A Micro-example of Why Christianity is Failing...

[kimberlysteele]

I recently shared a story of being naked-face shamed in my own private, hidden Facebook group, Speakeasy Illinois. The group's mission is to promote mask-choice establishments. Here was my original post, which included a link to the Druid Sphere of Protection video I made and have coincidentally linked elsewhere the most recent Open Post:

Me: Thursday night I went into Butera Market in Naperville on Chicago Avenue and Olesen. Of course I did not wear the face diaper. There were signs splashed all over the entrance and the windows (it's a large grocery store). HELP WANTED ALL POSITIONS, START AT $15.00 PER HOUR. I went in around 6:15pm. There were all of five other shoppers in the huge store. I had to circle back to get some fresh spinach in Produce and in the bread/deli area, a tall old man stared daggers at me. I could feel him wishing death upon me, so I gave him a big, warm smile, got my spinach, and went around by the registers so I didn't have to encounter him twice. I do a daily banishing ritual so whatever he tried to put on me ended up right in his lap, seriously the dumbest thing he could possibly do is wish harm on someone who does the SoP, it turns all of that crap right into a mirror aimed back at him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsD3LkfgFVs

I then checked out with all of $13 worth of items. The vibe in there was terrible.
The checkout kid, another male, was cold and unfriendly and could not look me in the eye even though I was very pleasant to him. That Butera was never incredibly successful but it's really got the kiss of death on it these days. When I was there a couple of weeks ago, they had posters up about doing a quacksine clinic at the store or some gross nonsense. These idiots are hemorrhaging customers because they're so nasty to the unmasked. They won't find any decent employees because almost nobody is dumb enough to play Russian Roulette for $15 an hour.

Little did I know this would trigger two different Christians, who got all bent out of shape about me posting about a magical ritual.

FB Christian: With all do respect, if we could please keep these based on face friendly or not businesses and not include divination or spells. I very strongly encourage bodily freedom and autonomy, but have convictions against ritualistic practices as mentioned in Deuteronomy 18:10-14. Maybe just suggesting very politely refraining from religious content here.

Someone pointed out the irony of her getting butthurt about religious content while quoting Deuteronomy.

FB Christian: I'm sorry you feel that way, but that was precisely why I included that-I'm not going use this platform to support my religious beliefs, and likewise I feel it should respectively remain neutral in that aspect. My inclusion of biblical scripture is the same as the inclusion of a link above to practice ritualistic spells. NEITHER belong in a group about rights to breathe freely. You may see it as hypocrisy, and I intended it as a comparison reference. We can agree to disagree and I will continue to be polite.

For that, she got called out.

Person No. 2: lol. I’m sorry you feel that way is a hysterical comment. It’s considered a faux-pology. Like when you did something wrong but somehow make it the other persons problem. Google it.

Of course I chimed in, it being my group and all.

Me: FB Christian No. 1, please show yourself the door if the content I decide to approve makes you uncomfortable. I am the creator of this group and it is the equivalent of my online living room. If you don't like it or think it is "evil", then the best way you can deal with that is by ignoring it and going away.

A second FB Christian decided to have a go by attempting to exclude me from the conversation (a common FB technique) by tagging someone else and ostensibly "chatting" with her on the thread. You can always tell they're furious by their atrocious grammar and punctuation.

Facebook Christian No. 2: I, too, feel that it’s a bit out of place. Thanks for being polite about it.

To this I responded:

Me: I will make that decision as the creator of this group. If it makes you uncomfortable, please show yourself the door.

This of course made some drama with FB Christian number 2, because... well, Facebook.

WOW……I’ll do that. You probably shouldn’t be involved in this sort of thing if you’re so ultra sensitive……BUH BYE

Some projection of the shadow on her part, no?

This is why I detest Facebook. The entitlement! I suppose JMG has to deal with this sort of crap all the time. Also, this is a REALLY BAD LOOK for any Christians out there and it is exactly why Christianity is becoming more unpopular by the minute. What would Jesus do? He certainly wouldn't be insecure about a video where some goofy Druid lady with giant hair sings other god's names.  If your religion is so unappealing that you attempt to invoke a higher authority in order to force people to believe the same way you do, you're probably doing it wrong!

Comments

big SIGH

[randomactsofkarmasc]

Organizing a group so people can support businesses who don't require masks is laudable. Doing it on FB is impressive; I don't remember the last time I logged in. You are doing a good thing. :-)

nil illegitimi carborundum

[(Anonymous)]

Unfortunately it appears that the right have decided that if the Left is going to get to be dictators then they should get to also. There's been quite a lot of anti-freedom promotion among the tradcon right, and they are determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Insecurity

[(Anonymous)]

I think it probably says more about their own personal faith. To use an analogy, people with healthy self-esteem generally aren't the ones who fly off the handle at the slightest insult.

(Also, happy new year to everyone!)

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Kimberly,

Yes, I can imagine that JMG gets scads of this sort of thing. Moderating a group must be, at least at times, intensely exasperating.

Someone who complains about religious content while pointing to Deuteronomy-- that's hilarious!

Thank you for what you do, here with the blog, and for refusing to wear the mask.

Monochrome Erudite Pooka

[causticus]

Translating passive-aggressive attacks into clear statements can be quite fun:

"Please don't bring religious content into [your own] group unless it's MY kind of religious content! Hrrrumph!"

I imagine if you pointed out the SOP can be performed with Christian invocations, it would have fallen on deaf ears. And secondly, that SOP itself isn't religion (though it can overlap with religion).

On Christianity being deader than a doornail:

Of course we see low-information Christians employing the usual out-of-context, very selective quotations from the Hebrew bible. It easily begs the question, "Where exactly did Jesus say to follow the old Mosaic laws to the letter? BTW, do you eat ham or shrimp by any chance?" When Constantine force-consolidated the various competing churches into one big (unhappy) state frankenchurch, his church bureaucrats used the flimsiest of duct tape to attach the OT to the NT and this has haunted mainstream Christianity ever since, especially regarding their schizophrenic love-hate relationship with Jews and Judaism.

Now just imagine how much better the world would be today if more Christians followed the type of Christianity that brave souls like Dion Fortune and Rudolf Steiner practiced, and not the nonsensical, crypto-materialist garbage (and now almost totally secularized) Christianity of the current year. America needs a new religion! Jesus said that putting new wine into and old wineskin is futile.

Finally, it's inevitable that a group like the one you host is going to attract a lot of Christians, both nominal and serious.

Keep fighting the good fight!

[illyria2001]

The SoP can be used by people of any religion, and people of no religion, and is very easy to personalize once you have the basic structure down -- it's too bad these people couldn't see that.

Your group, your rules...which means you get to decide what's ok to post, not anybody else.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the whole idea of it being acceptable to ask other people to censor themselves so you can feel comfortable needs to go. In whatever new society we build out of this wreckage I want to see whining about being butthurt being viewed as socially unacceptable and worthy of shaming and ostracism. I envision a society where people are so strong and confident in their beliefs that it wouldn't make sense for them to want to shield themselves from other people's opinions, thoughts, beliefs, etc.

[methylethyl]

On the larger assertion, though... what's happening to Christianity (in the US at least) is fascinating to watch (particularly from inside), but I don't think failure is the right word for it.

I think it's consolidating.

On paper, the numbers are horrible-- congregations are shrinking, denominations are shrinking, and every year it's a lower percentage of the population willing to state on surveys: "Yes, I'm a Christian".

You still have a lot of people who grew up in the evangelical milieu-- poorly catechized, poorly mentored, clinging to Christianity as a set of ingroup social signals-- where actions like what you see in your FB group (i.e. play-sparring with someone from the outgroup) earn them social status points. I think they experience religion largely as a set of aesthetic preferences and verbal cues. But the ingroup they belong to is being steadily eaten away by modernity, and the spiritual disciplines and grounding that would allow them to hold out in the face of real social censure are... lacking. They're in an unenviable spot, and I hope they find Jesus for real someday... though I suspect it'll require wandering in the wilderness a bit, to reset their base religious assumptions. You'll notice their censure comes with the underlying assumption that they are a cultural majority and they get to police cultural minorities. That's no longer true, and it's going to be devastating when they realize it-- the normal response to that is to squelch the beliefs you grew up with, pay lip-service to the new beliefs you need to get on with your fellow baseball moms or coworkers or officers' wives, and eventually, you can't remember why you ever believed what you believed. I've watched it happen, and find the process so... depressingly predictable. I feel bad for these people, even when they are behaving badly. IMO in another ten years, at the current cultural trajectory, most or all of them will be functionally atheists.

In the meantime, more broadly, people are quietly un-checking the "Christian" box, and melting into the broader God-is-irrelevant-to-my-day-to-day-life US culture, most churches are in a slow, or not-so-slow demographic collapse.

But there are a lot of individual churches (not whole denominations, and not any particular denomination), where the trend is going the other way: and they are universally churches that instead of getting with the times, are doubling down on their traditional beliefs and practices. So as fewer and fewer people can find the time or energy or inclination to go to church, the people who *do* go, in spite of it not being a social +5 anymore, in spite of it interfering with their work availability, in spite of the hassle of getting up early, etc.--- that's the dedicated core. The penitents. The people who, all along, were there to seek God. And the churches they go to are not only growing, they're *luminous* in a way I have not experienced before. We're being pared down to the most dedicated, most engaged, most devout, most sincere people --folks who have enough of a spine to resist social pressure, drawn in like little lost iron filings to a magnet, after their mainline churches disintegrated. There's still a sizable contingent of people who are there out of habit, or to keep their elderly parents happy so they don't get written out of the will, but it's smaller than it used to be.

Churches are failing. Whole denominations are failing. But Christians are being... concentrated. And it's beautiful to see. The churches I went to as a kid were 99% about maintaining a white middle-class social milieu. Most churches I've been to since... it's almost like a sliding scale through time, from mostly-social, to an even split, now tipping into mostly-sincere. And the thing is, while I'd like to claim it's because I've moved from less-sincere to more-sincere churches deliberately because I'm-so-great (haha), what I hear from people who still go to churches I used to be a part of suggests that it's happening across the board.

I won't cheer for the insincere people being gone. It's deeply sad to see how easy it was for people to grow up in the church and completely miss the point of it. But I see the current movement as... a larger pattern, over which we have no control, like the trajectory of history. We look on with wonder, but only God can steer it. To what purpose? Perhaps we will live long enough to find out.

[(Anonymous)]

Not fully on topic but the most recent post. This is a tour de force by James Howard Kunstler BUT be forewarned, there is some swearing within the text and even in the URL (Kimberly feel free to nix this post if you deem it necessary, but I can't edit the web address).

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/forecast-2022-dumpster-fire-blazing-on-the-frontier-of-a-dark-age/

Kunstler pulls so much of what is talked about here and on Ecosophia into one piece and offers a very dire forecast of the Great Reckoning hitting us hard, probably starting this year.

On a somewhat related note, enigmatic John Paul has recently posted that he believes the covid narrative will fall completely apart soon but that the ELITES will pivot to "climate change" as the next great threat that will permit their agenda to be further pursued. In any event, we need to buckle up for what looks like a rough ride in 2022 and beyond.


Maxxy

[(Anonymous)]

Just started this but it's supposed to be a very good discussion on the mass formation psychosis phenomenon featuring the Belgian professor, Malone and McCUllough.

https://rumble.com/vrxr3n-tpc-653-dr.-mattias-desmet-dr.-robert-malone-dr.-peter-mccullough-mass-form.html

Maxxy

Something wicked this way came

[denebalgedi777]

I've noticed a very spiritually oppressive climate in America since about 2013 or so, something really shifted in the astral world then and seeped down into the material. Whatever it is, it's really ugly, and being a psychically sensitive type I noticed it very viscerally. One of the things that was unmistakable was the anger and hatred that was palpable everywhere. So what I'm saying is, this is not new, though it has gotten worse.

I went to a drugstore before New Year's and there was a similar vibe of sullenness, anger, hostility, suspicion, mistrust, fear and dejection. It made my skin crawl. Everyone was tense, on edge, looking just completely joyless. This is what a society that is headed for history's ash heap looks like.

As a Sagittarius, I will keep it optimistic by saying that I do think something better will be born after this madness leaves -- for comparison you might look at Russia now, versus the Russia at the end of the Soviet Union. Note that the improvements such as they were have been only incremental, but it's not the utter misery of the 1990s for them at least. It won't be pleasant in the in-between times.

[open_space]

An entitled Christian is an oxymoron I know that doesn't make sense in todays Christianity nor on the last centuries Christianity but there is a reason why service was a requirement for Christian monks and nuns! Fake Christians in the contrary...