The following message came to Jeremiah from the LORD:
Stand at the gate of the house of the LORD,
and there proclaim this message:
Hear the word of the LORD, all you of Judah
who enter these gates to worship the LORD!
Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel:
Reform your ways and your deeds,
so that I may remain with you in this place.
Put not your trust in the deceitful words:
"This is the temple of the LORD!
The temple of the LORD! The temple of the LORD!"
Only if you thoroughly reform your ways and your deeds;
if each of you deals justly with his neighbor;
if you no longer oppress the resident alien,
the orphan, and the widow;
if you no longer shed innocent blood in this place,
or follow strange gods to your own harm,
will I remain with you in this place,
in the land I gave your fathers long ago and forever.
But here you are, putting your trust in deceitful words to your own loss!
Are you to steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury,
burn incense to Baal,
go after strange gods that you know not,
and yet come to stand before me
in this house which bears my name, and say:
"We are safe; we can commit all these abominations again"?
Has this house which bears my name
become in your eyes a den of thieves?
I too see what is being done, says the LORD.
I'm finding that the daily readings from the Catholic lectionary are so oddly appropriate for the news of the day under Trumpian-Republican fascism. More so than a lot of the commentary from the secular left.
Someone was surprised when I said that Majority Report with Sam Seder was my current favorite Youtube channel because I obviously disagree with a lot of what they say on the show. The materialism, the atheism, the quasi-Marxism of some of what is said but I don't listen to them for that, I listen for other things, not least of all Michael Brooks' uncanny imitation of Jordan Peterson who is such a whussy bully. And they, themselves, aren't supportive of people who might agree with them about atheism and even materialism, they have some of the most robust criticism of the new atheist fad of anyone left of John Lennox. And politically we're almost exactly in the same place most of the time, especially when it comes to realistic, practical politics instead of futile play-lefty crap.
That said, I didn't agree with Sam Seder when he said recently that religious people should keep their religion out of the public square. I look at what has happened in this country since nice, good liberals have kept religion out of the public square, on the basis of them wanting to be all First Amendmenty and not make atheists and people who don't like Christianity annoyed. The result was a perversion of Christianity into a fascist-imperial state religion like Roman imperial paganism with a few names changed and various regional and class resentment (I wonder the extent to which the lower orders in Roman society fell for the same thing), which has been a major component of Republican-fascist success. It's not unlike what's happened in Russia with the Russian Orthodox establishment, to which I can't believe there is no push-back by Orthodox Christians who know making nice with Putin comes at the cost of denying the Gospel of Jesus.
One of the big problems with American politics, American discourse and American society is that the religious left in America got intimidated out of putting their thoughts into the public square in the late 1960s, as I told someone recently, the death of The Reverenend Martin Luther King jr. was a convenient date to date that from but it had started before then, the Supreme Court ruling (rightly but hardly importantly) banning prayer and bible readings in public schools and the political reaction it and subsequent equally unimportant rulings restricting interactions between churches and states had a really strong part in that quashing of liberal religion in public. I think, just as with the idiotic duping of the non-Marxist left scandalized by the anti-communist excesses of the late 40s-60s leading them to feel misplaced sympathy for the equivalent of apologists for Hitler and Mussolini, they got royally suckered by various anti-Christian factions through a pious citation of the words against an establishment of religion in the First Amendment.
Let me give you an example for comparison. Just as there was never anything intrinsically wrong with people choosing to not patronize Stalinists who wrote and made movies, as private citizens, which was never a valid First Amendment issue or, really any issue,* there was never anything intrinsically wrong with the Christian left expressing their political and social stands and actions in the language of their religion.
The anti-Christian left has never produced anything except duping the left into taking massively unpopular, ballot-box poison positions on "principle" and eternally splitting into mutually hating, warring factions between tiny splinter groups. That is unless you count the rare episodes of violence that were so useful to the fascists in discrediting the real left that got nailed for it.
* If you think that people not wanting to pay to see a movie written by that pill, Lester Cole, is wrong, how is that any more wrong than the Montgomery Bus Boycott, various other boycotts? That's entirely different from HUAC wrongly hauling him in front of them in a tepid, watered down show trial with minimal consequences for Cole, or his fellow pill Lillian Hellman with even fewer consequences for her. You can compare that to what their hero, Stalin did when he wanted to put people on show trials and they ended up with a bullet in their head a few hours after the preordained verdict was given. I know Hellman went on record supporting the show-trials of Stalin, I wouldn't be surprised if Cole did, whether or not he signed on to that position like she did or not. He remained a Stalinist for the rest of his life. What was wrong about HUAC doing what they did is that it was a little taste of Stalinism in the United States, it is an irony that the very thing that will get Hollywood and show-biz and the scribbling class into a theatrical pose of outrage is the very thing that Cole and Hellman and those they want to paint as victims supported when it was carried to the ultimate extreme.
Needless to say, I haven't been boycotting Sam Seder's crew because of our disagreements. Though I would if they started supporting stuff I think is immoral.
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