Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§239 Our age, in a certain sense, is mature (that is to say, decadent), just as Buddha’s was — That is why a sort of Christianity is possible without all the absurd dogmas (the most repulsive offshoots of ancient hybridism).
The Clergy Project has up this morning a striking interview with a pastor who no longer believes. The entire thing is worth reading, but this particular passage really got my attention.
3. What caused the doubts to start becoming stronger than your beliefs?
I think my doubts became undeniable again last year once I had attained everything I set out to accomplish: education, full ordination in a liberal mainline denomination, job security and a retirement plan. Once I reached those goals, I found myself terribly unhappy and unable to stay with my choice to act as if I believed.
I got older, lonelier, and more tired, and have grown rather intolerant of bullshit. I have come to the place where I don’t want to waste my remaining years saying things I don’t believe and propping up the failing institution we call the church.
And one more thing: If there really is a God, I no longer want to serve him. If he is as awful as he is depicted in the Old Testament, then I will oppose him. In the New Testament, Jesus said God is loving, kind, and forgiving. He said that his Holy Spirit resides in us and guides us. I have loved that idea but I have never seen it or felt it and I’ve waited long enough. Time to move on.
Good for him. Seriously: If your daughter had a boyfriend who treated her as Our Heavenly Father Who Loves Us treats humanity, you’d go after him with a baseball bat and submit to the prison time with a smile.
Why should we expect less of a figure that is to be worshipped, and with whom one hopes to spend eternity, than we’d expect of some low-life dumbass boyfriend?
Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion§238 The struggle against brutal Instincts is quite different from the struggle against morbid instincts; it may even be a means of overcoming brutality by making the brutes ill. The psychical treatment practised by Christianity is often nothing more than the process of converting a brute into a sick and therefore tame animal.
The struggle against raw and savage natures must be a struggle with weapons which are able to affect such natures: superstitions and such means are therefore indispensable and essential.
Abortion supporters are just exactly like Nazis!!
“There are very few things you can directly compare to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,” he [Matt Barber] said. “This is one of them. Modern-day pro-aborts, pro-abortionists who support this and other gruesome procedures are the modern-day equivalent — if they are doing it, they are the Nazis, and if they’re supporting it, they’re the equivalent of the German people who looked the other way, allowed it to happen, even rationalized it in their mind. This is as black and white, it is as cut and dry … and they use the same tactics. They dehumanize these little people just like the Nazis dehumanized the Jews so that it would blunt the impact of what they’re actually doing; murdering them, torturing them. Pro-aborts are modern-day Nazis.”
Ed Brayton snarks:
Now here comes the irony. The state of Israel, to whom Barber has sworn such undying allegiance, not only protects the right to choose but the government actually pays for abortions. So that makes Israel a bunch of Nazis, according to Barber.
Reality and facts, of course, are not valid tokens on the evangelical right.
