There's no justice. There's just us.

Fellow exvangelicals: Do you, too, spend a significant portion of every day incandescent with rage that the people who spent every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening lecturing us about repentance - how we should confess our wrongdoing, acknowledge the harm done, even if unintentionally, ask people to hold us accountable, and then turn away from that behavior to begin walking a better path - absolutely fucking REFUSE TO DO THAT?

It makes me wish that Christianity WAS true. It makes me wish that all who cheerfully harm others in life WOULD face a final, inescapable judgement in death. I glow white-hot with holy wrath, I burn with righteous fury, I am consumed by the roaring flame of justice unfulfilled, if my anger was a physical force it would melt those motherfucking hypocrites like an all-consuming fire. And it's so fucking unfair that their betrayal will forever go unpunished, and most likely even unacknowledged.

It would be so comforting to think that there's someone in charge of the universe who gets it, who is as enraged as I am, who takes their blasphemy against all that is good and just and true as personally as I do and actually has the power to DO something about it.

And they listen to their Orange Antichrist read the verse about how nations must repent of the evil they do if they want to avoid horrific and everlasting consequences... and never for a moment realize that the very human authors who claimed to be prophets in that book were yelling at people like them, livid at them for allowing leaders like theirs to get away with harming the innocent.

Noah Lugeons (of the Scathing Atheist podcast) is amazing at expressing that rage, and I rely for my sanity on the weekly catharsis of hearing his screaming, profanity-laden, yet very carefully and thoughtfully crafted, diatribes about how livid he is at the harm done by Christianity in this country. It's especially remarkable how deeply he gets it, for someone who wasn't indoctrinated into the Evangelical cult, and didn't experience firsthand the betrayal of realizing as an adult that we'd been lied to all through our childhoods. But even Noah isn't angry ENOUGH at these people. It's physically impossible to BE sufficiently angry at them. Only a god could hold enough umbrage to hate their manifold sins enough, and enough power to repay their misdeeds appropriately.

But there isn't one.

There isn't one.

So we're stuck with no more effective tools for justice than trying desperately to convince dumbass motherfuckers to stop being dumbasses for their own good as well as ours and help us start fixing the shit they broke, and trying to use the deeply flawed and unwieldy systems that pass for justice in our country to maybe hold some of the shittiest people accountable once we get the power to do so.

And I hate it. The realization that there's no one but us humans to give a shit about justice, is the reason I'm an atheist. And the realization that the loudly religious humans who instilled a sense of justice in me don't actually have one themselves, is the reason I'm an ANTI-theist. And the realization that the justice we humans can create is at BEST woefully inadequate, and is almost never at its best, is the worst part of being an atheist.

Guilt vs. responsibility

One of the problems with religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is that it tries to use a sense of guilt to motivate people to behave better.

But that does not work, and physically can not work.

Because guilt triggers the emotional part of the brain. And the primary thing that the emotion of guilt motivates us to do is... to stop feeling that emotion.

Worse still, the emotional part of the brain is also the threat response part of the brain. And that part only knows four ways to solve a problem - fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. 

So if a person starts to feel guilt, they can respond with fight - get defensive, refuse to acknowledge they did anything wrong, even attack the person pointing out what they did wrong; or flight - avoid the person or situation that made them feel that way; or freeze - do nothing; or fawn - submit to whoever told them they did something wrong and accept whatever abuse is heaped on them in hopes of preventing something even worse.

And so you get Christians who scream at us that we're the racists, really, for talking about systemic racism. You get Christians who avoid have uncomfortable conversations about the role of Christianity in harming people all throughout history, including the present moment. You get Christians who shut down and "don't do politics" when it's revealed that the people they voted for in the name of "Christian values" are the sex offenders that they thought they were voting to protect their kids from. You get Christians doing penance or sobbing at altar calls as they ask their imaginary friend not to torture them for eternity for their imaginary sins... and never actually changing their behavior or even understanding what their ACTUAL sins are.

You even get Christians justifying abuse and defending abusers.

If instead you were to instill a sense of responsibility, however, THAT is an appeal to the thinking part of the brain, and the thinking part of the brain can actually come up with ways to address problems. The thinking part of the brain can say "It's not my fault that the system defaults to favor me and harm others, but it's my responsibility to do what I can to change that". "It's not my fault that children were harmed on that island, but it's my responsibility to do whatever it takes to bring the perpetrators to account, even if they're people I thought were on my team". 

The primary thing that a sense of responsibility motivates us to do... is to behave responsibly.

And religion can't do that. 

But humanism can.

On Jesus and Kermit

 

A Muppet page I follow on Facebook posted this:

 

And of course, there were lots of people pissed about it, calling it “grooming” and other such bullshit.

I responded by posting this:

“It's weird that so many people raised on the Muppets are mad about this. Miss Piggy is just Frank Oz's drag persona, Bert and Ernie have been ‘roommates’ for half a century, and the entire cast of the Muppet Show was a bunch of singing dancing animated fur suits, who put on a musical with Elton John once. And every episode they told you to be kind to everyone no matter how different they were from you. Kermit wanted you to understand that it's not easy being green in a world where most of your peers aren't. How did so many of you fail to get the whole point of the shows?”

 

Any reasonable person would have recognized that the first half about “roommates” and “fur suits” was tongue in cheek, while the second half about “treating people kindly” was serious. But of course, bigots aren’t reasonable people, and there were lots of people jumping in to “well, ACTUALLY” the thing about Bert and Ernie.

 

I should have foreseen that a bunch of people would jump on the joke about Bert and Ernie and take it literally, while ignoring the part they were SUPPOSED to take literally (about being kind to those who are different.)

 

But it’s not really surprising, given how many people take the Bible literally in the half dozen verses where it says awful things about LGBTQ people* but ignore the thousands of verses that tell them to be kind to everyone, even people they see as enemies, and treat people as they'd want to be treated.

 

If Jesus of Nazareth can't get his fans to follow the Golden Rule, I guess Kermit the Frog never had a chance.

 

 

*Note- the verses where the book supposedly condemns LGBTQ people are based on questionable translations, while the verses where it tells people to be kind to everyone are unquestionably translated correctly.