This is a direct follow up to my previous post, though it may not seem like it. The year 2020 has been disturbing and shocking on many levels, and like many of my fellow Americans I have so many questions. Like - how did it come to this? What happened? How did we get here?
Some of that debate is just as useless as assigning blame for the Massacre at Nightless City in The Untamed. Still, there is something that does get under my skin... not in the sense that I think it's responsible for everything. It's more, I don't know... the hypocrisy.
I talked before about how there were bad faith actors manipulating the situation, and credible people being manipulated. But the most irritating part was how self-righteous the cultivators became. How absolutely certain they were, that they were standing for all that is good and right. That they were doing some great service by standing up to and denouncing evil. And yet we all know that they basically looked the other way while real harm was being done. That they believed lies and rumors... and that ultimately they weren't standing on the side of truth and justice at all.
It's the hypocrisy. And more than that. It's that if they really cared about righteousness, if they really cared about standing up for justice... they'd have actually investigated the situation.
On the one hand, I get it. Nobody has the energy (or resources, or access) to investigate everything. At some point we have to trust other people to tell us the truth. Like cultivators trusting that the Jin guards were telling the truth about how Wen Ning died.
On the other hand - how can you claim to stand on the side of right, when you are giving your trust to bad faith actors? And in the process allow injustice and wrong to be ignored?
How can you not be aware of the cognitive dissonance it takes to say "this is wrong and a sign of how horribly evil the enemy is when they do it, but understandable, forgivable, and acceptable when it's us?"
To be honest, that's what makes me so mad at so-called Christian Conservatives today. It's not so much the bad faith actors, since just about every political interest has those. It's that tendency to wrap themselves up in self-righteousness and claim it's somehow justified or good or acceptable. As if you could possibly do the whole 'build the kingdom of heaven' on such a faulty foundation.
There was a study done once, on cheating, and it talked about how some religious people wound up justifying it. The thought process was generally along the lines of bargaining with God, where they basically said "I'll cheat, so I can get into a position where I'll be able to help others."
And... it doesn't work like that? That's not how faith and religion and righteousness is supposed to go. It's not somehow okay or acceptable to lie so long as you do good things to make up for it. (Which is not to say you should be burdened with guilt for the rest of your life or anything. There's a whole process for confession and reconciliation. It's just that the ends don't justify the means, and you can't somehow excuse bad behavior with later good behavior. In fact that's almost worse, because what else are you willing to justify doing in the belief that you'll somehow make up for it later?)
I was raised in a very religious environment, so I get the appeal of 'building the kingdom of heaven' and all that. And I'm also absolutely horrified at what some people are doing in the name of such a thing. Because the minute you decide the ends justify the means, the minute you think lying about something is in a good cause... that you'll somehow make up for it when you're in charge and going about your business...
It betrays a complete lack of understanding of just what it takes to build such a thing. It shows that your foundations are faulty, that the kingdom you're building is built on shifting sand. You're not building a kingdom of heaven on earth, you're not doing God's will, and you are not justified in sinning in order to do so.
(I hate that this sounds so morally black and white, I am reaching for the religious language of my roots to help explain how horrifying I find this.)
It really bothers me that they wrap themselves up in self-righteousness, wave the Bible around, and claim they are dong God's will even as they go against everything that the Bible says.
Trump encapsulates the problem, because they are willing to overlook and accept things they know are wrong. And they say it's because 'God works in mysterious ways', or it's some sort of sign about how He works through our fallible and flawed world, or something...
Instead of the very simple explanation that They. Are. Wrong.
That they are justifying wrongdoing in order to gain power, that they have decided they know what God wants better than He does, and that God wants them to support someone who embodies almost everything a good Christian isn't. Someone who lies on a regular basis, who mocks disabled people, who doesn't care about the sick or the poor...
You can't build a kingdom of heaven on such poor foundations, and any attempt at doing so will fail miserably.
They might, might, end up with a theocracy... and then will probably have the types of problems that come when a theocracy is imposed with such a terrible foundation. That is, the hypocrisy and abuse of power that is practically inevitable when people think the ends justifies the means has a tendency to make people more secular and turn them away from God.
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