Hate On The "Left" Today: Alternet Belongs On The Southern Poverty Law Centers' List of Hate Groups See Important Update

One thing I've decided to do this year is continue to point out that such venues of the pseudo-left as Alternet are vehicles of hate just as certainly as such venues of pseudo-Christianity as Focus on the Family are and to advocate that the left dump the haters.

Today's specimen is from one of their in-house haters, Valerie Tarico,  9 Ways the Bible Condones Torture.   Which uses a number of texts and interpretations of texts, some of them never taken in the way Tarico presents them.  There is this passage from Matthew, never once in my knowledge taken as a command for self-mutilation or acted on as such,

“If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell” (Matthew 18:8-9).

Which is so obviously making the point that the consequences of extremely evil behavior are worse than losing your hand or your eye.

Considering the economic injustice that was, in fact, a major focus of the teachings of Jesus and the fact that it, even today, leads to far worse mutilation of bodies and lives, it is clearly an exaggeration used to make a point.   Which you would think was quite supportive of a genuine liberal agenda, as opposed to a program of hate-talk.  In fact, I would consider the passage, in the context of the text and the times Jesus said that in make it a strong statement against just that kind of injustice.

When set in the wider context of the chapter in which that passage is set, Matthew 18,  Tarico's use of it for her hate-speech is obviously wrong.

Matthew 18 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, 3 and said, “Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.  7 “Woe to the world because of its stumbling blocks! For it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come; but woe to that man through whom the stumbling block comes!

The first thing that come to mind,  for me, is the commercial traffic in children, especially for sex, which was as wide-spread a phenomenon during the Roman empire as it is in today's world of pornography, championed by Alternet and such who work for venues of current atheism, such as Prometheus Press.*

It was a normal practice for those who held children in slavery to sell or rent them to pagan temples to be pimped to men who would ritually rape them (the actual focus of several of the bible verses misinterpreted to deal with gay sex), or just plain brothels.  Children who survived that torture would, upon losing their attraction to such men, be held as domestic slaves or sold to end their lives in other forms of toil, some of it among the most horrible imaginable.

The rape of children was an absolutely legal and normal thing throughout much of the Mediterranean during the classical period, a part of the everyday reality which Jesus was addressing.  If anything the Hebrew tradition he was a part of was remarkable for its relative discouragement of such things.   So you have to take that into account as what the people who heard Jesus talking about that, in the context of the text, would have understood him to mean.  I'd certainly advocate that it would be better for a child rapist or a pimp who trafficked in children to rapists to cut off their hand or tear out their eye than to do what they do.  If I had the time I'd go through the comment threads  to see what the congregation of Alternet atheists advocate be done to priestly pedophiles.  I will guarantee you that some kind of drastic and painful dismemberment would be advocated.  And those would be a group of pedophile rapists who, unlike those pagan ones Jesus was addressing, are in clear violation of both his teachings and the law of the Church which they claim to believe in.  Roman and other paganism which practiced child rape could certainly not be accused of banning it.   You see, context makes a real difference in understanding what the passage means.

The same chapter continues immediately after the passage cherry-picked and quote-mined by Tarico:

10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven. 11 For the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost.

As an unwilling student who monitors the evil that pornography is, I would compare the hate expressed on Tumblr blogs for the children and the adults who are the "bottoms" in the promotion of pedophile and other rape to compare with those two verses to see what Jesus was really talking about.   I have yet to see anything on Alternet or its partners which addresses the most massive body of hate talk against gay children in the world today, pornography.**

You can go on with that chapter to place it in an even wider context to see how Tarico is misrepresenting the text as an advocacy of torture.

12 “What do you think? If any man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go and search for the one that is straying? 13 If it turns out that he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray. 14 So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones perish.

15 “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. 16 But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector [For anyone who doesn't remember, Jesus told the equivalent of the Christian Right in his day that prostitutes and tax collectors would get into the kingdom of heaven before they would, to see how un-unforgiving he was] . 18 Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.

19 “Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. 20 For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

21 Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” 22 Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.

So, tell me how you'd make any of that into a policy allowing torture.

Alternet is a venue of hate of a particularly stupid kind, if promoting the political success of the left is their real goal, as it so obviously is not.   Their real goal is to promote atheism to a particularly ineffective and hateful bunch of people, their core audience, to promote their online mag.  Anything else is clearly secondary as anything associated with their hate speech will not escape damage from that association.   The clear fact is that a majority of Americans and Europeans are Christians, even in such countries where Christianity has been so damaged as England.  Anti-Christian hate speech is a political liability in national politics as certainly as anti-Jewish hate speech would be in New York State or, even more so, Israel.   If they focused their hatred on just Jews instead of mostly on Christians, they'd already be considered the venue of hate they are.   The real left doesn't need it, it needs to get shut of it.

*  I will remind anyone who has seen me make the point, before, that  Vern Bullough, honored by the "Humanists" (read "atheists") as "Humanist of the Year",  "Human Sexuality editor" of Prometheus publishers, that atheist propaganda machine, and associate of many of the prominent atheists of that time and today, was, at the same time and publicly, a member of the pro-pedophile group Paidika, dedicated to "normalizing" the rape of children by adult men.  His position in that group was as public as his own, self-generated CV but which never, in anything I've researched, gave him the slightest difficulty in his academic life or as a prominent member of CSICOP, the major venue of atheist propaganda at the time.  I have yet to see any major organ of atheist media deal honestly with that scandal of atheism or, as I will not cease to mention, the casual and gradually normalized rape of children within online porn - the unregulated dispersal of online porn being another thing championed by Alternet.   Of course, if Bullough had been that while being a member of the Christian clergy, his role in the world according to atheism would have been different.

** UPDATE:  I am wrong to leave out the even more massive expression of hatred against young girls that almost all of straight porn is.  The fact is that any advocacy of pornography and prostitution is an active advocacy for the hatred which is an inevitable and intrinsic aspect of peddling human beings as objects to be used for sex.  And it is inevitable that anyone presented as weaker than the male rapists, the customer base for porn and prostitution, will be presented as worthy of hatred, contempt, abuse, torture and murder within the everyday expression of that commerce, all championed by Alternet and its customer base.

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