Maybe there are beautiful Christian communities that are doing good things somewhere, but I seriously have my doubts, given the values that "conservative" church-goers actually have and teach their children (as opposed to the ones they claim to).
Do you know what Christian values, as taught by the definitely not "good" book, really are? Here, let Richard Dawkins tell you a few of them:
"... jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
— The God Delusion; Chapter 2
That's not even including dishonesty and incest, of which the "inerrant word of Yahweh/Yehowah" has plenty of stories. (I'm tempted to say that at least the bible has no problem with polyamory, but it reserves that only for men. Any woman who isn't submissive and faithful to her husband, whom considers her his property, is clearly considered a slut/whore in a pejorative sense, so that one's firmly in the "misogyny"category.) Plus, Dan Barker (former evangelical minister/priest turned atheist through actually reading the scriptures) claims Dawkins was remiss in his assessment. In God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, he adds the following:
- Angry
- Merciless
- Curse-Hurling
- Vaccicidal
- Abortical
- Cannibalistic
- Slavemonger
I confess that I had to look up "Vaccicidal". It means "Someone who kills cows", presumably in large numbers and for fun. Wait, WTF? Maybe that explains America's obsession with Big Macs.
If I see another Christian refer to the LGBTQ+ community as "a sickness" or "moral degeneracy" that "needs to be purged through the power of religion" so that "we can make America great again" (or some equally horrific prejudiced nonsense), there's no telling what I'll do (other than write mini-rants on the Web, that is). What fucking hypocrites, to believe such an awfully horrendous piece of trash, yet the LGBTQ+ community is the problem? Give me a break, man (because it's most often cishet men who're protesting); you've got to be shitting me!
Those folks disgust me at a core level. If you wonder why, then I suggest you read the Christian bible in its entirety (and not just cherry-pick the bits you like). Steven Wells' Skeptic's Annotated Bible might be a good one for the purpose, although I'm sure Assimov's commentary will do just as well. For good measure, the aforementioned books by Dawkins and Barker are recommended, as is Christopher Hitchens' God isn't Great. Hell, I might go so far as to suggest reading Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible (but the thing that puts me off about that is the treatment of magic as something real; everything else that I have read, which isn't everything, makes a lot more sense than Abrahamic religion).
Thumbnail image: Pentagram, one of the Pagan symbols used by the Church of Satan
