Religious Pomposity
Thoughts from Nick Carraway.
A former coworker threw up one of those posts on social media that I would simply label religious pomposity. Essentially, these folks (I know you’ve seen them before) assert that the virus is real, but their faith will protect them from harm. They will continue to live their life because God will protect them.
This is where we see some variance. Some will be respectful of others and wear masks in public. This is because they can at least understand the notion that masks are more about protecting others than protecting themselves. Others are more selfish. They are bulletproof from the virus because they have a great relationship with the almighty.
If you haven’t figured it, these are the people that anger me the most. It isn’t the denial of covid that bothers me. It bothers me sure, but it is understandable on some level. The religious folks bother me more because they are misunderstanding the virus and they are misunderstanding religion. That’s quite a combination.
They are using what I would call an Old Testament understanding of religion. It goes something like this. If I’m good enough and obedient enough then God will protect me from harm. This sounds good, but we can take this to its logical conclusion. In other words, if I’m continually safe then I am continually in God’s favor. If I’m infected or somehow worried about being infected then your faith is superior to my faith.
Now, for those that have studied their Bible, they remember the story of Job. God and Satan had this bet going that Job would continue to praise God even when you took away his stuff, his health, and his family. Those from Old Testament times believe both halves of that equation. If you are fortunate then God favors you. If you are not then he doesn’t.
People that post this kind of thing are continuing to perpetuate this idea. They are doing so in a very selfish and arrogant way. They have God’s favor. They are obviously good and obedient people. They will take advantage of his largesse, so they don’t need to protect himself and others. Unfortunately for them, evidence shows this is not case. Churches have held services in defiance of public safety and numerous members have paid the price.
I won’t go into specifics, but these folks are usually far from virtuous. This is why these kinds of pronouncements anger me. It’s the arrogance involved. We are called to be humble. Those that are first will be last and those that are last will be first. Belief doesn’t give me super powers and it doesn’t make me any safer than anyone else. Furthermore, if I’m willing to put someone else in danger because of my faith then I have surrendered any moral high ground I thought I had in the first place.
I’ve been calling those folks “Old Testament Christians” for a long time. In fact, I find a bunch of “New Testament Christians” who seem to think the first four books of that testament don’t count. (Those are the ones that say “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, for this is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like unto it: Love thy neighbor as thyself.” And they say “Judge not” and stuff like “take care of the poor and hurting.” I guess maybe the reason those Xtians don’t like those books is that they say pretty much the same thing as the Quran, and Lord only knows we can’t have that.)
1God didn’t save the Jewish people, and he won’t save the Southern Baptists.
2Two points:
1] I have a meme for every occasion. The relevant one in this case is a simple statement: “If you don’t need to wear a mask because God will protect you, you don’t need an AR-15 for the same reason.”
2] The spiritual teaching I study includes reincarnation and discusses soul age. Infant souls, generally, are too fearful to trust in the Almighty or anyone else to protect them but Baby souls are another matter entirely. THEY are the ones who are certain-sure that God is in their corner because they are morally superior to everyone else.
Seeing them in this light helps me not get too angry at them. After all, I don’t get p-o’d at toddlers for being toddlers. Their world-view makes sense to them and, as an adult, it’s up to me to protect them from themselves when they decide that tying a towel around their neck makes them invincible like Superman. It’s my job to keep them from climbing up on the roof to prove it.
3I can’t stop an adult Baby soul from being arrogant. All I can do, in that case, is protect myself from them.
I think I’ve talked in here about what I believe to be the most basic core belief of today’s conservatism.
4Everyone’s got what they deserve. Period.
If someone is filthy rich, they deserve it because they virtuously pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps.
If those boots trod over the bodies of others who hadn’t earned boots, tough shit.
If someone is poor or can’t feed their kids, it’s because they’re lazy or stupid. Not willing or able to take advantage of the totally fair free market system available to everyone.
And THAT’S how repugnantcans justified their ideology to evangelicals. Substitute everything above with two words.
God’s will.
Old Testament Christianity? Bet your ass. Even though Jesus wasn’t around for the first part, he’s been totally cool with how prosperity preachers have reconciled his teachings of help thy neighbor with the hardass Old Testament stuff.
I think the fact that Joel Osteen pushes that crap from the same stage that I saw Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen while smoking weed is some kind of poetic justice.
But that’s just me.
“God didn’t save the Jewish people, and he won’t save the Southern Baptists.”
well yeah, actually he did. first, he got Moses to lead them out of Egypt, where they had been an enslaved people, secondly, he helped them secure their own homeland, Israel. not bad for forty year’s work.
Mr. Carroway:
Hate to rain on your parade, but what you’re more accurately describing is Calvinism, he of predestination, and you can tell if you’re among favored, by how materially successful you are on this mortal coil. bear in mind, Calvin’s patrons were all wealthy, and Calvin wasn’t a stupid man, he was quite aware of who it was that was both providing his bread, and the butter he was slathering on it.
I am a Catholic School survivor. We studied both Testaments, Old and New. I was taught two very important lessons by the Nuns:
1. What separates man from all of God’s other creations, is “free will”. That is the ability to make fully thought out decisions on our own, not solely relying on hard-wired instinct. God will give us guidance, but ultimately, we’re directly responsible for our decisions, and whatever consequences result from them.
2. God helps those who help themselves. Sure, God will help you, but he expects you to exercise a bit of initiative of your own. If whatever it is you want isn’t worth you getting up off your butt for, why should should He do all the heavy lifting? He’s provided you all the tools you need, and He kind of expects you to use them, before calling on Him for help.
Maybe, if you’ve availed yourself of all the tools God has provided for your use, and you still aren’t getting what you want, you might just want to reconsider what you want. This could be God’s subtle way of telling you that your want isn’t a good thing; we can ask God for things, and sometimes the answer is no.
5Many religious are not too st00pid and will follow most science, but there are too many that elevate themselves to utter st00pidity and some of them pay the price..good riddens.
6#5 your point one is BS! I’ve studied animals in their habitat and they all make decisions based on the evidence they sense in their environment. Animals have as much free will as we do! And most behavior scientists don’t think we have much free-will at all!
Kristians are those who use religion to excuse their most
7ungodly behavior. The rabid Pro Gun/ Pro Life crowd comes to mind, with hateful attacks on people who don’t agree with them. We will be seeing many of them at polling places today, armed to the hilt, attempting to intimidate voters in response to their Leader’s call to arms.
I must have missed the part of the Bible that states masks are forbidden. Or that the tools created by humans aren’t God’s gift through wisdom.
If they can’t accept septic theory, then they shouldn’t accept electricity, motor vehicles, and firearms…
8Good stuff here! I have been leary of Xtians since I was a child. Never understood say one thing, do another.
9Free will is great, course if you were born poor, black and in the Mississippi Delta…lotsa luck. You can be smart and a good reader but if you are hungry and books are few…again, good luck.
White privileged much?
This is just another face of the blame-the-victim/ prosperity-gospel crap. As long as your luck holds you get to image that you live in a perfect world. The people who please God prosper and are protected and those who don’t don’t and aren’t. And if it seems odd who is pals with God well … be assured that God sees all and it is all part of God’s inscrutable plan. So don’t worry about it.
You can go about your life secure in the knowledge that al is right with the world. Which is great because with God rewarding and punishing everyone you don’t have to do anything. There is no need for a vaccine. Everyone who needs protecting is already protected by God, no less. And anyone who gets sick is being punished, trained or called to stand before God. It’s all good. There is no need to nurse the infirm, comfort the lonely, or help those who have fallen. Helping them may, in fact, interfere with God’s plan.
Similarly no perceived injustice, unfairness or tragedy is ever not part of God’s plan. We can all walk round with our heads in a cloud and a stupid grin on our faces because it is such a perfect world.
Which is fine, until your luck runs out. In every life some rain must fall. Which is fine with the preacher. Getting right with God again usually involves soul-searching, aligning ones views with some ‘man of God’ and a large contribution (Love Gift) to their organization.
If that doesn’t work you need to pray more, listen closer to His representatives and, always, give more.
10The story of Job was one of the things that made me question Christianity. God let Job’s wife and children die to win a bet? Giving Job a new wife who had more kids made everything OK?
This seems heartless and cruel, especially for an “all knowing” God who already knew how it would turn out – by being all knowing.
11Cpinva (#5)
We have pretty much the same upbringing. Of course, you are correct about Calvanism, but as a veteran school teacher, I recognize recycled theology with the best of them. Calvin didn’t come up with all of this on his own. Like curriculum specialists, he saw something he liked and put his name on it. He did add his own twist to it though.
RepubAnon,
That same Catholic upbringing taught me that the conception of God changed over time. The Book of Job is a protest piece to protest the common conception that the rich are favored by God and the poor cursed. If one sees the Bible as a human faith history then it starts to make a lot more sense.
Even in the New Testament, a Gentile woman ends up “convincing Jesus” that he is there to save everyone. He suddenly had an epiphany. If one views God and his Son as all knowing then he would have already known that and didn’t need someone else to tell him. It is more likely a realization by God’s ghostwriters than a transformation by God huimself. They can’t come out and say, “you know when we kept saying Jewish people good and everyone else bad? It turns out we were wrong. Our bad.” So, instead we bake it into the narrative. No one is the wiser.
12Joyce; IMO, everything we do since at least arriving at cognitive awareness involves free will choice. What you are using as examples show influencing factors on that choice. The number of choices likely will vary per individual. But no one else can make that choice.
13cpinva: If you are going to accept scientific reasoning you need to go whole hog. The story of Moses and the Israelites has no evidence, none. It isn’t just that directed plagues require more gullibility than I can summon but that there is no evidence that there ever were any Hebrews in Egypt at the time (whichever time you choose to place the story in).
The story is as vague as, say, Atlantis and therefore as believable.
14@TwoCrows. I love the meme!
Yes, the willfully ignorant wallower in one’s faith person can infuriate me in short order. But I also remind myself of what is underneath that arrogance/attitude.
Essentially fear. They are so afraid that they must create a sense of control–dictating how the world should work. And they are extremely vulnerable to breaking when it does not work that way.
Also the attitude of “my belief is right” indicates a position of weakness. I must be in the “right” even if the results are ugly-because I cannot deal with not being the “label-of-choice” such as honorable or knowledgeable.
It may not help…It may be my own effort to be superior/right. But I do temper the anger with compassion or attempt at understanding what fear must be driving them.
15They remind me of the anecdote of the man who had unshakeable faith that God would protect him from his present calamity (hurricane, falling in a pit, the scenario varies). When he refuses the many offers of help that come his way, he eventually dies. Upon arriving in heaven, he chides God for not protecting him, and God lists all the ways he sent help to rescue the man. And so it is with them. Wear the mask; follow the advice of the people “God has sent” to rescue you; God protects in all sorts of ways.
16Dang it! I also notice a nasty strain of anti-vaxers among them. gotta remind them that God also made the doctors and sicnetists who are saving lives.
17Nick Carroway@12: Thanks for your insights here. Very interesting.
18This is precisely why I lasted only a couple of weeks on FB, and that was back around ’06 when it was still a novelty. I just couldn’t take my siblings’ preaching (nor my students’ tales of drunken weekends and their weird politics). And yet I still keep in touch (as much as I want to) with texts and email, and even (gasp!) an occasional letter or three. With all the complaining folks do about FB, why don’t they just dump it?
19Virus don’t care how much faith you got.
20A certain kind of savage irony when Nick (and the others) Godsplain how other Godsplainers are doing it wrong.
I’ll just ask this:
Are any of you aware enough to just be humble and admit that your faith is a fluffy pillow to assuage existential dread?
We all die. 100%. No one has ever come back. That’s the real evidence.
We know very little of what we might know someday, and there is no transmissible evidence that there is even a god, or gods.
Why is the latest christian bible revision the only reference here? Is it because we live in America?
Jes’ wunnerin’
21The irony is delicious, while the cacophony is a touch loud. By their own admission Christianity needed new documentation ergo the NT which they proceeded to divvy up in Latin with translations for the
22bleacherpew set to arrive later. Yet they continue to cite the OT which is most often translated into Hebrew and as most know open to debate as to its literal meaning. Okay then, בוא נשחק#16…ever notice that the omni-gawd is totally powerless to do anything on its own! The chrisANALs always go on about how this super-powered waste can’t do it on its own. Needs doctors heal, needs rescue to well rescue, etc. Gawd is a total waste of time.
23lazrgrl: Why are some of us complainers still on FaceBook? Depends on the individual. I was pushed towards FB by my publisher at a time when I was on LiveJournal (still alive, but obviously doomed as Facebook had overtaken them by a lot) and SFF.net, a site with discussion boards for science fiction writers and some fans. I had started on USEnet, discussion boards on horses and riding (rec.equestrian is now a group on Facebook with many but not all of the old membership and fewer flamewars…but wow that was an experience!) and the discussion boards for parents of children with developmental disabilities (of whom I am one, or was…now parent of adult autist.)
At any rate, FB is a connection to a lot of my friends from SFF.net, those from rec.equestrian, friends outside either of those communities. I do not like its appearance or performance nearly as much as LiveJournal (where I could design and entire blog post with embedded photos and had a gallery of photos from our land arranged by taxon)…and though I couldn’t publish photos at SFF.net, the discussions were much better overall than on FB unless you block and silence and unfriend with a generous hand. (Surrounding yourself with positive people and those who make you feel good–as often recommended–also means avoiding–blocking–unfriending online–those who don’t.)
But it IS the only way I can communicate with some friends (and I can’t, now, because FB just reloads by page every second) and with my readership, to let the latter know how the return to writing is doing. (Post 4th concussion it’s been a slow slog.) It’s the only “platform” I have, or it was. And periodically I could point people to my FB or website when a book was coming out. Many of my friends don’t have websites, don’t do email much, and asked me to stay on FB.
24#21
That’s a fair point. Being a leftist and a Christian is a thin line to walk. It requires me not to be judgmental on multiple fronts. For one, I think our religion forbids it. Secondly, on a more global scale, our political movement rests on the notion of inclusion of all beliefs or not.
However, I think there’s a ton to gain by attempting to straddle that line. I happen to believe Jesus was a progressive. I think we can nab a number of folks to our side by preaching that message by couching it in a language they would understand. I do realize that can turn off non-believers. I mean no disrespect when I couch things in such terms, but understand how that would.
25“Animals have as much free will as we do!”
you’re mistaking genetic coding for free will, the two aren’t the same thing.
“It isn’t just that directed plagues require more gullibility than I can summon but that there is no evidence that there ever were any Hebrews in Egypt at the time (whichever time you choose to place the story in).”
actually, there are scientific studies which prove that the “plagues” could well have been the result of naturally occurring events. the authors of the OT, having no scientific training, would have seen these events as miracles by God. as well, the OT has been translated many times since first written, both theologians and scientists believe the Red Sea was a mistranslation, and it was actually the Sea of Reeds, a much shallower body of water, which could have been pushed aside by a strong wind, allowing Moses and the gang to cross it safely.
you are correct, there were no Hebrews in Egypt, because they didn’t exist until after they fled the country, and formed the 12 tribes, at least according to the OT. while archeological evidence is lacking to support that part of the story, there is no question whatsoever regarding the nation of Israel as the ancient Jewish homeland, going back roughly 3,000 years to its founding.
26cpinva: I have no idea what you mean when you say the Hebrews did not exist until later. Do you mean that, somehow, a group of people suddenly changed their language and culture? That does happen, probably most people who post here had grandparents or great grandparents who did not speak English or eat pizza.
But for the Moses story that sort of alteration precludes that. If there were Hebrews in Israel who spent some generations in Egypt they should have left evidence.
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