Friday, March 18, 2011

Sally gets Stoned (But not really) (And not in the fun way)

Ye gods how I despise the modern breed of faux martyred Christian!  The last time I blogged about Persecution Envy among modern Western Christians I was still able to be mostly amused if rather exasperated by the phenomenon.  But between then and now I find that I have been worn down by countless instances of Christians striking a persecuted pose over the most inane bullshit, causing me to lose my sense of humour about this phenomenon entirely.

Enter the latest great martyr of the Christian faith: Sally Kern.  You know she's a martyr because she did something few other martyrs in the history of Christianity has ever done, she wrote a book to tell the world all about her sufferings as a martyr for Christ.  So what happened, you ask?  Did she face a lynch mob because she preached the Gospel in badlands of Afghanistan?  Was she arrested for running an underground house church in North Korea?  Was her life endangered for distributing Bibles in Somalia?  No, not so much.  What happened was that she gave the following speech:







In it she likens gay people to cancer, she accuses them of undermining the United States and claims that acceptance of homosexuals will destroy civilization itself.  In fact she goes so far as to call them a bigger threat than terrorism and describes homosexuals as if they all belong to some Illuminati type secret sect that is hell bent on infiltrating and controlling every aspect of society.  Basically she spouts every bigoted idea that only people who have never met a real gay person can buy into.  What she didn't realise was that someone recorded this speech and published it on Youtube, which in turn caused a huge backlash by both gay people and straight people who weren't completely batshit insane.  This is now what goes for martyrdom these days apparently.  You can read all about it in her upcoming book, "The stoning of Sally Kern".  (Spoiler alert!  It's a "media stoning", whatever the hell that's supposed to be.  Turns out people calling her on her ignorant bullshit counts as persecution, who knew?  I bet St Stephen would have loved to trade the actual stoning he received for a "media stoning"!)

Times sure have changed!  Once upon a time Christian martyrs had to face lions - these days they apparently just have to face facts...

I so wish that Representative Kern was the exception but unfortunately she's the rule.  There exists in Christianity today a generation of umbrage junkies, people who despite the fact that they possess every privilege and advantage a free society can offer still feel the need to feel constantly offended and persecuted.  Of course, since they face no actual persecution they have to continually force themselves to be outraged about the most inane, trivial crap.  And so we end up with a group of people who manage to feel martyred by the very existence of opinions contrary to the ones they hold.  Therefore the very act of disagreeing with them becomes an act of persecution and so being called wrong and ignorant somehow becomes equivalent to stoning.  It's not enough for them to enjoy freedom of expression and belief.  No, they cannot feel happy unless they are the only ones who are allowed these freedoms.

How can anyone live like this?  Isn't it absolutely exhausting to have to constantly work up outrage over the most meaningless things?  Isn't that the most joyless way of going through life?  Doesn't it destroy your very soul to constantly manufacture feelings of persecution when in truth you live a life of unmatched privilege?  How can you sleep at night knowing you compared being disagreed with to the actual pain, suffering and death of millions of believers through the ages? 

It sickens me.

4 comments:

GumbyTheCat said...

I see it this fake persecution complex all the time. Christians in the U.S. are the most powerful force in the biggest baddest country in the history of the world. But disagree with them even a tiny bit and they get all whiny that they're being persecuted. LOL.

Hey, remember that video you linked for me that showed a preacher asking for peoples' bank account numbers? I can't find it anywhere, do you still have the URL?

Eugene said...

Well the good news is that I found the url, the bad news is that the video was removed thanks to a copyright claim by the church.

His name is Ed Young, perhaps someone else uploaded it somewhere.
Couple of articles about him and his lavish lifestyle:

http://www.wfaa.com/news/investigates/Prominent-Pastor-Linked-to-Luxury-83600192.html

http://www.alittleleaven.com/2010/02/ed-youngs-admissions-are-more-damning-than-the-original-news-story.html

Eugene said...

Found an alternative, hope it works! (It's on vimeo.com which seems to have a problem with people outside the US)

http://vimeo.com/16359090

GumbyTheCat said...

Thanks very much Eugene, got it!