Saturday, July 30, 2011

God Is Love, Right?

The Old Testament god of the bible was liable
To torture and kill you, as if at His whim;
His ardent believers were therefore a scare for
The heathens who dared have doubts about Him

The New Testament hoped to appease us with Jesus
Whose death on the cross was the end to our fear;
Now Christians are always, while living, forgiving
Unless we say something they don’t want to hear


Yesterday's "Headline Muse" referred to the American Atheists' WTC cross case. It's a story worth keeping an eye on, for those of us who love reading commentary. As is often the case, the worst of the comments are censored before we can read them... but this time, some have been archived, and serve as testimony to Christian Love. (The ones that remain range from supportive to vile, but fall short of death threats.)

Now, I've received death threats--against me, and against my family. But these have been from a solitary, troubled individual. He needs psychiatric help, and he knows it; the more he threatens, the more obvious his illness is. These WTC threats appear to be quite different. These are normal people*, perhaps buoyed by internet anonymity, perhaps assuming they are in the company of like-minded individuals. This is far more frightening than a pitiable, pathetic spammer.

Oh, but clearly this is an extreme minority position; the vast majority of Christians would be horrified by such comments. If you find some examples of religious leaders decrying these comments, be sure to let me know.

* as an aside, I wonder whether the names attached to the comments are their real names. Google+ appears to be on a bit of a crusade against pseudonyms--if these are real names, then certainly horrible language does not depend on anonymity; on the other hand, if these are not real names, then the crime of pseudonymous writers is simply that they chose a name that wasn't normal enough for Google.

5 comments:

Linda Grilli Calhoun said...

I have two messages for the anonymous death threat people.

First message: That behavior is not exactly proving us wrong, now, is it?

Second message: If your beliefs are so swell and wonderful that you think you have the right to threaten people's lives to force compliance, why be anonymous? Why not show the pride in your beliefs and the courage of your convictions and own your threats?

Cuttlefish said...

Actually, Linda, the threats at the link do have names attached to them. They may very well be their real names; we can't know at present.

Frankly, I'm even more frightened if they thought their opinion was popular enough to take ownership of. Especially if they are right.

Linda Grilli Calhoun said...

Not me. I'd rather have those hypocrites have to declare themselves publicly. L

latsot said...

I've had a few death threats from religious types over the years. Some have been from you know who but others from people I'd expect to know better. For example a Rabbi (so he said) once sent me several very detailed emails about my impending death at his hands because I refused to agree with him that my taking time off work at Christmas meant I believe in god. I think this was 2008 and I'm inexplicably still alive, so perhaps he was just letting off steam.

It's impossible to predict what will set these nutjobs off. If this man was really a rabbi - and my research at the time suggested he was - there are going to be some traumatised people in his congregation.

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