God Will Forgive You - But I Won't

Lyle Lovett, "God will forgive you (but I won't)".  (via AJ Milne at Pharyngula)

Lyle Lovett's song is the perfect introduction for the point of today's post.  No offense to Mr. Lovett, mind you, because his song is beautiful, thoughtful and heartbreakingly honest, even though it is built on a popular delusion. Like most Christians, the songwriter describes a psychological split where he offloads emotions he cannot reconcile right now onto another part of himself - his god part - while he owns up to the paramount emotion that he is experiencing.  He channels his pain and anger into the song, while constantly reminding the object of his thwarted affections that there is a part of himself that already forgives.

To acknowledge one's negative (potentially destructive) feelings, express them harmlessly (through art) and allow the budding of positive resolution of those feelings in a way that one can handle is one of the highest forms of human moral behaviour. In religious believers, this expression of one's humanity is often achieved by appealing to the god idea, which is really only the ideation of a more powerful self. It is his humanity that makes Lovett's song beautiful and sad and - ultimately - forgiving.

Lyle Lovett's sincere song acknowledging his very human inability to forgive and forget immediately after a heartbreak contrasts pretty strongly with the reality of the Christian notion of "forgiveness". The demonstrably untrue idea that Christians "love the sinner, hate the sin" is one that is tossed around as a 'given' in the current culture of extreme religiosity.  It is this notion that is trotted out to quash any fears that a religious basis is a dangerous one for any society. The Christian notion of forgiveness is also the foundation for the false claim of Christian 'tolerance', and the laws which undue reverence for this claim have been passed, through which the fears of oppressed minorities are realized.

The truth is that all too many Christians experience the god/self split quite differently from what Lyle Lovett describes in his song. Few Christians are willing or able to own up to their feelings of rage and hatred for people different from themselves by whom they feel threatened.  Yet, they are psychologically uncomfortable with the knowledge that they do feel this type of hatred, rage and desire to punish, harm or destroy those whose very existence make them feel threatened. In order to maintain hir sense that s/he is a good person - a True Christian™ - the believer offloads hir hatred and rage onto the god part, instead.

P.Z. Myers posted a fine example of this true Christian behaviour this morning.  As an outspoken atheist and a critic of the harm religion causes in society, Dr. Myers is a frequent target of hate mail from True Christians™. Here is an excerpt from one such letter he received.

"God doesn’t love you
A lot of Christians are big on forgiveness, I’m not. God fucking hates your guts. He is sitting up there just watching you, watching you with bated breath, with a stopwatch just waiting until you finally croak in 30 or 40 or however many years, and then he will do a little jig before going down to the Pearly Gares and giving Peter the day off, and he will bring you up to the Gates, and make you think that you’re going to make it in, and then PUNK’D! Into hell, where Beelzebub and Lucifer and Leviathan and Hitler will take turns kicking you right in the wiener for all eternity. Have fun, asshole..."via Pharyngula.

As revolting as this is, what is more frightening is the knowledge that it is a foundational belief of Christians that their god wills punishment and eternal torture for all who they feel are against them. What is more frightening is that, like Abraham in this week's Barmy Bible Study many Christians believe that they can know the will of their unknowable, invisible, silent god - and they act upon their interpretations of this will.  One needs only to peruse the Bible, the Christian blueprint for morality based upon "God's word" to see that it would take very little for a determined group of Christians to begin a serious push for the elimination of groups of others who trouble them.

The Bible lays out justifications for murder and genocide which Christians comfortably accommodate and see as righteous and godly. Christians believe that they can feel and know in their hearts what their god wills, which means that there is no objective way to counteract their beliefs with reality. There is no way to protect people from the danger of Christian oppression because the source of the Christian justification for their actions is a psychological one - literally voices in peoples' heads and feelings in their hearts - and this religion has been granted unmatched privilege and power to influence and control society.

Christians believe that gay marriage should be prevented, because they know that oppression of LGBT people is righteous and good in God's eyes. They know that women's rights must be restricted because the Bible tells them that women are inferior, evil, temptresses who must be controlled for the survival of society. They know that brown people all over the world are like those who threatened the Chosen People in the Bible, so cruel measures - even war and genocide - can be taken to destroy them, with their god's blessing.

Religious moderates who continue to urge that progressives respect and tolerate the dangerous extremism that has been growing in the west do so not only at the risk of imperiling their non-white or unbelieving neighbors (among many groups under threat), but at the risk of losing their own freedom and safety. Do moderates imagine that after the extremists finish with the people on their original hit list, their fundamentalist fervor will not then be turned against their moderate brethren? Fundamentalists already have begun to point out just how vast the differences are between the True Believers and those liberal or progressive Christians.  There is nothing new under the sun. I hope that religious moderates who are enabling Christian extremists in order to protect their own privilege have paid attention to history. Just food for thought.