Showing posts with label bring the hate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bring the hate. Show all posts

Bring The Hate!

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My earliest memories out at grandma and grandpa’s ranch are quite pleasant. With miles and miles of country around us, and long, lazy summer breaks, enabling us to spend weeks with two elderly loved ones who were intent on spoiling us through-and-through, all was good. Dad’s dad (or “Gran,” as we called him) was quite a character. You could spot him a clear mile away, wearing that same pen-striped blue-and-white factory work shirt and those dark-blue uniform pants with an always-oversized cowboy hat atop his head on that anorexically skinny body. He had about 15 pairs of the same uniform hanging in his closet, and I never saw him wear anything else a single day in his life. But hey, grandparents need not be stylish! That ought to be a written law somewhere!

Gran had an incredible level of charisma. He could be charming with an amazing sense of humor. We always thought he’d have been great as a stand-up comic. Gran was “the life of the party,” as they say, and a fundamentally good man. But good a man as he was, he had a problem—he loved his booze! Daily, he sat out on the front porch, on that same rusty, white lawn chair with the paint still chipping off it and became inebriated. This would bring out the demons from his painful past.

He would wake up in the morning and his words would be so clear, so well spoken. But as the day would progress, he would lose himself in his great escape of Schlitz beer. Then the demons would take control: “Them damn Japs. They need to be strangled with a god-damn guitar string, all of them!” Gran was in the Navy during World War II and was on one of the ships hit by the Japanese while escorting the USS Hornet. He couldn’t talk about it while sober, but in varying levels of buzz-ed-ness, he let out that he had seen his friends blown to bits. Those images stayed with him forever. His injured, severely hunched-over back, still containing bits of exploded boilers and random shards of metal from the ship, was a testament to the hell he had lived through. He survived over a day out in shark-infested waters until he was rescued. The guilt he felt for being a survivor was crushing. He had quite a few stories to tell.

And we kids never quit hearing those colorfully endowed, flaming stories over and over again! So after carrying on a great while about how worthy the Japanese were of being strangled, stabbed, and machine-gunned to death, he would go to one of those dusty shelves just above his garage icebox and show us the same picture he had shown us a thousand times before. The picture was of a dead Japanese soldier lying facedown next to a creek. “The only good Jap is a dead Jap!” he would declare. Then, he would continue the tirade with enough loudly yelled curse words to send an eleven-year-old me and my younger brother and cousins into fits of rolling laughter and incited thoughts of bloody vengeance against “our great enemies,” the Japanese.

Grandma would sometimes have to come out on the porch and settle him down because he would get so worked up and belligerent that he would lose himself and lash out at us. It only happened a few times, but we dared not defend the Japanese or say that the war was over (believe me, I learned the hard way!) In times like these, grandma would have to send us away to play while she quieted him: “Ssssssssshhhh! They’re just little kids! You ain’t supposed to cuss too much around little kids. Don’t yell at them! You are gonna ruin them.” Neither grandma nor grandpa was educated, and both grew up fighting extreme poverty. They didn’t have the opportunities we had, and yet they lived through hard times and survived to keep the line going.

Today, Gran is no longer around—hasn’t been for over a decade. I was close to him, and the things brought to light thus far were said to make a point, and not to cast aspersions on my grandfather or put stink on his memory. It pains me to share some of these things, but there is good and bad in all of us, and important lessons should be learned from the good and the bad in the legacies we leave behind. I’m sure a sober Gran would agree.

So let us suppose, of all the things I could glean and carry on of my grandfather’s ways, that I chose to embrace the bitter hatred he had for the Japanese. Suppose I were to carry on the anger and resentment generated from malicious memories of the past. Would that be right? Certainly that would be a big mistake. But what if my culture’s beloved holy book told me to hold people accountable for the sins of their fathers, because of wrongdoings of bygone times? Would that be right?

One of the most head-shaking evils of the Bible is that it is a book that has for so long taught and encouraged hatred and malice. Its yellowed pages have encouraged centuries of violence. And while the Old Testament is much more openly vile and less evolved than the New Testament, both sets of oracles have reddened the ground of every country in the world. The Bible teaches that God hates sinners unto the third and fourth generations…

“…for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;” (Exodus 20:5)

When I read these words, I can’t help but wonder how many have been stoned, stabbed, or burned alive for age-old wrongs that one’s ancestors were only guilty of. How many innocent voices have hollered out for mercy, squealing to be delivered from slaughter because of a father’s crimes? How many times have the words “no” and “please” been used in the same exclamatory sentences as one pleads for his or her life to be spared? It is chilling to think about.

And it is important to remember that the God of the Old Testament never made distinctions between “the consequences of sin” verses “the guilt of sin” like modern apologists do in trying to justify biblical massacres. The eternal hate and livid rage that flowed out from the thrown of the gods was unearthly in its intensity. The rage that the gods felt when sinned against could last anywhere from a single light punishment of one person (Genesis 49:4) all the way to eternal torture of a soul (Luke 16:19-31). So as it wasn’t to many of the other gods, generational guilt was no big thing to the God of the Bible either…

“the LORD hath sworn that the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” (Exodus 17:16)

“17. Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; 18. How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. 19. Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.” (Deuteronomy 24:17-19)

It is manifestly unjust – in principle and in practice – to hold someone accountable for the crimes committed by another. But the gods don’t think so (at least, not very often). If you were an Amalekite, there was no such thing as mercy from God for you. In similar fashion, the paganized Christian concept of vicarious atonement in the form of a savior dying for our sins is as unjust as is generational hatred. It is only horse sense that the word “justice” cannot apply to an innocent party bearing the guilt and punishment of a guilty party. And in at least one place, even the Bible says so…

“The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” (Ezekiel 18:20)

We are each responsible for our own wrongs committed—so much for the idea of a savior dying for my sins! We have here one of the few just and right moral principles in the Bible, but we cannot praise this precept because it is common sense and only creates a hopeless contradiction between the other verses mentioned.

The entire idea of original sin is also an injustice of universal proportion. I cannot be “born sinful,” bearing the guilt of Adam and Eve’s transgressions, and yet so many Christians have no problem assigning us our portion in the lake of fire because of this very crooked-but-accepted line of thinking. All Christians who accept this doctrine should be checked for sanity, or else admit from the outset that they are patently irrational and led by a lord-loving lunacy. But even those who reject the doctrine of depravity are themselves unable to justify barbaric Yahweh’s condemnation and slaughter of Amalek and all other Bible atrocities.

The all-too-human tendency of mankind to hate his fellow man over petty differences is the central danger, but religion is still a detriment. Hatred is the invading germ and religion is the host to carry it unchecked into the mind of the human being. It is the bringing over of bitterness from the past that causes so much bloodshed, and religion is often the vessel for how this hatred is justified and brought in. No one ever hated his fellow man so much as when God told him to. Nothing is more historically vindicated than this fact: those who love God most are out to love men least!

And just as with dear old Gran, I can forgive Christians for past wrongs and overlook the negative things that their belief systems have caused and instead judge them to be good people in spite of the shortcomings of their faith. But this only shows us that the ability to love and forgive, and the ability to refrain from judging a man because of what his ancestors did, is an evolved trait, a thing found in morally superior people and societies, and not biblically observant ones. Worshippers of the gods have always made up the status quo, and their members hold the chief percentage of rioters and lawbreakers of every type. A crimson earth is a territorial mark of the devoutly religious. Look long enough and you’ll find the blood; it is sung about in their hymns, talked about in their preaching, consumed in their communion services, and spilt onto the ground in preservation of their dogmas.

If ever we are to evolve as a society and become better, less hateful, less judgmental people, we must continue to grow away from our vile religious heritages. There have been improvements in religion as there have been in secular thinking. So yes, mankind is getting better (however slowly). But if both the secular and religious worlds are becoming kinder and more civilized and learning not to retain the barbaric and hatemongering ways of tribal war gods like Yahweh, then that means that the gods have had nothing to do with our improved senses of compassion and accountability—not one iota! We should look to ourselves for change and for the betterment of mankind, not to the gods.

(JH)