Jesus, guns & babies? For real?

Note to white, Christian “victims” of the culture war YOU declared – especially those so terrified of the rest of us that they must have all the guns they want – military grade killing machines included: the REAL victims in the world – untold millions of them yours – are deeply offended. Not that you’d care about that.

In America we’re regularly treated to what can only be called “bullshit kabuki” by the religious right. They get up on their phony high horses and wail about how other people living their lives infringes on their “religious freedom”. They compare taking away one right – to control one’s body – with taking away another – their guns. It would mortify the fundamentalists to know that they’re performing transubstantiation just like all those Catholics they despise. While Catholic priests pretend to turn water into wine, white, Christian fundamentalists pretend that their guns are Jesus. See the neat sleight of hand? Screw with their guns, you’re screwing with their faith.

And, we all know how no faith is more under assault than Christianity. But, onward Christian soldiers, right? We’ve got Crusades to wage! There’s a holy land that needs retaking from the infidel and continents belonging to others that need Manifest Destiny-ing. For the record, I skipped over two thousand years of blood libel.

Having grown up a Jew in America, I’ve always known I was “white adjacent” rather than “white”. My tribe faced restrictions from the moment we arrived here – some that persist to this day. Being Jewish means your rights anywhere you live are always provisional. They can be taken away. The angry mob can always come for you. Thus far, we’ve been lucky (far luckier than Black and brown people who’ve faced even more restrictions). As a group, we’ve gotten to keep all the wealth we’ve accumulated here. That’s given us a huge advantage over the Black people we ghetto’d beside when most of us started arriving after slavery.

Ghettos were invented – in Italy (the first one was in Venice) – to contain urban Jews. Jews had been kept to their own villages before they tried moving to cities and towns. Jewish villages – being entirely Jewish – were easy to wipe out because the Jews in it “poisoned the well with plague”. When Jews started urbanizing in Medieval Europe, the Christians – that ridiculous blood libel ringing in their ears (thank you, Catholic Church!) – something had to be done: voila that first ghetto.

Quick footnote to history: fifteen hundred years of forced separation from the rest of the Europe population – no miscegenation allowed! – caused a genetic defect, “Tay Sachs disease”, to develop inside the Ashkenazi (European) Jewish population. These things happen to a group when they’re not allowed to have children outside their group (either by choice or by force). Jews are the unfortunate twin of the Spanish Aristocracy.

Speaking of Spain, let’s not forget the Spanish Inquisition. And before we quit Europe, we’d be remiss if we forgot to mention that messy Protestant Reformation thing. In the Catholic Church’s defense, history has slightly mischaracterized the Spanish Inquisition. It wasn’t focussed on Jews still practicing Judaism. They were all supposed to be gone already or dead! No, the Inquisition was really looking for “Marranos” – the Jews who, rather than die, accepted conversion into Christianity. The Church was after Jews pretending to be Christians. “Marrano” also meant “pig” at the time.

The Protestant Reformation – from an outsider (non-Christian) POV – was a family food fight fought with weapons. Christians slaughtering Christians over a “rules” dispute. Please – spare the rest of us all the philosophical this-and-that over what it all means because – if you ain’t a Christian – it’s all ooga-booga. For real.

The blood libel is pure ooga-booga. It’s not even good storytelling FFS! And the underlying logic wouldn’t satisfy a modern movie audience if you tried to sell it to them. And yet – with the Catholic Church whipping its flock to a literal frenzy – Christianity invented a monster of utter bullshit that it can never stop: Jews killed Jesus. When I think of how many Jews were murdered in cold blood over a ludicrous fiction invented by Paul the Apostle, I want to projectile vomit every time I hear some white Christian American yowling about how Christians are being “victimized” here in America.

The thing about monotheism is that it focuses all the divine power in the universe into one god – and then puts that god inside the individual believer’s head. All well and good! Whereas polytheistic gods had a here-and-there relationship with humans (they could take us or leave us), Yahweh (that’s the name of the monotheistic god Jews imagined, “God” isn’t his name, it’s his job description) got personally involved with humans (starting with Abraham). Yahweh promises Abraham that if becomes a faithful follower, he’ll give him a whole country (where he’ll be fruitful and multiply). That “whole country” Abraham moved into (from present day Iran where he came from – if Abraham ever even really existed) belonged to someone else – the Canaanites. Hey, Canaanites, Google “Manifest Destiny”. You’ll understand.

The downside of putting the voice of the “creator of all things” into a believer’s head is that it starts a natural chain reaction of thought. 1) “The Creator Of All Things and I have a relationship”, 2) “the Creator Of All Things doesn’t have a relationship with everyone”, so 3) “that must make me special”. Walk a few miles in that Christian’s shoes. Look around at a world filled with infidels, unbelievers and – worst of all – apostates who think they speak for God when they absolutely don’t; YOU do.

Oy. Nothing good can come from this. Nothing good has.

Christianity has never, EVER been a victim of anything in the Americas. They have been the victimizer from the instant they (and their pathogens) landed. The most galling irony is that Europeans told themselves they were taming wild creatures – non-Christians. They thought they did it with ease because of the superiority of their faith. No, Christian soldiers, your ideas did not conquer the Americas, your pathogens did. Then your guns finished the job.

It’s a little like being born on third base like a Bush but thinking ya hit a triple.

Here in America, white Christians used their Christian faith (and the book they based their faith on) to justify every horror imaginable starting with slavery. Hell, white Christians even used their Christian faith to justify murdering other Christians – Mormons – whose version of Christianity they despised. Again, from an outside, non-Christian perspective? This is madness on steroids.

When an apoplectic white Christian American, filled with righteous indignation because a trans kid needs to empty their bladder insists their ability to practice their Christianity is being violated, what we are witnessing is bullshit of the highest grade. It is a rapist blaming their victim before raping them again – and then using the rape to justify the rape.

You can read your Bible from front to cover and you won’t find anywhere in it where Jesus says “arm up” if ya want to follow me. But then Jesus never met a Christian in his entire life. He was born, lived and died a Jew. He knew Jewish stories and rules and preached those same things to an exclusively Jewish audience (Jews did not and do not proselytize). The lessons he preached were simple: “Do unto others” and “you don’t need a corrupt temple and its corrupt priests to talk to God”.

Paul – and then Christianity – got both wrong. And then they turned their religious faith on the rest of us.