Pat Robertson is Ghoulish

 

Pat Robertson came out of retirement to claim that Putin "is being compelled by God" to invade Ukraine in preparation for a massive End Times invasion of Israel. pic.twitter.com/Pmwybf57Ay

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 28, 2022

Claiming that Putin is being used as an instrument of God in what is looking more and more like a genocide (if he cannot take Ukraine with the people there, he will simply remove all the people) to ultimately lead to the End Times which for whatever reason is definitely in Israel is so, so...completely on brand? He's excited that there's misery on tap for humanity. His comforting message: the God we're supposed to worship wants this, so relax and accept all the death. It's almost as if death and misery give his conception of God shape and form. As if his concept of God requires blood and barely exists without the terror by night. As if ethnic genocide and horror were planned by God with the exacting detail of a Kommandant with the entire earth as his camp.

It takes away the human agency of Putin to not do horrific things, in the same way that John Hagee surrendered Hitler's human agency to God in declaring that he used Hitler to found Israel--again for the ultimate End Times purpose.  Will history's monsters face eternal judgment if they were just meat puppets God is operating through? It seems like an ethos that gives monsters a pass at the expense of so many bodies that are "fulfilling prophecy." 

And if God is good, then how is it He cannot achieve his ends without putting human lives through a meat grinder? Surely, a deity like that is to be feared, but how can one so monstrous be worshipped or loved? How can he be a comfort to the afflicted when he is the source of affliction? How can he be a savior when the model of his world is that his instruments are destroyers? 

In a moment of war and tumult, imagine thinking this is exactly the time to peer out from one's retirement and say "More of this, maranatha!" The Good News is--bad news until we all snuff it. 

It's folks like Robertson that are why Christianity and me aren't ever getting on. But it makes me wonder about people for whom this is their religion, the actual way they look at the world. There is a nihilism in it. Why do good at all? Why fight the good fight? The God who formed you in the womb also planned your eventual, necessary, and even potentially excruciating demise along with everyone you ever loved. How would you go through life? Would you be more inclined to do the right things, or find cosmic reasons why it wouldn't matter?  Would you decide that siding with horror had a purpose; that God was working through the evil you had done? 

I don't like the answers I see out there. But look at the old man. The specter of mass death livened his blood. 

Reading, Writing, or Rapture?

I'm basically suspicious of the idea of homeschooling, folks. See, while a part of me wants to believe that the majority of homeschoolers just want their kids to receive a better education than the state can provide them, it seems to me that a part of that desire comes not only from a deep distrust of government and people who are different from oneself in the first place, but also a desire to exert a great deal of control over one's own children, in being the only conduit through which their worldview gets constructed. I feel like this is a dangerous thing, because the world is populated by many people with many conflicting interests and views. Getting only one filter for understanding the world isn't much better than getting a blindfold. I've mentioned before instances where this control over children denied them not just a complete education, but basically their lives. I can also point out that this distrust of outsiders is also sometimes a guard against being caught abusing children.

But the biggest thing I worry about is the idea that kids might not get any kind of education at all. That parents, with good intentions or bad, try their own idiosyncrasies out on their kids and adopt this method and that, and wind up with kids who aren't properly educated and aren't well-capable of taking on employment opportunities or caring for themselves. That sort of thing sounds like it could be guilt-ridden and hard to overcome, because the child so (un)educated might themselves be isolated by a distrust of formal learning opportunities to fix their educational deficits.

So, hearing that a "homeschooling" family wants to forgo any curriculum at all because they are waiting on the Rapture strikes me as appalling. That's abusive. We're working on two thousand years since the life of Jesus, and no man knows the hour or the day of his Coming again. So why in the heck wouldn't you want your kids to pick up a little knowledge in the meanwhile on the off-chance they might have use of some adult skills? Or just to keep themselves usefully busy? Or because knowing stuff is rewarding and interacting with the world is why we are actually here?

Jesus H. Christ and George W. Bush.

It seems like it was only yesterday that I was grousing about the vague possibility that we had an actual president in office who was some kind of end-times nutter, and wasn't that a freaking joke and a half, huh? Because really, what sort of guy would take a country to war in the middle east and prolong it indefinitely with incendiary "crusades" like east vs west language, and overpronate, if you will, on his spiritual walk by generally assuming that, as the Lizard King himself chanted, the "West is the Best"?  

Well, out of office, George W Bush is still probably some kind of end-times nutter, only in this case, a converting of the Jews because that isn't even remotely offensive to Jesus type. 

I have a really specific opinion regarding GWB: he can shut up forever. Also people who can shut up forever: people who want to find President Obama's Katrina, or his Iraq War, or his other equivalent of Bush fail.  He will not ever reach the fringes of Bush fail. Bush fail is a messianic fail. Bush fails like prophecy. Bush fails like fail was his job. And if he was buying into apocalypse: maybe his fails were deliberate?

Think about that, and try to have a nice day.

Took a microvacation: Not Raptured.

Actually, I'm kind of vexed at the stupidity of this whole weekend. Not my experience of this weekend--which involved a day off on Friday to celebrate my spouse's birthday with a lunch and some gadding about New Hope (which is my favorite place, seriously!), a serious spring-cleaning Saturday, which let me finally get some "outdoor plants" out of my rec room, and let me start the process of cleaning the big, empty aquarium that I might want to re-purpose, and then a baby shower with open bar today, which is obviously awesome.   But the "rapture" bits--that was vexingly dumb. That there are people who either want the end of the world, or seriously think some crooked old radio-preacher is going to know the date certain, tests me. But the fall-out.  The painful stupid, depressed-ass fall-out: