this mean that they should not be shot?
No…and yes. Like if they are able to surrender, great (and purely strategically, that does more to help Ukraine than killing the soldier would, both on the global scale of goodwill rendered plus demoralizing the remaining people in Russia upon hearing not just that soldiers got shot “defending their country”, but that they were traitors who abandoned the cause at the absolute earliest opportunity), but ultimately they will still kill you, your family, and everyone you’ve ever met if given the chance, so you can’t like NOT shoot back.
That is why giving up your Freedom to Think is such a heinous crime. i.e., that is why religious extremism is such a heinous crime. e.g. that is why the Bible says that unthinking adherence to religious principles is such a heinous crime (I Thessalonians 5:21: “QUESTION EVERYTHING against what you KNOW to be TRUE”). Or as the
devilQOP would say, “go on, DO it, you know you want to, it’ll be so much easier if you just GIVE IN and do what ‘everybody’ else is doing…”.The reason I am focusing so much on the precise nature of the crime is that if given half a chance, Democrats and liberals would do it too, just as Republicans and conservatives have. Vote for Biden to support workers? Yeah no he’ll end the train strike just exactly like Reagan did. Vote for Dems to support gun control? Gun control when/where/why/who/how/NEVER? I am not saying the two sides are equal, but I am saying that they are of like nature - politics being what it is and all. And it would do no good at all for “us” to end up exactly like “them”, believing whatever the media tells us just b/c it comes from a supposed source of authority.
On a bit of a tangent, but also getting back to the OP, there was only a single type of person that the Bible records Jesus as literally HATING, with a passionate burning type of HATE even - calling them “tombs”, looking fInE on the outside but inside all full of rot & decay - and those people were the religious extremists of His day, who heaped heavy burdens on people without bothering to lift a finger to help them. I actually think that in many ways Jesus would be more or less fine with LGBTQIA+ - the self-discovering adherents at least even if not the lifestyle itself, e.g. how he hung out with common everyday “sinners” aka non-religious peeps all the time - but the hypocrites not so much, as there are some rather HARSH words said about them, involving death/destruction/judgement etc.
Looked at from this POV, showing up on Jan. 6 isn’t looking so bad (e.g. hypothetical scenario: your mom & dad both went and brought you as a child along for the ride), whereas making the CHOICE to watch Fox News is that bad… if that makes any sense.