Permission and Forgiveness

"They told me my dreams were common disease
To pray to their god get down on my knees
But the dollar in heaven says slavery is free"

 

Humanwine - Wake Up 

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"The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science #130

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"Get. Your. Gunn!"

- the Antichrist Superstar

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Though professional mourners were still hired during my youth in rare instances, in my region the practice had already died out, so I never got to personally witness this particularly theatric manifestation of faith. I do have to disagree with Wikipedia's statement of "the goal of being indistinguishable from real mourners" as while it would've been gauche to point it out, it was treated rather as an open secret, an accepted form of bribing Jesus for a Heaven pass, like incense or gold-plated Bibles. Because the almighty, all-knowing and all-wise creator of all happens to be a big fan of aromatherapy and Cats-grade stage wailing. At any rate, in old villages it would be hard to disguise the same handful of misty-eyed biddies, the same crone chorale making the rounds of every funeral. No, I'll go out on a limb and say another goal was indistinguished.

 

Consider caroling. By the time I was growing up it had become customary to pay carolers in cash (I assume these days they Venmo you per stanza or something) but in the old days it was especially children that would go around singing for food. Pastries in my ancestral village's tradition, maybe dried fruit. It took me a while to realize this was, among other things, a form of wealth redistribution. It allowed poor kids to amass a few extra calories before winter ramped up to its harshest, disguising such begging as supernatural ritual to save face. Same goes for giving sour old hags an occupation doing what they do best (pretending to still give a shit and making others' business their own) while dodging the question of whether or not we want them to starve. Maybe... not? I guess?

 

On a completely unrelated topic, depending on where in the world you live you may have heard a Trumpist murdered and heavily wounded two politicians in Minnesota last month, along with their spouses. The murderer is an antiabortionist with crayon diplomas from a Catholic college, not just churchgoer but church owner, missionary to the Congo, founded an evangelizing nonprofit, and I'd say the list keeps going but it would seem a bit apropos of the fact he was carrying an actual hit-list of 70 more potential victims at the time of his crimes. There's no guesswork involved here. This was a lifelong Christian whose entire history consists of Christian obsessions attacking a favorite target of Christian violence under the moral umbrella provided by official core Christian doctrine, the pretense of the existence of "souls" infused into zygotes at conception.

 

Once or twice I've made fun of libertarians, supposedly an ideology of personal rights and freedom, so often hypocritically also mouthing some family values tripe to make themselves seem cuddlier to the average idiot. Followers of any stripe show such tendencies. The more invested a believer is in any framework of thought or behavior, the more inexorably this manifests as a totalizing worldview in which the BIG GOOD THING (be it environmentalism, nationalism, feminism, laissez-faire capitalism, etc.) is the only source of goodness, and all else must be reinterpreted as one of its facets. But supernatural belief is particularly apt to provide fanatics with justification greater than life itself, and an implicit license to kill by minimizing earthly life in favor of promised eternity. For as long as you legitimize the pretense that fairy-tales about eternal souls are real, you will continue to also legitimize subhuman retard filth in torturing their neighbours to death with souls as pretext.

 

But I find the flip-side of that impulse even more perverse. By minimizing real life in favor of idiotic delusions about eternal life, believers not only forgive sadism and violence, but require permission for basic kindness. Ask them why they feed the poor and they'll openly tell you: it's the "christian" thing to do. Why can it not simply be the good thing to do? Why can you not feed children and the elderly (or everyone else, while you're at it) because it's beneficial, and fuck the hocus-pocus? We murderous apes get few enough noble impulses as it is. For two or three millennia at the very least, maybe fifty thousand years, we've had to tie even those few into propaganda for some costumed clown in front of an altar claiming he's in good with the creator of the universe. Isn't it perpetually hilarious that the showiest participants in charity organizations also oppose the welfare state? Laugh, damn you.