#the only mention of the christian bible is in that beginning part btw. just to further show how he doesnt actually care about the book he

[x688plsloveme]

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones

This was to fulfill a couple prompts for whumptober, but some things happened in October and well... I just finished it. I’ll keep posting the rest of the fics/reacts that I did for whumptober as I finish them ^^

Theresea could count the number of regrets she has on one hand. Today, she'll add another.

Watching as Joshua Graham ruthlessly murders the White Legs makes her wish she sided with Daniel instead.

See, there's a difference between killing someone and murdering them. It's all about your heart posture. In war, killing happens all the time. Soldiers are ordered about like mindless drones and they have no choice but to obey. Even God's soldiers held no resentment for their victims.

Jesus once said that simply holding anger in your heart for somebody else was the same as murder in the Lord's eyes.

Now. Rese didn't know if Joshua's bible was the same as the one she was forced to read growing up, but even if that part wasn't, no one could say that what he was doing didn't constitute murder.

She could tell he was a hypocrite sure, but even she believed him for a split second when he said getting rid of the White Legs was seen as just a chore for him. Seeing him emotionless as he took life after life would've been preferable to this.

Based on what he told her, he should've even been remorseful with every kill, yet it was far from that. His words may have reflected such an emotion, but it was completely juxtaposed by the sheer joy he emitted with blood on his hands.

The glint in his eyes as he lands every shot. Blood spraying all around them. Rese barely has to lift a finger.

His focus as he shoves a woman's head underwater. He doesn't so much as twitch when the woman claws at him to try and regain her breath. Doesn't blink twice at her bloodshot eyes and sputtering mouth as he drags her head out just to shove it back in again. Every time she thinks he's going to stop, he does it again. And again. And again.

Rese tries her best to stay still, to stay uncaring, but it's getting to be too much. The woman barely has enough time to cry out to her gods before she gets shoved back under. Before Rese realizes it, she's wringing out her hands in a way she hasn't done since she was a child. She scowls and forces herself still once more.

Finally, she can't stand the sound of her crying anymore and yells, "Joshua!"

This snaps him out of his... trance or whatever that was. He stands up and puts a bullet in her skull.

He averts his eyes. "I was simply... trying to gather information."

Neither of them is stupid enough to pretend that he said a word the whole time or that he gave the woman more than a second to breathe, let alone speak.

Thankfully, Rese knew when to keep her mouth shut.

Of course, that wasn't the end of it. His eagerness is downright terrifying as he crushes a young teenager's skull against a rock, a sickening crunch is heard and when Rese opens her eyes, his boot is covered in blood and brain goo.

Her stomach churns at the sight and she's reminded of something he said before. Something about being happy and dashing little ones against the stone?

He looks at it distastefully, like his shoes getting brain matter on them was more of an inconvenience than anything. Rese, on the other hand, was trying not to audibly gag.

She regrets it the most when they get to the end and she has to be right next to him and witness his treatment of Salt Upon Wounds up close. Sure, the guy was one of the worst, but even he deserves a quick death. Joshua just keeps hitting him and hitting him and hitting him after every question. Like an afterthought. Like he was used to giving prisoners such brutality.

She frowns.

How could a man who wished to escape his past, act as if he never left it? It doesn't make sense. She winces at his final hit before letting her speak.

Salt Upon Wounds immediately starts begging for his life. He says Joshua is mad, brutal, evil. She agrees with every point and would have said so if the aforementioned man wasn't observing her so closely. She feels sorry for the poor bastard, but she's more fearful of Joshua than whatever bad karma this would grant her.

She wears a mask of indifference as she looks at Joshua and says, "Kill him."

He smiles. She couldn't see it under his bandages, but she could tell. Her mask almost slips with the amount of disgust she holds for him.

She looks at her nails as screams are heard and abruptly cut short.

Joshua walks up to her, pats her on the shoulder, and says, "Now let's get you out of here."

Rese commends herself for not shivering at his touch and smiles for the first time since this battle started, sweet and saccharine. "Yes please."

She couldn't wait to get away from this psycho.

[tanadrin]

Where I grew up, people had this way of spitting the word “Christian,” wielding it like a spear. That’s not Christian. We’re Christian. Krischin. Krisschin. They didn’t mean “Christian,” they meant Like Me, for better or worse. Only Like Me is neutral, requires context, can even be bad if you happen yourself to be imperfect. That’s not how they meant it of course.

Krisschin meant deserving of respect. Krisschin meant reasonable, normal, relatable. They’re Krisschin meant they’re (possibly) deserving of human decency, and by elimination, everything outside that category you could deal with how you liked. The bare text of the Bible, was, of course, acknowledged, but the implicit undercurrent that ran through the word Krisschin was that these are the things that apply between ourselves. Love your neighbor (he’s Krisschin). Treat others (other Krisschins) how you want to be treated.  Blessed are the meek (if they’re Krisschen), maybe, if you’re lucky.

 I’m appealing to a personal narrative here to give weight to this perspective, but by itself it’s not remarkable. I shouldn’t find it insidious or even particularly interesting to note that assholes are everywhere, and religion is not anti-asshole insurance. Assholery is a function of the human condition, not of religion, and it’s not an indictment of a faith to say some people who profess that faith are dicks, either on doctrinal or organizational grounds. That has, in fact, been my relationship to Christianity for most of the time since letting my Catholicism quietly extinguish itself: there’s this book, with some nice bits and some weird bits, which inspired a religion, which has mostly nice people and a few jerks, like all groups of people everywhere. Surely all people are like that; there is no reason Christianity should be different.

Except. Except then I started singing Sacred Harp music.

Look, you don’t have to believe in God to sing Sacred Harp. You sure as shit don’t have to believe in Jesus. There are Jewish Sacred Harp singers--there’s a community of singers in Israel, even--there are nonreligious Sacred Harp singers, and yeah, there are Christian sacred harp singers of every stripe. You do have to not actively despise religion, which is a high bar for some people to clear (my SO for instance), so I think there are few or no Sacred Harp singers who don’t respect religion. But if you’re the sort of person (as pretty much everybody who sings this stuff is) whose first exposure to hearing Sacred Harp music was “...” “...” “...oh my god that’s amazing,” followed by “I want to do that!” then it doesn’t seem to much matter about your personal relationship to religion.

I have passed through my own various phases of irreligion in life; I started out believing God existed because my parents and teachers told me God existed, and much like F=ma and the conservation of volume, I had no reason to doubt them. I read PZ Meyers’ blog religiously (ha ho) for a while, and went through a phase where I thought on balance religion was probably a net negative for humanity, even if I was never a bitter anti-theist. I have identified as atheist and as agnostic, and I still don’t literally believe in the existence of God, but that feels much less important to me now than it did when I was nineteen.

Sacred Harp did two things for me. One, it gave me an emotional connection to the things it talked about. Catholicism, when you are ten, is a lot of people talking at you about what you should believe: your religion teacher, the priest, etc. It can feel very academic and abstract, and honestly, I never felt that transubstantiation or the wording of the Nicene Creed had a very strong effect on my life (btw, the current translation is shit: “all things seen and unseen” sounds way better than “visible and invisible,” though I know why they changed it. They’re wrong). When you are twenty-seven, and you sing in a chorus words by Isaac Watts or Charles Wesley that talk about grief and terror and hope for salvation better than anyone you have ever heard in your life, that can, uh, have an effect on a person. So yeah, it changed how I related to the topic. Not just the general idea of a benevolent God, but the specific idea that no matter how shitty or ugly or awful you feel in the moment, or even for your entire life, you can hope to be redeemed.

The second thing it did was make me angry at everyone who had ever presumed to teach me about religion in my entire life. More than that: it made me angry at the Krisschins, the ones I grew up around, and the ones I have encountered since. There is something to Christianity, something I never encountered in hours and hours of Mass, or in any religion class, or in any hand-wavy non-answer from the Catholic catechism about whether the Jews are going to hell, but which I do find in 285t, and 30b, and 168. It’s hard to put into words. Something like this: you are suffering now. It’s not your imagination; it’s real, and it’s because the world itself is fucked up and has been from the beginning, but it will be okay. Not now, not soon, and not maybe for a long time to come. But it will be, and when it is, all of this will be worth it, I promise. Only, because it’s music, and not just words, and because it’s music better than all of the shitty, anodyne hymns that passed for church music in Catholicism put together,it actually has weight to it. Even if you don’t believe it, you know Watts and Billings and all the rest did, with every fiber of their being, and that counts for something.

So while intellectually I may think that Christianity is a two thousand year old diverse intellectual movement with murky origins sometime in the first few decades CE with as many disparate interpretations as there are distinct denominations (and there are many, even among pre-Reformation churches and heresies), and therefore despite competing claims to legitimacy no single authority to say what is or isn’t definitely Christian. On the other hand, on a gut level, it feels like someone ripped back a curtain and showed me a fiery luminous jewel, whose light is an abject love for everyone alive. And I look at this jewel at the one hand, and I compare it to the ordinary messiness of the human condition of which the Krisschins are only one not-particularly-terrible example, and I am so. Fucking. Angry.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Christianity was not meant to rule. It was, it can be agreed, an initially small offshoot of an already minority religion, that only latterly became the faith of an empire, whose first bishops led their churches from basements and private homes, not from thrones which they sat on in glittering robes. No movement can endure the negative attentions of authority if it fails to mention the virtue it places on humility and respect; and no king can rule if he says to peasant whose throat he’s stepping on that he is, in the final accounting, just as wretched. I don’t know whether that shining jewel was the totality of what James preached in Jerusalem before Paul came along, and I don’t know for certain that the Pope and the Ecumenical Patriarch have no knowledge of it as they sit on their thrones. But if there is anything in religion you want to point to as self-evidently good, as a tangible and universalizable righteousness without arrogance or pretense, that is it. No utopian idealist, no flag-waving revolutionary, no prince however wise and no philanthropist however generous has ever promoted a cause more worthy to be cherished, more challenging to or more fulfilling of human nature, and its only competition in that respects tends to a diluted version of it (or the same light from a different direction).

I did not know when you said “Christian” that by it you could mean this jewel; no one ever showed it to me before. Having seen it, I don’t know how you could mean anything else. I don’t know what else, in comparison, could really be important, and spitting the word Christian until it becomes a meaningless phonetic hiss to cut apart the body of the human race, becoming obsessed with the doctrines and the failures that form a kind of klipah that obscures and is utterly opposed to that essential truth, which overthrows all the others, can be considered nothing but human failure.

Except it’s worse than that, if you actually believe. If you actually believe Jesus Christ was God, then you believe your God, ancient beyond time, wise beyond comprehension, good beyond anything any human being could ever aspire to, took the form of a human being and suffered and died for no reason other than love. Failure to endure the brightness of that jewel--turning aside for a moment, or for a day, or for a lifetime--might be ascribed to mere human weakness; but to valorize your failure as orthodoxy, as what your God wanted when he died choking on a hill outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, to despise or shun or judge or sneer at your fellow human beings and to call that Christianity, is the ugliest blasphemy I can imagine. Your God died because he loved everyone alive without reservation, and how dare you spit on him like that.

I’m a big believer in calling yourself what you aspire to be. A rationalist is someone who aspires to be more rational; an artist is someone who aspires  to make beautiful art; the best we can hope for, if we want to be a good person, is to aspire to do as much good as we can. If you call yourself a Christian, and you do not at least aspire toward that kind of abject love, whatever my intellectual knowledge about the messiness of real-world religious movements and the scotsman fallacy say, in my heart of hearts I will believe you to be a hypocrite and a liar.

I will feel more genuine respect for any random selfish asshole who thinks they got theirs, so fuck everybody else, than I will for someone who uses a word that should mean “aspiring toward abject love stronger than you can imagine” to mean “condescends toward people who are different from me,” “silently judges people a bunch of Italians in funny hats told me are going to hell,” or “clutches my pearls every time someone with skin darker than Pantone 2309 comes within fifteen feet.” And I have no respect for doctrines, which, claiming that love as their wellspring and their heart, as the example of all that they aspire to, betray it with a laundry list of bullshit they have furiously rationalized to themselves and their followers.

Something’s shifted in me, has been shifting for a while; I have felt the urge, driven by Sacred Harp, more and more to find some way in my life to give expression to religious modes and thoughts, emotionally, personally, the space for such things is inside a Catholic church, but there’s too much there that feels like a lie, and not a comforting one, an ugly, crass lie where we have taken our worst failures and renamed them holiness. Protestantism has no particular connection for me, emotionally or intellectually, even the liberal denominations that people like to make fun of as not believing in anything (say what you will, at least they’re not hypocrites). So I guess for now I will continue to what I have been doing semi-regularly for the past year, and once a week I’ll go out on Thursday nights, and I’ll sing.

[neopets420]

what i'm trying to say is this: i don't care if you are religious. specifically, i don't care if you're a christian. i really don't care what or who you believe in, because it, for the most part, doesn't and SHOULDN'T affect me or my life in any meaningful way. HOWEVER, the second anyone tries to use their personal beliefs and opinions about god to tell me how i am Wrong and Immoral, when they make their religion affect me, that goes straight out the window. i don't actually have to give anyone respect, ever, but i generally do because i think not treating others badly is good, or nice, i guess, and i want to be a good person. but when you literally tell me (or anyone else) that i'm an abomination and that you not only sincerely want me to go to hell and be tortured for eternity, but that you genuinely believe that's going to happen, just because you don't like my "life style" or whatever it is that plagues you so, i'm no longer capable of tolerating you. what makes you think god likes you so much anyways? what if i think god only likes me and that it's going to hurt everyone that's not enough like how i want them to be? what if i "believe" YOU should be tortured for the rest of time, forever, just because i don't like you? is this a valid philosophy? no? why? it's the same as yours. and WHY are trans people abominations to god? why doesn't he like us? why is there no mention of trans people in the bible, period? why didn't jesus tell everyone to kill their trans neighbors? where's the list of everything that god thinks is just too bad? (btw, there IS one and it covers things from eating certain types of meats to murder[bad, unless it is your son who has disobeyed you, the father, in which case it is good], animal sacrifice[good] and a rule against mixing fabric types in your clothing) if transgender people are really as horrible as you say, if god really hates us THAT much, why does he allow us to exist to begin with? why allow people to do things he finds so deplorable in the first place, just to send them to hell later? isn't god supposed to be capable of doing anything? why doesn't he just smite every trans person right now and get it over with? the christian god is not so much a loving, fair, wise, protecting father figure as he is the stupid, jealous, abusive bully of a step father that i never asked for.

[blessedandanointed]

Prayer and Fasting

I finally had a chance to catch my breath today since last Wednesday. It was a crazy week with work, aunt responsibility, kid’s birthday parties, choir rehearsals, meetings, church and life in general. In the business of life, sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on what’s truly important in our lives.

I’ve struggled many times, to wake up early in the morning for devotions. It’s our quiet time to hear from God, read His Word and commit the day into His exceedingly capable Hands. It’s vital for our spiritual lives, and every time we forsake it, we become weaker spiritually. However, the tricky part of it is this: it creeps up on us. Sometimes, we don’t realize it until we’re so far away, that we feel distant from God. We wonder, “Why can’t I connect? When did this suddenly become so hard?” and that’s exactly what we need to remember, because the enemy is subtle. He isn’t as conspicuous as the world leads us to believe.

Apart from prayer, we need to keep in mind that fasting is also a part of the Christian walk. It’s a sacrifice, and one thing I’ve learned from the Bible, is that God delights in our sacrifice (2 Chronicles 1:7). It isn’t higher on the scale, than obedience (1 Samuel 15:22), but still valued and rewarded. Fasting isn’t an act for God, He has nothing to gain by it. It’s for us, as children of God, to receive breakthroughs in our seemingly immovable circumstances. Matthew 17:21 says, “But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” (NASB)

Not every mountain in our lives can be moved by praying or pleading with God (without sacrifice). Sometimes, we must fast so that we can have the victory over circumstances that otherwise refuse to budge. As I mentioned, fasting is a sacrifice, both physically and spiritually. It is the act of not yielding or succumbing to the flesh either in hunger or distractions, thus strengthening our spirit man.

In the month of January, for as long as I can remember, the churches in every location I’ve lived (Trinidad, Canada and the UK), fast anywhere from 2 weeks to 120 days, to set the tone for the year. This year, my church called a 21-day fast (aka Daniel fast), and today was my very first day. During my fast, I choose not only to abstain from food, but also from social media and anything else I know will distract me from the main purpose or goal of the fast. The first few days of an extended fast are generally the most difficult for me, especially coming from the holidays, with the wide variety of deliciously cooked food. However, it must be done because the moment we begin to see it as something optional, we’ve lost sight of its value.

As expected, today was quite challenging for me. Abstaining from food wasn’t even the most difficult part. Dealing with patients all day, I meet a variety of people that can test my patience. At times, although contained in the spirit of politeness, I immediately get agitated or angry, which are both sinful (James 1:19), and during times of fasting, my spirit is particularly sensitive to any type of sin (even if they’re characterized as “small”…btw, no such thing!). It’s a continuous struggle throughout the day, keeping myself in check. Another thing to remember about fasting is that it must be accompanied by reading the Word and prayer, or else it simply cannot be considered a fast (just a hunger strike!). So, it’s not just about performing the act, but in order for it to be effective there must be other check marks in place.

In my workplace, it is difficult to find the right place to pray without anyone hearing. Personally, I’m not ashamed of the act of prayer and fasting itself, I’m just self-conscious of others listening to the words I’m saying. I see it as something private between God, and myself and I never feel comfortable when others are around (not to be mistaken with corporate prayer).

You see, I want to be as transparent as possible concerning the real struggles I face as a Christian, and that includes fasting. A lot of the time, I end up feeling like I didn’t do it right, but honestly, I get back up the next day and try it again. I know and I’m fully persuaded that God sees our efforts, and once our hearts are fixed on Him, He gives us the grace to keep trying until we succeed. So, here I am hoping that Day 2 is better than Day 1.

Be encouraged and have a blessed night folks!