Church and State

Government is about being able to enforce stuff when things go wrong such that someone has the authority and means to use force to make sure the right thing happens.

It's necessary because the reality is there are bad people in the world who will gleefully take more than their fair share and intentionally shrink the pie for other people so they have relatively even more. There are people who are horribly insecure or whatever, frequently referred to as narcissists, who only worry about themselves and no amount of money and power is ever enough to make them happy or make them feel adequately secure or whatever.

You don't remedy the kinds of problems such people cause by having sympathy for them and their choices and the warped reasons they do the things they choose to do. You remedy it by using force -- such as law enforcement -- to insist that what matters here is the rights and needs of other people and the consequences to other people and not whatever bullshit excuses and justifications they want to harp on as to why their abusive shit should be tolerated and forgiven while they get endless "second chances" without actually making any effort whatsoever to fix their shit.

I'm not religious and mostly haven't spent much time in church. I think people like me -- who are inclined to see "motive" behind life events and inclined to assume there is intelligence behind the workings of the universe -- likely invented the concept of gods and religion.

I saw a clip recently of Desi Lydic interviewing Jeff Hiller. The clip starts with the title "Redefining Church as Community."

This is the first I've ever heard of Jeff Hiller or Somebody, Somewhere and I mostly tend to not like Desi Lydic. She's likely a career woman and I was a full-time homemaker and we tend to not jibe well and while I would like to not just be a toxic bitch towards such women, they are all too often toxic bitches towards women like me and I don't know how to respect them without feeling like I'm enabling disrespect and abuse of women like me.

But I really liked the clip because I feel like that's really what church should be about but frequently seems to not be, as the clip indicates with talking about the show is about being queer in the Midwest and the character who says "THIS is church" (about feeling a sense of community with friends) is involved with the church but having some weirdness with church.

I grew up in the Deep South which is the most strongly Christian part of the US and I have a serious medical condition, among other issues. I returned to the Deep South during my divorce with a renewed sense of appreciation for Southern manners which helped enormously in making my life tenable as a divorced single mom who was seriously ill and also working full-time for the first time in my life and initially still doing the lion's share of the women's work, though I ultimately did get my sons to take over most of the cooking, cleaning and grocery shopping.

I frequently wasn't buying all that much at the grocery store because I have a long, long history of shopping frequently for groceries and I frequently was very OBVIOUSLY frazzled because of being very ill and overwhelmed with life at that time. But it was the Deep South and it was super common for total strangers to let me go ahead of them because I wasn't buying much and I looked like I was at the end of my rope because I was.

It also was common at the grocery store I frequented the most for staff to open up a new register and take me first when things were busy. I felt both of those things were an artifact of Southern culture which is strongly shaped by the fact that most Southerners are -- or were historically -- devoutly Christian.

Routinely not having to wait a few extra minutes in line at the grocery store while deathly ill and an overworked single mom with special needs kids made a big difference in my ability to keep on keeping on under extremely difficult circumstances.

I would like to think that's what Christianity is supposed to be about. I would like to think the Bible is intended to be an instruction manual for HOW to create a healthy, functional community.

But, unfortunately, the Catholic Church actively aids and abets child molester priests while persecuting homosexual priests and I feel like that's in a nutshell what's wrong with Christianity generally and it's extremely evil stuff.

Instead of being a handbook for how a group of people can have a healthy community where if you screw up and hurt someone, you make amends to them and then go confess to a priest so they can tell you to let it go emotionally if you have already in actual fact done everything in your power to remedy the harm you did them, it's become a means for narcissistic sadistic evil people to insist the world cater to their feelings and give them endless undeserved "second chances" and reassure them their immortal soul is still on track to spend an eternity in heaven instead of hell no matter how badly they behave and never mind what the Bible actually says.

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

Mathew 7: 21-23

I look at Christianity and feel like I am watching the mangled pledge of allegiance in the Star Trek episode The Omega Glory. This clip shows the mangled pledge of allegiance and Kirk completing it correctly and then a bit about someone trying to denounce Kirk and his people as essentially "excommunicated from the church" or "people cast out of heaven."

One of the better things about the US is the separation of church and state which isn't true in all countries. I think it's good to separate enforcement of the law from efforts to foster community. Conflating the two goes bad places, though at the moment I feel like both church and state have lost their way.

Another clip from that same episode is Kirk talking about the Constitution of the United States being rules for all the people. The preamble is so important it made it into the excellent Schoolhouse Rock clips used in my youth to try to guarantee essential literacy in some things for all American children, or as many as humanly possible.

I'm a big believer in "That government is best which governs least." I think the US Federal government has become something of a cancer on this nation and should try to butt out of a lot of things and try harder to stick to its original mission of providing for the common defense.

As such, it's high time Americans stopped allowing draft dodgers to run for president and try to remember that one of the President's titles is Commander in Chief.

I'm a woman and my father was career military and a two time decorated veteran. My ex husband was also career military.

I'm hesitant to say that we should require military service to run for office. I feel like that potentially excludes women like me who may have devoted much of their lives to supporting national security in the traditional role of wife and mom and may know plenty about military culture and the reasons we do certain things the way we do them.

Historically, many of our presidents were military Generals. If we required one to be a military General to run for president this would defacto exclude women almost entirely because historically you needed to be in command of a combat unit of some sort to gain certain ranks and women were excluded from combat units.

I don't know what the solution is but I think church should be about fostering community and that's why it gets paid for with tithing rather than being part of the commercial for profit economy and government should focus on protecting people when things go wrong and enforcing the fact that "This is not okay and we don't allow this in our country."

My best understanding is that the Department of Education is a large part of why US schools now "teach to the test" and actual education be damned. 

So I wish the federal government would stop butting in to every detail of American life and would try to scale back it's cancerous excessive growth and endlessly over budget deficit spending in support of that.

Community can be fostered locally in various ways, church being just one of them. That's not something which benefits from a top down approach.