Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

fundamentalist Christians have a new epithet for the rest of us (new to me, at least):

unchurched -- denotes one who does not have the same knowledge and acceptance of Jesus and the same good church-going and tithing practice that you do as a good church-going Christian -- barely-disguised equivalent for the classic epithet "unwashed"; denotes those godless heathens and infidels, in particular the despised secularists and the detested humanists and most especially the dreaded secular humanists, who deny Jesus and thus are doomed to god's damnation to hell for all eternity unless they shape up, forget everything else they ever thought they'd figured out or believed, and adopt your good Christian knowledge and join you as a regular in a good Christian church to often and openly share in your fervent hopes and prayers for e.g. the Second Coming and all the great stuff that you know will go with that (like the Rapture)

for the first time this evening, I saw this new epithet used, after a tense pause in what he was saying and with a scowl and a sneer he just could not supress, by a large and way-too-serious Texas gentleman in overalls who had not recently shaved, as he described to a local reporter (in the course of soliciting contributions for) the "outreach" effort that is planned by certain good church-going Christians to buy something like 6 million tickets to the new Gibson movie and to "give" those tickets to the "unchurched" so that the "unchurched" can be brought along by those "giving" the tickets to come see for themselves god's own truth in Gibson's movie, and thus be converted from their evil and sinful failure to acknowledge and accept the Christ and all the rest of god's own truth that said certain good Christians know so well

I have never in my life tried to tell a fundamentalist Christian what to believe or not to believe, nor to my knowledge have any of my friends who also are not fundamentalist Christians; it's an obvious and crucially important matter of respect for others in an explicitly secular political society unmatched (so far, anyway) in its protection of everyone's freedom of belief -- but many of these fundamentalist Christians won't leave the rest of us alone unless and until we all believe as they do (or at least are forced to live in accordance with those beliefs); re the respect point, they just don't get it, and/or they're just way too proud and self-righteous in the arrogance of their faith and accordingly just don't care, just don't think they owe any "unchurched" person that same sort of respect -- and it is no coincidence, indeed it is just another reflection off the same coin, that their in substance openly fascist theocratic political agenda is to destroy the constitutional separation of church and state, to write their religion into our law (including the Constitution; even now, dubya's expected to soon announce that he is calling for a constitutional amendment, which would of course be the first amendment ever to expressly authorize and dictate legal discrimination based on religious belief against certain Americans, to ban any gay marriage, including any civil union or any other such thing for gay couples that would confer on them any of the legal benefits enjoyed by married heterosexual couples), and to have their good Christian churches draw funding from the government (and thus from all of us) and begin to subsume what had been government functions (dubya's "Faith-Based Initiative"), with the ultimate goal of having their good Christian churches effectively coalesce with and take over -- in other words, hijack -- our government

and now, with demagogues like dubya and asscrack and company, with their own significantly coincident neocon agenda, pandering to these fundamentalist Christians for their own purposes and political gain, things will only get worse unless and until the rest of us wake us and put a stop to it by getting off our asses and voting

no excuses -- not this time . . .