Rush Limbaugh

Neo-Coservatism – the Pseudo-Religion

I look at political neo-conservatism as a quasi-religious entity, like freemasonry – a kind of social religion. The religious people involved seem to be looking for precisely a quasi-religious talmudism that allows them to re-interpret the historical Christ and Christianity much like the Talmud allowed Hebrews to reinterpret the requirements of the law. The focus is on keeping most of your money and rejecting responsibility for the poor, militarizing against foreigners, foreign nations, and immigrants and rejecting the love of strangers, and maintaining a closed, bigoted society and rejecting the diversity required by following Christ’s teaching. In short, to be a neo-conservative is to become a religious Pharisee, with all the attendant self-righteousness, obfuscation of rational debate, and filibustering to paralyze society when it doesn’t cooperate with the agenda. It is the religion of this world, expressed in the particular formula recognizable in all fascist societal movements.

: Image via Wikipedia

To say that I have no respect for it, is an understatement. Certainly, I don’t have respect for the ideas, thoughts, motivations, and activities of its adherents, any more than I do those of brown shirts or black shirts. But I also see it as a tremendous blight and cancer upon civilization. It is the formulized antithesis to Christianity itself.

Christ preaches constant concern for the poor. They preach constant concern for “us and our own” and that the poor can take care of themselves. You stick with yours, I stick with mine.
Christ preaches welcoming and embracing the stranger, the foreigner, and the alien. They preach denying hospitality and treating the alien as less entitled. There is a reification of nationality, and overtones that nations of other ethnicities are generally inferior. Who are they always bombing? Little brown people.
Christ preaches tolerance continually for others, religious, cultural, gender, ethnic, sexual, everything. Yep, that means gays too. They preach denying to those who don’t hold their values the very things Christ freely gave – his community, his attention, his interest, his compassion and charity, his involvement, his help, and his protection.
Christ preaches visiting those in prison, relieving their suffering, and healing their wounds. “I was in prison,” says Christ. They preach putting more people into prisons, depriving prisoners of adequate medical care, decent food, and substantive emotional and mental comfort, and closeting them in ever more deprived situations, far from the public eye. In some cases, they preach secret prisons, torture, and utter deprivation of human dignity – things that no Christ, real or imagined, can inspire.
Christ preaches constant concern for the sick, and securing their health at our own expense, just like the good Samaritan. They preach “I am not responsible”, and letting the sick die for lack of anyone to treat or attend them. They say the government should not be involved, but they do not themselves, like the ancient Christians who founded the first hospitals as charities, found hospitals to heal those who cannot find healing.

In the end, the only relationship of neo-conservatism, especially as a para-religious society for protestant fundamentalists, to Christ and the Christianity of the Holy Apostles and the Holy Fathers is an inverse one. It is the antithesis. It is every word of Christ turned on its head, sandwiched in a “yeah but”, “only if”, or “that means”, just as the Talmudists did to the law. And Christ preached also against Talmudism – saying they had reinterpreted the law and thereby ignored its precepts.

In short, neo-conservatism in general, and religious fundamentalism in particular, are systems of modifying Christianity and Christ until you get the pseudo-“Jesus” of the airwaves and the campaign trail and the Klan rally and the closed community. It is “Jesus” as a Rush Limbaugh figure, “Jesus” as an Oliver North figure, “Jesus” as the powerful fascist leader that keeps soccer moms and “women of God” safe from the unclean hordes outside the culdesac. “Jesus” of the Country-Western station and the torture chamber and the neighborhood association. It is the “Jesus” of beating up “faggots” behind the bleachers, “Jesus” of the prom queen who thanks him for winning. It is a made-up, tooth-fairy Jesus who doesn’t exist, most certainly is not due our worship, and is in fact a demon masquerading under the name of the very God who pointed out that there will be false Jesus’ and false Christs. The “Jesus” of expedience, of convenience, of national interests – the red, white, and blue clad “Jesus” of U.S. hegemony.

The false “Jesus” is the “Jesus” who told the poor that they should get a job, and turned his back – the “Jesus” who chased away the stranger or called immigration or the police when they showed up, and who plotted how best to invade the Samaritans. It is the “Jesus” who told the woman at the well that she belongs at home – the “Jesus” who cast the first stone at the harlot and asked if they had any gays on hand. It is the “Jesus” who said, “you didn’t visit me in prison – good job – they were too easy on me, anyway.” It is the “Jesus” who told the blind man and the sick, “you’re not my responsibility. I don’t believe in social welfare”. It’s the “Jesus” who instead of saying, “my mother and my brothers are those who do the will of God”, said, “I’m for good, old-fashioned family values – family comes first. To heck with staying on the cross for people I’ve never met, charity begins at home, can someone give me a ladder?”. This “Jesus” would never have gone to the cross in the first place – it just wouldn’t make sense. The false “Jesus” says the end justifies the means, the outcome justifies whatever we have to do, “collateral damage”, torture, suspending rights, punishing sedition, and building a security state. This “Jesus” would never feed 5,000 from a few loaves – he would say “we can’t help everyone” and then go to Dennys with the apostles for a “Men’s breakfast” and eat five pounds each of fatty foods.

Do you see how the “Jesus” of neo-conservatism deserves only our derision and scorn, our contempt and ridicule? And if the mascot of their movement, then the movement as a whole. The people are lost people, deceived people, enthralled by a false Christ, in the power of the demonic, and compassion is what we must provide. Contempt for their ideas, compassion for their persons. We must never do what they have done – commit the heresy of reducing persons to their ideas or affiliations (“those people” while forgetting that they are people like us) or reducing persons to their actions (“terrorists”). That last is the fallacy into which existentialists fall, and it is heresy, and rejected by the Church. It is a denial of the Incarnation. Hate neo-conservatism, but love the neoconservative. At the same time, this system of neoconservatism deserves unrelenting opposition as an anti-human, anti-life, anti-Christ, and anti-Christian force to substitute fascism for faith at the expense of every person and group they would abandon, imprison, or trod under foot in the name of a demonic “Jesus” who hates you if you don’t follow him.

The Rules of Religious Blogging

The rules of religious blogging aren’t that different than the rules of blogging in general. So many religious bloggers made their first foray into the medium with religion, and it’s an explosive topic, so it bears some discussion for the layman. The biggest problem is that so many people attribute to their religious views a totality, a monolithic, comprehensive absolutism – quite simply put, a “rightness” – that, in the area of religion, they feel free to ignore the rules of blogging altogether. The results can be disastrous personally, as the blogger falls quickly into pride, defensiveness, and begins to make war on anyone who disagrees. Again, quite simply, the worst tendencies of religious absolutism come out for all to see, leaving the blogger in a seige position, with a taking on all enemies mentality, boxing in all directions, and inviting likewise the audience to participate in the personal moral failures of the blogger – closemindedness, inability to hear, the loss of gentleness and peace, the devolution of spirited debate into personal attacks and enjoyment of other people’s downfall, or plotting enjoyment of their potential defeat. In short, the blogger becomes a monster, the blog a monstrosity, and all we who participate become little monsters hanging on to the mother beast. Gone is any real possibility, though we might kid ourselves, that we will learn something. We become Rush Limbaugh-like, firing missiles from our armored booths, with no felt accountability for where they land.

: Image via Wikipedia

You might find this intro surprising, coming from me. But I’m not talking about breaking the rules of blogging, merely about ignoring them. It’s one thing to proceed with ignorance and inexperience and end up slamming your first car into a wall. We’d like to avoid that. It’s another thing if you wreck cars for a living as a stuntman, crash test dummy, or safety tester. If you know what you’re doing, are breaking the rules intentionally for a reason, and understand the consequences for you and for others, then maybe it’s appropriate. Maybe. It depends on your purpose and the purpose of your blog and what kind of interaction you want with visitors. I know mine, know what I’m doing and why, and while that doesn’t exempt me from the need to monitor myself, listen to feedback, and possibly adjust, it also means that if I’m breaking the very rules I’m discussing, it may not be hypocrisy at all – it may be quite intentional. My father used to quote Oscar Wilde, “a gentleman never offends anyone unintentionally”. That shouldn’t be an excuse for being intentionally brutal – it doesn’t make it all right – but we must at once be willing to take all offenses we give on ourselves, saying with our fathers, “it is all my fault”, and yet leave the other person their own will, which we cannot presume to own or control. Sometimes what is being offended is pride, or presumption, or arrogance, or unbelief, or some such thing. We must avoid making excuses, tread carefully lest we assume for ourselves the deluded role of ‘hammer of God’ – avoiding hubris, and yet also sometimes be willing to risk pain in order to remove something awful, like a surgeon at work on a tumor. And in that, it’s so easy to become self-righteous and blind.

So anyway, I’m not meaning this to be a comprehensive list of rules. There are plenty of lists out there, if you want to google the rules of blogging. But here are a couple that may be useful:

* Whenever possible, avoid telling a person he’s wrong. Instead, acknowledge right intent, right direction, right in some point, but merely operating with wrong information or incomplete analysis in another area. I’m constantly re-learning this one. It’s something I pull from business blogging, and it’s just as appropriate in a religious setting.

* Always leave something on the table. Don’t attempt to “decimate” someone you’ve decided is an intellectual opponent. If you do, you’re delighting too much in another’s downfall, which is forbidden, is it not? Do you think David mocked Goliath as he slung the stone? We are not that kind of people, if we pretend to be whatever is meant by “christian”. The wrath of God is upon us at such moments. There is always a bigger giant. If you can’t find *any* point of agreement with the other person, let them know that that’s where you’re struggling, and leave it at that. As John Duns Scotus said, ‘unless we can find some single point on which we really and unreservedly agree, we can’t really have a conversation’. That happens to me a lot, because you and I don’t mean the same thing by “christian” or “god” or “Jesus”. There’s always someone assuming for you that you’re in agreement, and who will fight to insist that you agree when you know that you do not. I always end it by saying, “the god that you believe in, I think is fictional, imaginary, and doesn’t exist, so saying we both worship the same God is like saying that you think you’re hearing fairies and I think you’re hearing your own mind – that’s not what “same” really means”. But it’s not really our place to have ecumenical(ist) dialogues and come to ‘agreement’ as we cook our own religious meth, so to speak. Protestants create their religion. The rest of us cannot engage in that kind of thing without ceasing to be what we are. It’s apostasy of attitude and activity that we must avoid, besides mysteriological apostasy.

* Acknowledge the other person’s intellectual and vocational liberty. You can’t be Orthodox without believing in this freedom. Maybe Calvinists have another take and end up struggling with this. You hear fundamentalists say all the time, “the devil is whispering in your ear” or some such thing. It’s really inappropriate for us to make such a judgment. Our fathers warn stringently against that presumption. I find I’m saying, “I understand that a lot of people live that way, think that way, make that choice. It’s not the way I live, think, or not what I’ve decided.” Sometimes the best way to acknowledge liberty is to pair it with your own. The danger for religious bloggers, and those who drop in for a visit, is the same danger you get in religious forums (an infernal venue that I don’t want here) – that is, deciding that there’s only one possible correct answer, and that you’ve got a handle on it such that nothing else need be listened to. It’s the most dangerous to you when you ‘know’ you’re right. The moment you stop challenging your own ‘beliefs’, then you’re not actually thinking anymore, your intellect isn’t actually free, but instead you’re a creature of ‘beliefs’. One of my religious duties is to remove from my mind all ‘beliefs’. I often say that I don’t believe in God, because I don’t have any beliefs. That’s more an intention than a reality. I know if I dig enough, I’ll find beliefs I haven’t eradicated yet. A belief is something you’ve insulated from consideration, scrutiny, from thought – it’s fixed, it cannot any more be considered. You can’t really respond to a belief. The person has chosen to separate themselves from reality, in actual principle, and to decide that nothing can impact their understanding. They are immune even from the God they presume to worship. They aren’t followers of God, but followers of their own mind. It’s the ultimate atheism, the best demonstration of autonomy from the Creator, the height of pride and also, tragically, the best evidence of terrible loneliness, fear – the very seige mentality we’re saying religious bloggers need to avoid. The best thing you can do for them and for you is to keep responding with, “yes, I acknowledge that’s one way of thinking. it’s not mine, or everyone’s, but it’s one way.” Then, unless you’re a hypocrite, you tell yourself the same thing about *your* beliefs, until they start listening again, and you are free of their power. Nothing destroys faith like belief.

* Make friends of your enemies, where possible. The notion that someone is your ‘enemy’ is suspect in the first place, because you’ve reduced the other person to a concept, which is the first stage in villifying them. You’re not really listening, anymore, just fighting. So if it’s possible, read what they write elsewhere, offer respect, agreement where possible, interest – don’t let it all become teeth and claws. Sure, some people are enemies of God, enemies of the truth, etc. But be careful about painting with that brush. Because, again, it reduces the person down to what the person is saying or doing, and that’s heresy if you’re Orthodox, the height of evil, and the reason we stopped regarding the Roman Bishop and his “christians” as Orthodox in the first place, because they did that theological to the Holy Trinity, in the form of the filioque, making heresy into blasphemy. How can you then presume to do it? Might as well join the other camp at that point, because whatever you’re saying to them, you’ve fallen into their primary error, what St. Photius spoke of as ‘the sum of all heresies’, “all the rash impudence that the West has to say”. Be careful, because once you do that, you pave the way for cyber-crusades, internet inquisitions, and blogger burnings at the cyber-stake.

* Know when to cut it off. There are times when it’s clear that all the other person is not interested in doing anything except fighting. At that point, give them the last word if you want, or if their last word is to kick over something that needs to be repaired, then you take the last word, and then cut them off. I don’t mean cut off anyone who disagrees with you and annoys you personally, or people you like, by not “getting it” or by asking uncomfortable questions. I know a couple of bloggers who do that, and most of us don’t have a lot of respect for them. One of them gives a couple of warnings that if you keep asking the same question in a different way, or keep bringing up an issue that the blogger thinks has already been answered adequately, you’re going to get banned. I don’t read that blog anymore, because I can’t respect the venue or the blog manager. True, I didn’t agree with the people who were getting banned, and I thought the person doing the banning had more or less correct ideas, but it’s not a real discussion if you always hand the game to your own team. That’s religion. That’s belief. It’s the equivalent, in a blog, of what belief is doing in the mind. It’s the antithesis of faith. So why bother? Another blogger I’ve spent some time observing, only posts comments that ask questions he likes or that won’t embarrass him, and he uses the approval/disapproval system to control the conversation, so that he always comes out right. Wow. That’s even worse, and almost no one I know respects him, or what he’s doing. A colleague called it a monoblog. 🙂 That’s fine, if it’s going to be that, but then turn off comments rather than make it a sham.

* Have a mission statement. A lot of people don’t get blogging for the same reason they don’t get Twitter. They’re newbies who don’t have the background a lot of us do in virtual communities and online venues. If they just came onto the scene about the time AOL opened it’s doors to the web, they’re newbies. And you’re going to get people who think your web real estate is one thing when it’s another. If it’s a forum, treat it like a forum – don’t censor. If it’s a monoblog, then turn off comments. If you’re primarily promoting yourself and sharing information, then make that clear. Whatever you’re doing, even if someone is an ass, you have to give them a pass if you don’t tell them what defines the turf. This blog, for instance, is neither a forum nor a monoblog. It’s a site of personal confession. I’m open to some feedback, some discussion, some comments, but I’m not interested in cooking our own meth. The people you’ll see me chase off, eventually, if they don’t get it after a while, are the Protestant types who want to ‘dialogue’ and create our own religious viewpoints, as though that’s a legitimate activity. I’m Orthodox. That’s not what Orthodox people do. You can find ones who will. They’re Protestants dressed up in Orthodox clothes. It wouldn’t be a site of personal confession if I was here throwing Holy Orthodoxy over my shoulder, would it? The other behavior I don’t spend a lot of time with (in other words, I usually say “look, I’m not interested in this”) comes from visitors who drop in, fire off a “corrective” based on reading a single post (yeah, you can track how many posts they’ve read, and how long they spent on each page, etc), and aren’t really listening to or looking at what you’re doing or why. They’re taking some statement as a disconnected proposition, the way Protestants do ‘bible verses’ and responding to that. In short, they’re not talking about what I’m saying, they’re focuses only on what I said. They’re not paying attention to what I’ve said, but only to what’s happening in their own mind. I don’t really have a lot of time for that, and I tend to want to toss it in one response. So I reduce it to logic, show the fallacies, and move on. Usually is quite effective. Doesn’t mean I need only flowery love sonnets for what I’m writing – those don’t do much for me, either – I’m not a sage – I’m just a sinner who is thinking out loud, trying to be saved and, as I’ve said elsewhere, wanting to avoid having only the walls of my own mind to respond, for reasons I needn’t repeat in this post. Anyway, somewhere, you need to make it clear what the hell you’re doing, so that there’s some point of reference. In the old days, people used an F.A.Q.

* Above all, don’t go nuclear. I’m not talking about your personal feelings, or about getting too upset. I mean don’t arm your online country with weapons of mass destruction in the first place. Once you escalate to the point that you’re your own nation, you’re not a “christian” anymore – if you ever were in the first place. Nationalism and christianity are incompatible, no matter what your flag waving pastor tells you. Nationalism is heresy to all faiths, because it’s an attack on faith itself. And I’m not only talking about the nationalism that things “charity starts at home” or “American and Israel are special nations” (neo-gnostic nonsense). In principle, we’re talking about any time you carve out an area and say, ‘outsiders will have to give account of their religious background, their legal identity, their statement of faith, etc.’ and ‘if you commit treason, sedition, or even questional activities, you will be stigmatized, ostracized, and eventually ejected, or else bombed by a religious dogpile of “loving” violence’. Loving violence – that’s nuclear. You know, I’ve had people slap my face, punch me, or threaten to hurt me or worse, because their religious group had gone nuclear. To the point that even the ‘leaders’ (cult leaders) sanctioned it. When a religion goes nuclear, I don’t care if it’s Brother Billy and First Baptist, your Victory Fundagelical Megachurch, or the coffee hour folks at your local parish, you’re a cult and your leaders, if they are involved, are cult leaders. When you do that with online religious communities, you’re either acting illicitly *against* your religion (Orthodox people would say acting apart from the Bishop) or your religion isn’t worth blogging about in the first place, because it’s just an argument by force. And that goes whether people set out on online smear campaigns, villify you in one of those “let’s all gang up on one person (and scare any sympathizers into silence)” free for alls, or what have you. It’s all illicit violence. If you’ve gone nuclear, and you have enough humanity left to realize it, do the one needful thing – kill the damned beast, so it doesn’t grow any more. Close down the blog, shut off the forum, end the meetings and the e-mails, or what have you, and go and spend the next months in penance and begging forgiveness. You have killed. Even if you didn’t actually draw blood. You have murdered with your mind, and you are an apostate to your Faith and to all faith of any kind. Repent, and bend your swords into plowshares.

And remember, don’t get some monster dressed up as a Saint in your head. Martin Luther burned the town of Muenster, and all the men, women, children, elderly, and infirm within it. If you’re thinking, “Martin Luther would do this!” then you might as well put in Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Hitler. The religious thing is just window dressing.

* Show it to your Bishop. Or if you’re not Orthodox, then take it to your leader. Make sure they know it exists and where to find it. I’m not necessarily telling you that you can’t speak freely. I’m saying that it’s good to make what you say, where possible, available to your Bishop, so you can get guidance and help with any serious problems you might have, or if you really need someone to rescue you from the monster you’ve become. Sometimes, speaking into the hollow of an oak is necessary. I get it. But that’s not what turns you into a monster, usually. Avoid monstrosity – show the Bishop. That’s what he’s there for.

That’s it. The list could go on and on. I figure these are enough. I mean, if you’ve got these down, hell, you’re better off that in most religious venues, aren’t you? And if you can’t do these things, for goodness sake, it’s not for you to run, launch, or participate in an online venue. Get out of it. No one is appointed to the inquisition. If you’re going to stay in, try slapping something on your sidebar that says, “Be gentle, be kind, be peaceable. Be willing to say that you’re wrong. Be willing to acknowledge the other guy is right. If you can’t do these things, go play golf until you can. It’ll still be here tomorrow.” Here, I use remembrance of the times and seasons. Again, I’ll violate these rules sometimes. Sometimes unintentionally, in which case I’ve got work to do. Sometimes, on purpose, but usually more for dramatic effect. I swear up a storm some days, because I’d rather be genuine than religious and, again, this blog really serves a purpose to which that’s appropriate. But in the comments section, I sometimes do all right, sometimes not. That’s where I try to follow the rules as best I can.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blogger

Update on Haiti: Don’t be discouraged by the reports of overwhelming aid, and too much of one thing at one time. The aid is going to be needed for the long haul. There is no decent running water, and where that’s true, and people have no homes, families are destroyed, and most things are just a pile, it’s going to be an ongoing need to get people to the point they can survive and rebuild. The “overwhelming” part is a testament to how quickly the world responded – quicker than ever before on anything. The duplication – e.g. with so many countries sending field hospitals – demonstrates the need for better international coordination of aid. We still act like nations – we still believe in the made-up construct of nationhood and act in a disjointed way, because of it. At a minimum, we need to act as a federation of nations, with some federal coordination. But that doesn’t mean the ongoing aid is not needed. Please keep helping.

As usual, that was preface, and I don’t intend a discourse on the passion of anger or divine anger or any such thing. It’s preface to personal confession. I experience anger whenever I start something new. It’s a kind of outrage. And I don’t know if it’s the passion of anger or not. I’m not going to try to sort that out here. It’ll take more than a platitude or two. I just know it’s there. When I first decided to work for myself, I felt anger at all the pretences that had been foisted on me by the culture and corporate life, the bondage I had placed in, unknowingly, since infancy – sculpted to become a slave. And I spent the first weeks after expressing that anger, or outrage, or what have you. When battered by ridiculous pagan mantras (no negative energy, no negative energy…) I became outraged and began throwing those shackles off. It felt as if they would handcuff me to something that can’t sustain life, mold me into the output of a philosophical meat grinder – a concept not a human. Nothing more complex than a few mantras. And I railed against it. When I began writing again here, I also felt anger. Anger at the chains put on others, and the chains once clamped on me. And I cried out and am still crying out against them. If my experience here matches the other venues, this will last a while, and then it’ll be done, and I’ll either talk about other things or have nothing more to say for a while, so that it becomes a protest venue, for when raids are made against my sanity and my liberty by the world. I don’t know which it’ll be, of course.You know, we deny that there is such a thing as righteous anger, good anger, or the anger of God – if, by that, we mean anything remotely like human anger. God is not subject to the passions, because God is not subject to death. To deny this is to make God part of the universe – not the creator, but rather himself the created. To deny it is heresy and gnosticism. It is also to turn the scriptures against themselves, a common characteristic of both gnosticism and Protestantism – quoting proof texts that elsewhere are seemingly contradicted. When the Apostle calls anger a passion, how then can the prophets say that God is angry? The apparent disymmetry comes from attempting to treat the scriptures like a book, external and separate from the thinking community that wrote them – external to its liturgy, it’s understanding. And even now, as people convert to Orthodoxy, from other religions or from the culture at large, they bring with them this disymmetry and find it difficult to learn to understand the holy scriptures in an Orthodox manner. As Christ said, “let him who has ears to hear, let him hear”. It is difficult to hear when listening with ears that are alien to the faith of the first man, the faith of our fathers, the faith of all ages. But the Orthodox mind does not attribute anger to God as some higher form of the passion experienced by man, any more than we can think that God forgets or that God grows weary. Genuine Christianity is all of one piece, not a jumble of statements in a book that you can toss onto your kindle and get your head around on a plane. In fact, the more people attempt that, the less they really understand, because they acquire the delusion that they have understood. The books are liturgical, and cannot be understood externally to the liturgy. That’s just the facts.

I believe anger is so often the result of pain. I know from experience that mine is. The Haiti thing tho is the latest example. I think it’s one thing to listen to ongoing interviews on the ground, listen to people pulled from the wreckage, listen to the husbands burying their wives, listen to the overwhelmed doctors and the people trying to find others in the rubble, and the people learning that their loved ones have died. When you listen to that, if you’re human, if you haven’t converted your humanity into ideology, which is genocide on all human beings everywhere for all time – Christ included, you feel… solidarity, symmetry with the suffering, pain. Not pain like theirs, not suffering like theirs. After all, you have a radio, you are driving a car, you are on the way to buy food or to earn money. You take a drink of water or coffee and you have everything they do not have. You cannot feel what they feel. But you don’t feel nothing, either, unless you’ve killed your human soul. You feel pain.

It’s another thing entirely to listen to 40-second clips on TV news punctuating 3-hour rants by a Rush Limbaugh figure on how it’s being politicized, ironically politicizing it just by making that statement. Over and over, building it into an ideological agenda. No pain, no humanity, just ideology. An intellectual meat grinder for quasi-intellectual, half-intelligent armchair philosophers. The Sadducees of our time. The cultural gnostics. There is no Christianity in that. To borrow from Lewis Black, right wing, conservative cultural religion is to Christianity what KFC is to chicken. And it distorts, warps, and finally deprives one of humanity. It eradicates the human soul, substituting for it a set of platitudes, much like Protestantism and gnosticism from which, unrealized perhaps by the listener, it originates. It is the translation of those premises into popular culture.

And it doesn’t let you feel pain, it causes pain. It doesn’t lessen the suffering of the world, it adds to it. And when you feel the pain in your soul that is the shared life with other human beings, and someone comes along and turns on a loudspeaker of droning, caustic, antagonistic vitriol against and pollution of the fundamental connection we share with all of creation, and foremost with all human beings, not only are they attacking the gospel, by which God became a human being, the very meaning of salvation – the Incarnation, they are trying to crumble the underpinnings of your human soul – creating their own earthquake, their own disturbance, to bring down the part of you that makes you a man. And the pain felt by sharing, by connection, by what we Christians can only reach for and describe as love, is drowned out by the pain of blunt trauma to all connections, all sharing, all solidarity, in fact to the very nature and essence of man, which is one thing, summed up in Christ, expressed in the diversity of all. And that pain fills me with outrage. It makes me angry. And I try to overcome the passion. And fathers help me, saints save me, but I don’t know whether what’s left is my sin or something else. St. John Cassian, I completely submit to thy teaching that there is no righteous anger. And I have no recourse but to do as the fathers tell me – namely, when in doubt, attribute sin to myself, and so escape the wrath of God, which is not like my illicit wrath, not a more nobler version, but is justice in the very uncreate energies of an all-consuming God. Consume me so I am not destroyed. Consume me, so that my life is preserved.

We say, among the faithful, that God does not absorb us. But union with God, theosis, to be consumed, is the very preservation of our unique persons, the very protection of diversity, while the God who became man, wedding but not confusing the two natures, joined in on person, joins us to himself. It is not a thing for the armchair theologian. It is a thing to understand by becoming a real part of the community of people whose liturgy expresses through the year the mystery of this union, enacted through the days of the calendar and the fasts and the feasts, and in the life inside the timeless temple that is one with the temple in Heaven, all us with the angels in the one liturgy, with all the Saints, everywhere unceasingly, mystically representing the Cherubim, finding thereby the union with “all mortal flesh”.

That talk radio garbage is an outrage against God and an enmity with all men. But I don’t wish to fight on God’s behalf. I am not a nice man. I am “meaner” than that. The worst thing one can do to one’s enemies is to refuse to strike them, consigning them instead to the judgment of God. Christ withheld his hand, though he could have turned the world inside out and swallowed them in flame bathed in blood. But he went like a lamb. “I am not here to judge. There is one who judges.” How foolish to think this means he was not hear to point out wrong and elevate good. He did precisely that, all the time. No, but real judgment is when God decides what to do with each of us. And that is a “terrifying thing”, is it not? I am angry, but I am trying not to strike, because God will do what is right, and know what is right, and the passions will not be his guide. He is ever free from Death, and has liberated us likewise to his freedom. I wish to go into it. Lord have mercy.