I’ll never be completely free of the bullshit of extreme Christianity where I live. As much as I want to be rid of it, as I need to be rid of it, it’s a bell I can’t un-ring. Everyday interactions with people serve as reminders that people everywhere are being sold on the idea it’s okay to break others as long as you break yourself.
Only in fundagelical America can a person convince themselves that putting people in cages is the sign of moral rectitude. Or that homicide is the only way to get through to some people. Or that one’s personal life is the right way to live while everyone else needs to get the fuck out of your way.
Yeah, #notallwhatevers applies. Christianity doesn’t own a monopoly on human misery. But it sure as shit owns the rights to mine. Years of being convinced some dude died horribly to give me something I didn’t know existed leaves a mark if one applies it hard enough. Fundagelicals do it harder than anyone else.
Worse, they convince people that it’s a good thing to break people. To tell them they aren’t worth anything. To convince them that they need to hurt people so they feel the right pain. As if there’s a right pain to bear.
Years of not believing hasn’t made this easier. It doesn’t unmake the things people have done in the past, or stop people from making the same mistakes here in the present. There’s this cycle of misery that everyone goes through for no reason than it happened in the past.
Having to make way for these terrible beliefs is a constant reminder that I live in a world that loves the fantasy of Roman torture over agreeing that reality needs to be pondered more rationally. This is so for what? So that people can tell themselves churches breed moral activity? That making shit up about what’s right and wrong is easier than figuring the hard stuff out?
Everywhere I turn, I discover that I believed in a fictional rabbi with superpowers longer than I believed in the person I see in the mirror. That person in the mirror is foreign to me, a chemical reaction that didn’t ask for self-awareness, cursed by realization and ignorance in unknown measures. Why does the fiction have so much influence over what I can see and hear?
Because pain is just as insistent a teacher as anything else. I do not like this fact, nor did I ask to live with it. But it’s there regardless.
Amusing Nonsense 