Christianity Versus Personal Responsibility

No deep insights here. Just a big, bold WTF? at the fact that so many conservative Christians continue to profess to be champions of personal responsibility.

Really?

Christians: your god hates personal responsibility. He loathes it. If you believe he exists and if you believe Christian doctrine, then this god has condemned you to torture because of something someone else did thousands of years before you were born. That’s not personal responsibility. If that god believed in personal responsibility, Eve and Adam would have taken some lumps – presumably the snake also – and, well, that would be it. They were cast out of the garden. Their children didn’t return, so no one else ate the forbidden fruit. Nope. Just those two. But the Christian god is happy to make you responsible for events in which you played no personal part.

And, of course, there’s no responsibility imposed on you for your evil acts. Sure, you have to “believe” in the Big J, but even if you don’t commit any evil acts, you’d still have to have faith in order to escape torture. To escape divine condemnation, Stalin must pay the same price (no more, no less) that any child who dies within minutes of being born must pay. No need to make amends to those you’ve wronged. No need to do something a little extra to make it back into the Christian god’s good graces if you ordered water boarding and other war crimes. No need to suck up just a little bit more if you launch a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.

Nope. This god condemns regardless of your behavior. This god condemns regardless of the amount of evil you harbor. And this god forgives Hitler and Mother Teresa just as quickly and easily as this god “forgives” Charles Hamilton Houston, Sylvia Rivera, Hildegard von Bingen, and Woody Guthrie.

Personalized responsibility? Responsibility where it actually matters what you personally have done, why you did it, and what outcomes resulted? That’s anathema to the Christian god and antithetical to the tenets of Christianity.

And yet so many people simultaneously profess to be devout Christians and believers in personal responsibility. I sometimes wonder: do they even realize that they must of necessity be lying about at least one of those things?

Rice or the Media: Whom do I condemn?

And I swear I’m not trying to pick on Newsweek.com, but it was there that I first saw an article on Condoleezza Rice’s new book. I was laughing from the first sentence:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that U.S.-led interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia were not about spreading democracy, but about addressing regional security issues.

Her recent public statements both are and are not part of a book tour: it’s likely many would say the tour is to promote her ideas, and the book is part of that effort, though I think that demeans the reasoning and efforts of others who write books, artificially ennobling Rice’s efforts to communicate her ideas and sell books at the same time while implicitly assigning a crass commercialism to others who write books and then accept lectures to speak about the same themes contained within the books. In any case, however, it’s undeniable that the public statements are part of an effort that is equally well reflected by the publication of her book, Democracy: The Long Road to Freedom.*1
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Newsweek Shocked – Shocked! To Find Racism Happening In Dress Codes

I nearly laughed myself silly over this recent piece at Newsweek.com:

Two black female students attending a charter school in Massachusetts were recently kicked off their sports teams and prohibited from attending a prom because they wore their hair in braids. The Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden, about 9 miles from Boston, enforces a strict dress code preventing students from wearing their hair in any unnatural way, which includes braids.

Twin students Maya and Deanna Cook, African-American sophomores, told local news outlets they were first told to take their braids out two weeks ago by school officials. The girls’ adoptive mother, Colleen Cook, told Boston’s 25 News that she received a call from the school informing her that students weren’t allowed to wear “anything artificial or unnatural in their hair.”

“We told them there’s nothing wrong with their hair the way it is. Their hair is beautiful, there’s no correcting that needs to be done,” Colleen Cook said, adding that the hair policy seems to target only students of color, who wear their hair in braids or extensions reflecting their African-American culture.

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This is What Fascist Policing Looks Like: No Gay Men Abused In Chechnya

If you aren’t familiar with the systematic abuse of gay men by the government of Chechnya, you probably don’t live in Chechnya (or any other republic of Russia for that matter). The issue has been getting considerable coverage for years now. The situation has been sufficiently highlighted for sufficiently long that people in Russia are daring to protest Putin for his lack of intervention in the neighboring country. Putin, it should be noted, did not respond well to the criticism.

But what’s particularly frightening is not yet another example of Putin’s dictatorial opposition to any form of criticism or dissent. What’s particularly frightening is the statement that Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov gave to Interfax through a spokesperson:

“You cannot detain and persecute people who simply do not exist in the republic,” he told Interfax news agency.

“If there were such people in Chechnya, the law-enforcement organs wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning.”

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Some Rapes Are Tuesday

I hope you read the recent post on Republican efforts to preserve the ability to commit rape after someone who previously consented to sexual activity revokes that consent, even when the activity includes things not covered by the original consent, such as violent force.

Some people will wonder how and why someone like Amy Guy, who by all accounts I’ve read sounds a very strong and capable person, could possibly offer any form of sexual consent to someone like Jonathan Wayne Guy, who had a history of acting abusively towards Amy Guy. For many, that history will understandably justify the fear of something horrific that might lead Amy Guy to minimize her risk by consenting, and, hopefully, by consenting help shape exactly what happens next. The hope is that, despite having sex only out of fear, exercising some agency can help make what happens next less traumatic than it might otherwise be.

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No means “don’t stop” … if you’re a Republican Senator in NC

This story, of course, deals with highly upsetting content, continue as you will.

In 1979 the NC state supreme court handed down a ruling that made it non-criminal to continue to act as if one had someone else’s sexual consent after that consent had been withdrawn. Worse? It did not matter if the rapist acted violently: if an encounter began with sexual consent, criminal law in NC would treat rape as consensual sex until whenever a rapist decided to stop raping. Prosecution would have to wait for the rapist to begin a separate, uniquely distinguishable act of sexual contact against a person without consent.

It was, in short, the Blue Balls theory of automatism. She was asking for it, writ in legalese alongside the ever popular, He’s a good guy, he just couldn’t help it.

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Jack Kingston: A Moral Blot on the Nation

Jack Kingston, a man whose moral compass must always point evil, made one of the most abominable statements I’ve ever heard on one of his regular appearances on Anderson Cooper’s 360. AC was speaking to his guests about Trump’s idiotic statements that 1) No one asks why the Civil War happened, 2) Andrew Jackson was very upset at what he saw going on with the civil war [despite being dead for 16 years], and 3) Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War if his presidency had come later in US history, presumably close to 1860.

Instead of making the point that Trump was simply lying about 1 & 2, Cooper allowed the discussion to focus on 3. As a “what if” scenario about an alternate universe, Trump can’t be said to be lying, and here Kingston even made an effort to portray the President’s comments as something other than arrogant, ignorant twaddle. I’m disappointed, of course, that AC and the panel allowed this to become the focus, but that’s no more than I expect from cable news.

No, the bile flooded my mouth when during this discussion about whether or not some alternate-universe Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War, I head this exchange:

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Talk About a Mediocre Ethicist

In the last post all about me, I mentioned that it might be possible for any mediocre ethicist to outdo anything I have accomplished. Recently I read all too many articles published by the Christian Courier, all of which, strangely, list Wayne Jackson as their author.

And? I stand corrected. I have found a Black Swan: at least one mediocre ethicist has no hope of outdoing me.

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For Your Enjoyment: A commenter makes me think

Comment filters here at Pervert Justice are set so that your first comment ever always goes to moderation. If approved, subsequent comments – even on different threads – are not moderated unless they trip the spam trap or certain specific content filters.

One of the best things about this is that I get to see all the commenters names, there’s never one that I miss because I don’t realize a commenter is new. Today that commenter is AbbeyCadabra, commenting on the thread I am 3 years old. I know everything.

AbbeyCadabra really made me think, though not about arcane topics like philately or feminism. No, the arcane which AbbeyCadabra woke from my memory is entirely different and entirely more fun. For your enjoyment, I provide a clip that never stops making me laugh, 40 years after I first saw it:

 

I particularly like, “AbbaCaPocus!” and the poor vampires stone-muffled “Hoh-kusss, Poh-kusss”. There must be something terribly Sadistic going on here at Pervert Justice.