Aspiration Toward Inspiration

My brain took some tangents as a recent speaker I saw asked the audience to try to love Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney…

I feel like so often, in conversations with conservative American Christians (not my denomination’s brand of Obama Christians), there reaches a point where Mr. Believer says, “Well, you just don’t understand.” Of course, that’s not what is meant. What is meant is that the Christian argument (subject to the circumstances, of course), generally based in scripture (ignorantly, but not quite the point) or dogma, doesn’t transcend their paradigm. Their reality is this: there exist a heaven and a hell, a fatherly god who loves you (yet is willing to disown you), and a guy named Jesus who magically defied death and floated up to the aforementioned heaven in an act that somehow saves you too from death if you simply believe that it does. This cosmology is accurate in the minds of a huge percentage of American Christians, however insane it may sound to the rest of us. They’ve arrived at this worldview by carefully following a tradition of ridiculousness perpetuated by some egomaniacal and undereducated men who think that the ability to read English at a fourth grade level somehow qualifies them to interpret collections of literature (not even originally written in English) so complex and diverse that multitudes of scholars cannot decrypt all of it. Nonetheless, believing themselves divinely inspired, they make noise in Hitler-esque fashions and convince people to believe ridiculous things.

If I can come back from the tangent from my tangent, I had a small point. These people, with their ridiculous worldviews, have the gall to tell us that we can’t understand because we haven’t accepted Jesus or we don’t have faith or we’re misled by the devil or some crap like that. So it seems to me that if these people have the right to dismiss us as incapable by virtue of being “heathens” and tell us that we’re going to Hell even though they love us (because “love the sinner, hate the sin”), we should have the right to call them ignorant (because love the stupid people, not the stupidity). There’s a point past which tolerance helps breed injustice. We can all agree on that. Liberals could stand to be a bit less tolerant of religious people.

So yes, I can love Dick Cheney, but I still think he’s a jerk.