Religious Hatred: The Westboro Baptist Church: Part Three

One tends to associate religious intolerance for other religions with bloodshed. The phrase ‘holy wars’ comes to the fore. However, the peace movement has come to religious hatred as well as in all other manner of protest movements. The most famous, or infamous, of the peaceful religious haters is probably the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). I’m sure many of the recipients of their hate would prefer the days of bloodshed so they could dish a bit something back in return.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

I also wonder if these idiots have a death or suicide wish. It’s not the best of ideas to Thank God for dead cops and soldiers when you reside in America’s heartland. The Ku-Klux-Klan isn’t exactly partial to the WBC either. And no doubt the Taliban wouldn’t mind showing the WBC some Islamic hospitality either. Friends come and friends go, but enemies accumulate. Accidents can happen when backs are turned.

The resident inmates of the WBC asylum apparently think God also hates those who mock Him. So I won’t mock Him, rather all the loonies who put their faith in the Holy Trinity equivalent of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, most notably God Himself. Those who I identify as loonies quite obviously include those wacko members at the WBC.

Now there’s a category of people and organizations well represented in say the “Guinness Book of Records” or “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not”. That category is those who have achieved their moment of fame and glory in the sunshine. Publicity seekers abound everywhere. There’s certainly a share of loony tunes – certified nut cases; there’s skilled daredevils and not so skilled risk takers. Many people like to do really crazy but relatively harmless things just for the hell of it and many do likewise as a means of raising money for various charities and other worthy causes. Thus they need all the PR they can get for their cause. But the bottom line is getting noticed, and you don’t get noticed if you’re part of the crowd. You’ve got to stand out from the crowd; dare to be different.  

But not all PR hounds are deliberately silly or daring or charitable. Shock-jocks shock to keep up their ratings. They also shock to keep up earning their multi-million dollar salaries, for example, a top shock-jock like Rush Limbaugh. Now Rush Limbaugh comes across as a total idiot; but total idiots don’t command huge listening audiences and vast, nearly obscene monetary rewards. So I strongly suspect that shock-jocks shock just because that’s part of their job description, not because they always actually believe the B.S. they spout off. But that’s their trade secret and they have to live with their often probably deliberate lies, hoping, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, the listening public can see through their charades.

America has more than her fair share of shock-jocks, including that especially one infamous name, Rush Limbaugh. Listeners tune in to see if their favorite shock-jock can outdo him or herself and top his or her previous outrageous rant with something even more outrageous. I’m sure they know this and deliberately stir the pot, though some like Limbaugh often cross the invisible line of what is and is not acceptable. 

The WBC is, IMHO, the religious equivalent of the radio shock-jock. In fact, my theory – I’m not alone here – Is that the WBC has bugger-all to do with religion and everything to do with keeping all of them the front-and-centre of attention. Your moment in the sun becomes a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade. This is getting publicity for the sake of publicity – lots of newspaper headlines and evening TV news coverage – and they don’t care who they psychologically hurt in the process. No amount of pleading will get the WBC to change their tactics, but they will call off their picket line hounds in exchange for extra free airtime. They have got attention-grabbing down to a fine art, and religious intolerance and extreme picketing and outrageous slogans are sure ways of getting attention. 

Their shock-jock tactics do have some rather chilling facets to them. First of these is their use of very young children who the WBC have carry their full-of-hate placards. The children are way too young to remotely comprehend the issues; they just parrot what the adults tell them too without such comprehension. Secondly, if you view their videos, you’ll notice, especially at the end, the narrator’s shit-eating-grin (SEG) expression - “You’re going to hell” (SEG); “Thank God for 9/11” (SEG), etc. The third chilling thing is that all of the numerous spokespersons come across as total believers in the nonsense they’re spouting off. Total sincerity or so it would seem. They have either been coached very well or totally brainwashed. You can just about imagine that bowl of tainted Kool-Aid in the WBC fridge waiting for the appropriate moment to ‘celebrate’ and go to their heavenly reward while everyone else has headed in the opposite direction.

In conclusion, the WBC membership is collectively just a bunch of PR hungry loonies who use religious themes (way out of context by the way) and outrageous tactics to attract attention and publicity as long as they stay ever so barely on the right side of the law while not caring who suffers emotional stress via their rants, raves, pickets, chants, songs, etc. Of course they deny that – it’s all about preaching “God’s hate” – but then again, such a theology is just bound to attract the sort of PR that they in fact, constantly get.

However, as my final wrap-up, there is some good news. Many WBC members, especially some high profile family members of the WBC leading lights, have decided to vote with their feet against the WBC and their version of God and pack it up and leave. Maybe there is a God after all! For details, see the BBC’s follow-up documentary “America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis” (2011).

The other good news trend is that the ungodly great unwashed, all those picketed and consigned to hell by the WBC, are fed up. Counter-pickets and wall-to-wall people blockades to prevent the WBC from strutting their picketing funerals stuff are becoming ever more frequent and so it is coming to pass that the members of the WBC are now tending to be outnumbered by ratios of dozens to one. When some of the counter demonstrators are hell-bent-for-leather motorcyclists, the sort that look as if they’d shoot first and ask questions later, it’s no wonder that it’s further coming to pass that the WBC frequently announces their picket but that’s equally followed by a no-show!   

By the by, if God is really on the side of WBC, you’d think He would have given them heavenly voices with which to sing their hatred songs. Let’s just say if you hear the WBC ‘choir’ sing their picket line songs, you’ll appreciate rap and hip-hop and even ethnic chanting (or is that wailing) in preference. WBC singers – don’t give up your day jobs! But, as an afterthought, perhaps instead WBC should picket with bagpipes a-blowing! That would show the world how much God hates ‘em!

While I’ve presented the above in a slightly less than a pure shock, horror manner, I’ve tried to keep things slightly light-hearted, there’s nothing light-hearted about the way the WBC have treated their victims. The WBC deserves no less than the severest condemnation that all feeling members of civilized society can muster against them. 

Religious Hatred: The Westboro Baptist Church: Part Two

One tends to associate religious intolerance for other religions with bloodshed. The phrase ‘holy wars’ comes to the fore. However, the peace movement has come to religious hatred as well as in all other manner of protest movements. The most famous, or infamous, of the peaceful religious haters is probably the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). I’m sure many of the recipients of their hate would prefer the days of bloodshed so they could dish a bit something back in return.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

To give you an idea of exactly what direction the WBC is coming from, here are some of their philosophies (in my own words) that appear to be central to the WBC worldview.

*Harking back to my introductory remarks, it would seem as if the WBC has set itself up as the authority on all that’s holy and godly. In fact, according to them, faith in any other religion is akin to devil worship. Tell that one to the pope; he could always use a good laugh given all the strife his organization is in. Of course it’s that very strife, sexual child abuse, that give the WBC the God-given right to state that the Catholic religion is a false religion, and by-God is the WBC position an example of anti-Catholicism.

*Whatever transpired in the Bible is the absolute literal truth. All events in the Bible panned out because God willed it so. So Noah’s riding the flood wave crests and Sodom & Gomorrah were literal disasters and practice sessions – God’s warm-ups to the coming of God’s Big Crunch against the modern world (presumably as outlined in the Book of Revelation).

*If the Bible says it’s a no-no, then it’s a no-no, and if the USA doesn’t endorse and enforce Biblical no-no’s then God’s going to boot and continue to boot America in the privates! Since America doesn’t endorse and enforce God’s Holy Word, well, anything and everything that’s nasty that befalls America is a sign God is pissed! God hates America! When America gets kicked in the privates, from the untimely death in combat of one soldier to the demise of hundreds in a hurricane – you know who is responsible!

*The Old Testament notwithstanding, God hates the Jews, because the Jews killed Jesus and the Jews support abortion and homosexuality (Biblical no-no’s), so in the opinion of the WBC, God sent the holocaust and thus the Jews got their just deserts.

*Homosexuality (“fags”) is sin number one. It’s the prime target of the WBC. God hates fags! If you’re gay, if you support the gay community, if you condone gay activities, God’s gonna get you! In fact, the entire gay community, all those who aren’t 100% heterosexual, should be put to death in accordance with Old Testament doctrine and practices.

*At least the WBC gets one brownie point since they do not support racism because the Bible doesn’t support racism. The Ku-Klux-Klan is not amused!

*President Obama is the antichrist. [He’s just one of hundreds so identified over the millennia so don’t put too much faith in that procrastination.]

*Any disaster, natural or otherwise (like 9/11), is a direct expression of God’s wrath, and that applies not just to America but anywhere and everywhere else in the world. When an earthquake hits China, or a tsunami hits Japan, or tornadoes rip across the U.S.A., it’s “Thank God” according to the WBC. Cop that you devil worshiping bastards! And that includes Islam. Mohammed gets the Big Finger from the WBC too. 

*There are no innocents. The child in the womb who died in the womb goes straight to hell too.

*You must “Thank God” for everything that happens, because everything that happens happens because God wills it to happen and anything God wills to happen must be for a good reason and thus God should be thanked for bringing you the benefits of His infinite goodness. That includes anything and everything that you may not personally think of as good. So if you’re seriously injured in a car crash, and your child is killed (and who is now in hell), you are to “Thank God” for that because God willed your injury and death and damnation of your child for a good reason (which is that God hates the both of you). Now aren’t you grateful?

*The WBC exists not to spread the word about God’s love, but about “God’s hate”.

*The WBC wants everyone (excepting themselves of course) to die horribly and burn in hell.

*Only the WBC – repeat, ONLY the WBC understands all of this; thus their warnings via those pickets and placards. In their hearts they know their messages will be unheeded, but that’s okay since that leaves them to become the be all and end all of God’s chosen few.

I had a quick check on an online Bible site to see if the Bible (King James Version) used the phrase anywhere that “God hates” – No. I guess the WBC likes putting words in God’s mouth!

I wonder in turn if the God of the Old Testament hates the WBC. He probably does since they’re not doing their full bit to contribute to the terrestrial quota of blood and guts that He likes spilled on His behalf. Actions speak louder than words, and when you come down to the nitty-gritty, the WBC are just spouting off words; lots of hot air. They huff and they puff and though they like dead cops and dead soldiers and dead fags, they won’t pull the trigger themselves. They don’t put their money where their mouths are. They should. It would give them real credibility and of course they could (and would) always claim that God made them do it. Still, the membership of the WBC gets to picket another day if they mind their peaceful ways. You can’t picket from a prison cell.

WBC logic screw-up number one: If in fact, as the WBC says, “God hates everybody” and “God hates America” then of necessity God hates all those members of the WBC since they collectively are part of “everyone” and they reside in America. So there! Though somehow I rather suspect they’d try to wiggle out of that logic somehow.

There’s another facet that shows up how screwy their logic is. Since all of these deaths by 1000 cuts (Katrina, 9/11, the war in Iraq, homicides, etc.) have been going on, and on, and on and on, it appears that God’s wrath is going to be exhibited as the nickel-and-dime-the-world approach to a long dragged out Armageddon. But for every 5 & 10 God’s wrath devours and deposits in hell, another 100 are born. Those births too must be “Thank God” events.  It’s self defeating. My reading is that if God were really that pissed, He wouldn’t toy with us via death by a thousand cuts – a cop here, a soldier there, a mass shooting the day after that with a now and again 9/11 type event thrown into the mix. God would just ring up the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and bring on the Book of Revelation scenario and just sort of nuke us and be done with it. WBC is a few nickels-and-dimes short of a dollar!

Yet another flaw in the WBC version of what passes for logic is their “Thank God for Dead…” The dead of course are those prematurely deceased human beings who are now in hell. But equally the WBC should “Thank God” for their births since of course by their logic God must have been the driving force behind their conceptions in the first bloody place. So that “Thank God for Dead…” makes no Godly sense whatsoever, unless it’s God’s plan to have people born only to be prematurely killed just to thus satisfy the theology of the WBC and give them a reason to picket and keep on preaching their hate. No, something screwy somewhere, like the mindset of the WBC, since when it comes to God and the WBC, logic is damned.  

This entire “Thank God for…” slogan can easily bite the WBC on the ass. Most of the leading lights at the WBC are well educated university graduates. You’d think that maybe they would hold up a sign that says “Thank God for education and academics” and protest that there should be more funding for education and teachers, etc. That would be constructive, but that’s not the way of the WBC – to be constructive that is.

By WBC logic, if you Thank God for dead cops and soldiers, because that’s God’s way, then you must also Thank God for live cops and live soldiers since they presumably are alive because that too is God’s will. Of course you won’t get the WBC to admit to that. If you Thank God for a tornado that kills, you need to Thank God for the rain that grows the crops that feeds all those that God’s wrath hasn’t yet consigned to a place where rain doesn’t fall. If you Thank God for anything that kills the human species, you have to Thank God for all that which doesn’t kill. But there’s no WBC placards that reads Thank God for flowers or baseball or Vietnam Veterans or holidays in Australia. Sorry WBC, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  

To be continued…

Religious Hatred: The Westboro Baptist Church: Part One

One tends to associate religious intolerance for other religions with bloodshed. The phrase ‘holy wars’ comes to the fore. However, the peace movement has come to religious hatred as well as in all other manner of protest movements. The most famous, or infamous, of the peaceful religious haters is probably the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). I’m sure many of the recipients of their hate would prefer the days of bloodshed so they could dish a bit something back in return.

All monotheistic religions – and there are many of them – all have as a core value that theirs is the one true religion that represents the one true God and that all other monotheistic religions are false religions and represent a false version of God. That alone immediately leads me to the conclusion that they all are just full of B.S. and that there is no such animal as the one true religion and the one true God. But that’s not my overriding theme here.

Rivalry  between various monotheistic faiths have of course given rise to much inter-religious hatred and stemming from that, much violence and bloodshed. Methinks the God of the Old Testament, a serious fan of blood and gore, would be Lord Almighty pleased!

Anyway, religious hatred come violence has spanned the range from all out warfare, to terrorism, to more localized conflicts. Across the generations, so it has been and so it is now and no doubt so it will be way into the future (if humans don’t breed themselves out of existence first). A definitive list of monotheistic religious conflicts is way too extensive to give here, but Northern Ireland, the Crusades; and 9/11 all come to the mind as examples.   

At least when the holy bombs explode and the holy bullets fly and the holy swords slash away, you know what you’re up against and can strike back accordingly or as best you can.

But there’s religious hatred and violence, and then there’s religious HATRED that replaces physical violence with psychological warfare. No holy bombs, bullets or swords. Violence is replaced with the picket line, the placards, the chants, the songs. This now becomes the new (and improved?) non-violent version of bombs, bullets and swords. But make no doubt, the religious hatred, or in some cases, to make it clear, the HATRED, remains – in spades. To the best of my knowledge organized religious hatred of the peaceful kind is uniquely American. I’d like to say only in America, but I’d probably be corrected quick-smart. Still, God’s own country is awash in religious hatred without a bomb, bullet or sword anywhere in sight.

And so you can express your religious hatreds and carry out those messages and shed not one drop of actual blood and thus stay inside the law since the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech as long as such speech causes no actual or potential physical harm to others. For example there's no incitement to cause a panic, or to induce a riot or stir up the masses and cause a lynching. Still, what it lacks in doing physical damage is more than made up for in psychological trauma that these picketers direct their “God hates” placards against.  

Now what do civilized people, Americans or otherwise, make of religious picketers that carry placards that have as a central message “God hates…” and variations on the theme. Here are some actual examples of messages written on picket placards: it’s a representative, but hardly exhaustive list:

“America is Doomed; Fag Flag [the Stars & Stripes]; Fag Lover Obama; Fag Soldier in Hell; Fag Troops; Fags Are Beasts; Fags Are Violent; Fags Are Worthy of Death; Fags Die, God Laughs; Fags Doom Nations; Fear God; God Blew Up the Troops; God Hates America; God Hates Divorce; God Hates Fags; God Hates India; God Hates Jews; God Hates Obama; God Hates You; God Is Angry Everyday; God Is Your Enemy; God Killed Your Cops; God Killed Your Sons; God Sent the Shooter [various lone gunman massacres] ; God: USA’s Terrorist; Pray for More Dead Soldiers; Prepare to Meet Thy God; Remember Lot’s Wife; Thank God for 9/11; Thank God for AIDS; Thank God for Dead Cops; Thank God for Dead Soldiers; Thank God for [Hurricane] Katrina; Thank God for IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]; The Siege Is Coming; The World is Doomed; USA = Fag Nation; Your Sons Are In Hell; You’re Going to Hell”.

Then there’s a picket chant: “1, 2, 3, 4, God Hates the Marine Corps”.

And their song title: “God Hates the World”.

Pretty disgusting wouldn’t you say? Well, all those and more are brought to you, if not in person, then via your TV or Internet screen, courtesy of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), with a home base in Topeka, Kansas, which must be insulting to real Baptists since the WBC has no actual affiliation with any official Baptist organization. They’re a rouge organization, and for all practical purposes, an extended family organization. Well the BBC in a documentary on the WBC called them “The Most Hated Family in America” (2007).

Ah, but what does the WBC picket and why? Well their usual target is funerals and the higher the celebrity profiles of the funeral (victim or attendees) the better. But the funeral has got to have some sort of connection with, in their twisted logic, sins against God. So as long as the funeral has something to which, in their convoluted form of ‘sins against God’ religious logic, they can claim that “God hates” that something back in return. If “God hates” that something, and since the WBC stands shoulder-to-shoulder with God, then the WBC hates that something too and by God are they going to let the world know it!

Funerals are of course especially emotionally-charged occasions; military (killed in action) funerals all the more-so, which of course ramps up the impact the WBC will have, so military (killed in action) funerals are just about Target Number One.

The WBC also pickets other churches, since those churches, obviously, advocates a false religion or theology or god and thus are evil in the sight of the WBC God; and thus the call to arms and person the picket line. As long as something has a connection to something the WBC perceives that their God is against; then the WBC stands ready to picket! Apparently God can’t defend Himself adequately enough against false religions and needs additional moral support!

I spotted in one of their numerous extremist videos the statement that if you took on the WBC, any challenge to them at all, well God would get you for that since a slap in the face to the WBC was a slap in the face to God Almighty. Okay, I’ll take up and swallow their bait. I’m not afraid of their (non-existent) Big Bad God.

To be continued…