What 's God Got to Do With It ?

I stand in horrified awe, sometimes, of species Homo Sapiens' immense capacity for steeping their souls in hypocrisy... all the while considering themselves monumentally righteous for doing so. For me, one of the most 'poisonous fruits of the resulting tree' is embodied in the phrase, "Love the sinner but hate the sin". I've come to loathe that expression, most often uttered with arrogant impunity by so-called 'Christians' no more truly in touch with what it means to be a Christian than Adolph Hitler was with his feminine side.

In the vast majority of instances, the "sins" to which these allegedly 'pious Christians' are referring amount to such things as homosexuality, interracial relationships and offspring, and philosophical, spiritual, and/or religious beliefs they deem to be a departure from the 'one true faith'. These 'Christians' emphatically assert that the Bible supports their 'take' on what is a 'sin' in the eyes of God, turning a perpetually stone-deaf ear to any interpretation of the Good Book that differs from their own. Good LORD, people! At one point, the Bible banishes women from religious services/ceremonies, declaring them to be "impure" and "unclean" whenever they are menstruating!

If you place a dozen human beings in a circle and whisper a simple sentence into the ear of the person beside you, by the time it reaches the twelfth person, it will hardly be recognizable! Having been translated and passed from generation to generation for thousands of years - who is to say what God originally said and/or meant after King James and so many others of his ilk have put their personal "spin" on innumerable translations and "versions" of the Bible? Who among us possesses the absolute right to declare that the King James Version of the Bible, for example, trumps the Catholic faith's Bible, the latter of which includes six more Chapters than the former? Or that the Catholic Bible trumps the Koran? Or that the Koran trumps the Tanakh as the 'be all, end all' written word of the Almighty? Is it not the epitome of arrogance for any mortal human being - particularly those purporting to be 'good Christians' - to dare consider themselves worthy of condemning as 'sins' actions and attributes having nothing whatsoever to do with the Ten Commandments?

White Supremacists who hide in hooded KKK garb, burn crosses, and thump upon their Bibles while declaring Blacks, Jews, biracial people, and gays to be "impure", "sinful", and/or "evil" are frighteningly repugnant, indeed - but, like Archie Bunker, their ignorance, hatred, and toxic arrogance is an 'in your face' disease process hidden in plain sight. Such malignancy,openly festering and reveling as it does in its own stench of decay, is relatively easy to excise and eradicate from humanity's midst. But the egotism, pervasive judgmentalism, and self-aggrandizement embodied in the kind of thinking that leads to such arrogantly asserted quips as "Love the sinner but not the sin", like the 'friend' who smiles in your face and leaves a knife embedded in your back, are another matter entirely... and therefore terrifying beyond measure. They are the cleverly disguised, insidious minions of the Beasts of hatred, prejudice, narcissism, and arrogance that, cloaked in the false pretense of 'righteousness', leave naught but pain, injury, and spiritual devastation in their wake.

Looking upon their victims and contemplating the destruction they've wrought in countless lives, I have a phrase of my own for such 'good Christians' to consider...

Jesus weeps.