Civil Commotion

I’ve sat through exactly one sermon in my life that I got something worthwhile out of — the sermon when the pastor set out a list of writers whose books no decent, godly person should allow in his home. I can’t remember the entire list now, but there was only one writer whose books I didn’t already have: Friedrich Nietzsche.

So I picked-up a copy of Twilight of the Idols next time I was at Barnes & Noble, and I’m glad I did. Nietzsche was a true freak-of-nature genius, and his frank contempt for pious buffoons is endlessly refreshing.

• Plato was a bore.

• Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

• He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

• In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

• To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity, — that is to say, to the priestly class — decadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.

• The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’.

• The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

• “Faith” means not wanting to know.

• The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

• In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

• There are no moral facts.

• Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization.

• I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty — I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

You get the idea.

Here’s a case where confession would definitely have been a good thing.

Two teenage brothers were brutally beaten in church — one fatally — in an effort by their parents, sister and other members to get them to confess their sins, police said Wednesday in a case involving what neighbors described as an insular congregation that didn’t let its children out to play.

It’s true that the mainstream religions aren’t so overtly cruel as this nutjob cult, but the difference is one of degree and Catholic/Southern Baptist/Mormon violence is more likely to be psychological. Ask any child who turned to his or her church ‘family’ for help after being sexually abused by Pastor Bubba, or anybody whose spouse abruptly went AWOL on the pastor’s say-so. Religion is a variety of sickness. Period.

Albert the Pious takes an unseemly pride in being on the front page of today’s Louisville Courier-Journal.

What’s the occasion? Mohler’s soon-to-be-published book instructing the godly that they mustn’t attend same-sex weddings, even if it’s the wedding of their own child.

The president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says in a new book that Christians should not attend a same-sex wedding ceremony – even of their own child – because it “signals moral approval” of the union.

Writing in “We Cannot Be Silent,” R. Albert Mohler Jr. says that while it may be “excruciatingly difficult” to boycott gay weddings of friends and loved ones, “at some point attendance will involve congratulating the couple for their union. If you can’t congratulate the couple, how can you attend?”

Have I ever mentioned that the Truly Devout believe that the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend is more important than family loyalties? I think so. If I did, I probably added that I think that teaching is ignorant sewage, and that I think no better of those who peddle it.

One of the most irritating moments during last night’s Democratic debate came when a young black man posed the question, “Do black lives matter, or do all lives matter?”, because it was a trap whose either/or form precluded a nuanced, thoughtful response.

As most longtime readers know, my first freelance pieces were true crime features for the old tabloid crime rags, and one of the very first things I learned is that features about black people killing each other are not salable. I tried. If a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a white Sunday School teacher its a story; if a scary-looking minority rapes and kills a black Sunday School teacher it’s … too bad. That’s the bald commercial fact.

If you doubt that, just visit the true crime section of your local Barnes & Noble store, or scan Ann Rule’s or Joe McGinniss’ or Gregg Olsen’s output: No black people. Check the televised true-crime shows, too; No black people.

So, make no mistake: blacks do have a legitimate grievance; white America isn’t very interested in black lives or deaths.

I believe that’s chiefly a cultural effect, rather than racism per se. The legacy racism of the Jim Crow laws inhibited assimilation of blacks into the mainstream of American life, and conduced toward the development of a separate, co-existing, all but immiscible culture — and it’s that cultural barrier that works against the empathy that makes victims sympathetic.

If there were nothing to know about the subject of race in America but racism-racism-racism, then Barack Obama would never have been elected president and Condoleezza Rice would never have been Secretary of State. Never.

I would probably have felt honor-bound to answer that all lives matter, and looked as hopelessly dopey as Jim Webb did.

Naturally, it comes from John Piper.

There are two problems here.

1. There’s not even a handful of pastors in the whole of Christendom who aren’t frantically mulcting their ‘sheep’ for every dime they can get.

2. Judas is the worst possible example of greed. After all, if Jesus was sent to earth (by himself) to be a blood sacrifice (to himself), then Jesus had to get himself onto the cross somehow; no Judas, no crucifixion, no salvation.

We should all be grateful to Judas — right? Suppose, for example, that Jesus had never been betrayed. In that case he would have become just another wild-eyed gray-haired nuisance hanging-out on street corners haranguing passersby about their wickedness. What good would that have been to anybody?

And what would John Piper be doing today? Huh? Judas’ greed is the best thing that ever happened to John Piper.