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.