Hate, Hell, Hope & Halleluiah
Unloading some vile thoughts
‘Hateluiah’ was their song
Four somewhat linked pieces : mostly about the HATE that THEY spew at us for being ‘different’ in ways THEY say is unacceptable. When THEY do wrong things such as Abuse, Violence, Rape and Cruelty then they claim their misdeeds are somehow acceptable; when a man dresses as the opposite gender (while so many women do it without penalty) …. somehow this is wrong.
These pieces are labelled 'Z' to place them at the end of my stories.
There’s not much point in looking forward when everything has gone. I used to have a life I enjoyed, I felt worthwhile, even valued. But that was then. And this, this hateful now, is now.
That was then. This, this hateful now, is Now.
There’s not much point in looking forward when everything has gone. I used to have a life I enjoyed, I felt worthwhile, even valued. But that was then. And this, this hateful now, is now. I learned that I was different. And that people feared my difference. And they said ‘if you are different in this way, then you must be different in other ways we hate’. And therefore we hate you. Because we will not accept your sort of ‘’difference’.
So we will label you ‘homosexual’ (no), we will label you ‘pervert’ (no), we will label you p*dohile (no), we will label you vile and without any possibility of redeeming virtues. We will label you ‘different’ and cast you out. This is our truth and you are condemned. WE shun you. You are not even nothing in our eyes, you are beneath nothing.
’And lo and behold, that is what they did. And they were proud of what they did. They gloried in what they did. And they knew their might and knew that all was right; because Might is Right in their world. And they knew therefore that their god, made in their image, would be pleased with them. And they were not alone. The institutions and agencies made up of their acolytes and minions knew that they must treat wrongdoers and ‘differents’ similarly. Not to be their definition of ‘normal’ meant ‘abnormal’. No shading of tolerance or acceptability – a vehement, venomous, vitriolic black-and-whiteness. President Bush said it ‘You are either with us or against us.’
Everybody who is different knows how that is interpreted. So the Police and other agencies of The System also knew how to despise and devalue and denigrate. (Strange how that word seems to have overtones of blackness and oooh, naughty, ‘nigger’ - well that’s a truth). They can spurn. To mock and trash everything you hold of worth. And their cruelty is barely deliberate. It is so deeply entrenched and engrained that it is for them completely and reasonably normal. They cannot see what they have become. So much for ‘institutionalised racism’; the larger truth is that there is ‘institutionalised hatred of people-not-like-us’.
But that’s what The System can do once it decides you are so ‘different’ as to be ‘wrong’.
Because ‘They’ don’t care about you. They care about themselves. They don’t mean ‘Love Everybody’ because they know the correct statement is ‘Love everybody who is like us’. And so it came to pass - no wife, no family, no children, no parents (dead), no siblings (dead). No money, no job, no phone (viz no money), no internet, no computer, no access (except an hour a day in the library).
No job, no applications (somehow the Job Centre believes that having no phone or internet means I can’t respond to enquiries which they say means I’m not trying!) so no benefit. As if they would not find ways to minimise any support if they could. No friends, no colleagues, not quite nothing but so far below that even the homeless and vagrants – no, be fair. I’m not homeless yet but I’m so crushed I can’t even ask my equals who are labelled ‘the dregs’ for help. They have nothing to spare and I won’t take their nothing. That’s how low my self-worth has been driven.
No welcome and no goodbye. They have these cherry-picked proclamations such as ‘hate the sin and love the sinner’ – but they don’t mean it. Once you are sufficiently different they treat you and the sin as inextricably linked. They hate the sin, they hate you, they forget everything good or worthwhile that you might have contributed. The people with their hell-bent heaven-sent(!) determination have no truck with the yin-yang concept that in every blackness there is a speck of white and vice versa. For them the speck of black obliterates any whiteness. Wrong is bad. Wrong is Dead.
They know their truth. I’ve been driven to believe that my ‘difference’ is true and that I almost deserve the treatment I have been given. Hah. Not much of a ‘gift’.
How am I so appallingly different? What have I done that is so wrong? I’m a man and I enjoy dressing in pretty clothes. I enjoy silks and satins and velvets – rather like the Georgian dandies and the other rich and posh folk. I enjoy frills and lace and, oh, all the colours of the rainbow – again, like the Cavaliers of long ago.
I enjoy stockings and heels – just like men used to wear (even if not so recently). I don’t like high heels, not even as much as 2 inches, unlike the gentry of the 1700s. They hurt my mangled toes even while I love the feeling they give my legs. When I have dressed up, in the privacy of my home (ex-home), I could wear wigs [the only men who now wear wigs are judges – how suitable]. I sometimes tried makeup - but until recently men and women could use face decoration to improve their appeal to others and their confidence in themselves. But I didn’t like it and couldn’t be bothered.
And I prefer pastel yellow and green to indoctrinated pink or blue. Then I remember that the whole pink for girls issue is the phenomenal result of a USA marketing campaign from the 1930s. It’s not true about blue for boys – or perhaps it was not true (until the campaign). Red and faded red ie pink used to be the boy colours – because they were more expensive. Blue was often linked with the Virgin Mary. And all babies wore dresses because it allowed easy access for pee and poop.
But somehow in this grey and drab world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – these elements of costume are allocated to ‘women’. Somehow in this drab world, my behaviour is labelled wrong and sickening and vile. And, worse, other labels are attached so that any ugly label relating to sex or gender is attached to me.
And every now and again I wonder why women may wear every possible item of clothing that is ‘normally’ allocated to men and there is not the tiniest complaint. Shirts, trousers, ties, jackets. Some even call it ‘style’ and ‘fashion’ and ‘chic’. Not if I wear THEIR clothes. Personally, I think some of them look magnificent, and others, sadly, are mutton dressed as lamb. But that is not a criticism aimed solely at women.
Inconveniently this comment does echo a criticism made occasionally by ‘Them’ when they display their loathing of transfolk and their differences. Some of the costumes worn by others in the transgender / transsexual spectrum do themselves no favours. Ultra-miniskirts, deep cleavage, exaggerated anything are all ‘Look at Me’ rather than ‘I’m comfortable as I am’. Perhaps I also should be more tolerant. Sauces for gooses and ganders.
Some of the most vitriolic nastiness comes from those who say that ‘they believe in the Bible’ and they quote some particularly specific cherry-picked verse from Deuteronomy at you. “A man shall not wear the clothing of a woman”. They never connect the statement with the period when roles were much more specific or to requirements of nomadic aggressive-defensive life at the time.
Are the demands of ‘Them’ an instruction that the man should not wear the desert nomad’s costume of some 4,000 years ago (and in their wilful ignorance they decide that perhaps a Berber costume may be equivalent!) My love of wordplay wonders what a dessert nomad might be – at least I got THAT spelling right.
If I were to pick a phrase from their bible and quote it, for example, ‘I will make you smash you babies against the rocks’, so I would likely be accused of ignoring the context. But these self-righteous absolutely right people may do so with impunity. Who makes these modern rules? Who then links them to laws made for a nomadic desert tribe some 4,000 years ago?
Who has the bare-faced lack of logic to link the two concepts? What do ‘They’ approve of for men to wear that isn’t black, brown, grey, dark, drab, dreary. Made of tough and rough materials suitable for sufferers from testosterone overload. And I don’t suggest that lower testosterone is equivalent to ‘becoming gay’.
When will the average person learn to distinguish between body-gender, brain-gender, soul-gender and sexual preference? Barely 100 years ago, Queen Victoria forbad the word ‘lesbian’ because she was not willing to allow the concept to be voiced.
Interestingly, some ancient languages have no specific gender discrimination; there is no word for he as opposed to she. Is all progress forward?
The patriarchal societies – and all the Abrahamic religions are included – demand he v she discrimination as part of the required imbalance of power. And some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the patriarchal system are women. I don’t understand how any woman can support a system that denies her equal worth and proper value. Of course women are not equal to men – they are different. Oh, oops, but they hate things that are different. Oh , double oops, they only hate things that they say are ‘wrongly different’. Oh dear, logic loop.
Facebook has a startling number of non-he and non-she non-binary options for determining gender status; about 50 of them at the last count. Clearly some of the categories will have very few members, but this does not equate to denying any category its rightful and meaningful existence. Personally, I have a difficulty – there seems to be no box for heterosexual cross-dresser who has no desire to alter his plumbing. Options for sexual preference are available but separate. And these other decision-makers somehow know that the only correct and valid definitions are those binary two suitable for a small tribe of desert nomads from 4,000 years ago. And yet, They know better. No, let’s correct that, They believe they know better. What a load of nasty bullying based on selective thinking.
They say ‘You MUST believe the Bible’ – have these people ever studied that document with even a mildly curious brain. Even in the first few verses of this never-to-be-questioned ‘infallible’ document, there are two different versions of the Creation. In one, man is created after the animals; in the second, Man comes first. But They say, incomprehensibly, that both must be true. Ha. Just look at some of their ‘facts’.
In the first creation story, humans are created after the other animals; also man and woman are created simultaneously :-
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1:25-27
In the second story, humans were created before the other animals; and then woman was created from man :-
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. … And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. Genesis 2:18-22
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Even if one accepts that the Bible MAY be the accumulation of a number of authors around the period 1000 BC to 500BC and that the Old Testament contains a sort of history, some laws for a nomadic tribe and some strange allegedly prophetic writings, it is not necessarily a complete basis of rules or ethics for a modern non-nomadic people just because a loud priest proclaims it so. Or do we go with the current method of change to the social structure, whereby if a small minority shouts and screams and demands enough then it will happen. And by this you may infer according to your own preference as to whether I may be meaning vegetarians, LGB, anti-fur, T, vegans and similar others.
There are the fabled (not so fabulous) Ten Commandments.
According to the Bible itself, the usually quoted ones in Exodus 20 were replaced by a rather different set in Exodus 34 after Moses broke the first stones. Now, I don’t know how many people cook baby goats these days, but of the 600+ ‘Laws’ which can be found in the Bible – I am pretty sure that too many of the church-goers who despised me are guilty of Lying, Working on the Sabbath (whichever day that is!), Idolatry (usually for a football team or other sport), too often Adultery and, worst, Killing people’s hearts and souls.
They say that they follow their leader, someone called Jesus, and that they are loving and tolerant – hah. I know that they will congratulate themselves when those they despise are eliminated. But somehow they would disapprove of Hitler’s method. Why? Do they prefer to kill the soul rather than the body? Are they jealous of Hitler's success?
So this is how different I am. But not how different I have become. I used to think kindly of everyone. But it has got ever harder. One kind word now would reduce me to tears. A gift of food or warmth – the same.
Since I have received much hurt and hardness, so my own self has grown a shell to protect me. A rough, nasty, spiky armour covering what I tell myself is a gentle soul. But pretend-me has learnt to pretend-hate.
I cannot pretend to deliver back to others what has been done to me. Nothing so vile as what is thrown at me every day. Shit-parcels on my doorstep and through my letterbox; graffiti accusing me of incomprehensible deeds and thoughts with every variety of illiterate and perhaps ignorant spelling. Windows smashed; vileness encouraged by genuinely nasty-minded people. How can humans be so vile to other humans?
I do not want to believe that even Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Idi Amin or their soul-kin could be so deliberately nasty.
‘They’ would claim to sorrow at my funeral – but I feel they wouldn’t mean it. They know with an ugly certainty that They know best what is right. It is the unstated certainty of the silent majority. How grubby must be their souls? How nasty is their [complete failure of] tolerance? How evil is their sort of goodness? Yet who will judge them?
I only know this story as an anecdote. Last winter, a homeless man smartened himself up and waited outside the church as the congregation went in and as they came out. He had a small sign saying, I would be grateful for whatever you can spare’ …… and there was nothing to spare from these good people as they came away from their message of love and redemption. I hope the story is not true.
But in past times, I don’t know if I would have been the first to make an offering. I too would have been afeared of the visible ‘difference’. “I was hungry and …..”
And their choir will not do their excellent rendition of ‘Hateluiah’ as nobody will attend my funeral. And yet – there will be one who prays for them (if I know how to pray and if it means anything) because whatever my faults (and I had my share although not as vile as painted) I believe that to love is better than to hate. And they will sing their songs and they will sing Hateluiah not Halleluiah.
For those who have not read Exodus 34 recently – I wonder how surprised you’ll be.
EXODUS Chapter 34 : The second set of 10 Commandments 1 The LORD said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke. ………….. 5 Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. 6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
(Alternative v6 & 7) I am the LORD God. I am merciful and very patient with my people. I show great love, and I can be trusted. 7 I keep my promises to my people forever, but I also punish anyone who sins. When people sin, I punish them and their children, and also their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
8 Moses quickly bowed down to the ground and worshipped the LORD. 9 He prayed, “LORD, if you really are pleased with me, I pray that you will go with us. It is true that these people are sinful and rebellious, but forgive our sin and let us be your people.”10 The LORD said: I promise to perform miracles for you that have never been seen anywhere on earth. Neighboring nations will stand in fear and know that I was the one who did these marvelous things.
11 I will force out the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, but you must do what I command you today. 12 Don’t make treaties with any of those people. If you do, it will be like falling into a trap. 13 Instead, you must destroy their altars and tear down the sacred poles they use in the worship of the goddess Asherah. 14 I demand your complete loyalty—you must not worship any other god! 15 Don’t make treaties with the people there, or you will soon find yourselves worshiping their gods and taking part in their sacrificial meals. 16 Your men will even marry their women and be influenced to worship their gods.
Commandment 1 17 Don’t make metal images of gods.
Commandment 2 18 Don’t fail to observe the Festival of Thin Bread in the month of Abib. Obey me and eat bread without yeast for seven days during Abib, because that is the month you left Egypt.
Commandment 3 19 The first-born males of your families and of your flocks and herds belong to me.
Commandment 4 20 You can save the life of a first-born donkey by sacrificing a lamb; if you don’t, you must break the donkey’s neck. You must save every first-born son.
Commandment 5 Bring an offering every time you come to worship.
Commandment 6 21 Do your work in six days and rest on the seventh day, even during the seasons for plowing and harvesting. 22 Celebrate the Harvest Festival each spring when you start harvesting your wheat, and celebrate the Festival of Shelters each autumn when you pick your fruit.
Commandment 7 23 Your men must come to worship me three times a year, because I am the LORD God of Israel. 24 I will force the nations out of your land and enlarge your borders. Then no one will try to take your property when you come to worship me these three times each year.
Commandment 8 25 When you sacrifice an animal on the altar, don’t offer bread made with yeast. And don’t save any part of the Passover meal for the next day.
Commandment 9 26 I am the LORD your God, and you must bring the first part of your harvest to the place of worship.
Commandment 10 Don’t boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.
27 The LORD told Moses to put these laws in writing, as part of his agreement with Israel. 28 Moses stayed on the mountain with the LORD for forty days and nights, without eating or drinking. And he wrote down the Ten Commandments, the most important part of God’s agreement with his people.
Now, I have to confess that since these commandments were pointed out to me, I have not asked any priest or equivalent WHY the first ones (which were broken, destroyed and lost) have not been replaced by this second set as apparently their god instructed?? Can’t the priests understand a simple commandment ‘This replaces the first set’ !!!!!!!!!! (10).
But I’m tired of writing about the hate that THEY are willing to spread. I must be so unusual – I’m a man who likes to dress as a woman and I prefer kindness to nastiness and I believe that most people are decent and trustworthy. How ‘different’ does this make me from any of THEM?
Comments
Actually, Biblical scholars
Actually, Biblical scholars are fairly sure that all of the following (and others) are all due to the prohibition on worshiping other gods:
Men not wearing womens clothes (part of the ceremonies for some of the local religions)
men laying down with men (ditto)
wearing clothes made from two different kinds of fiber (ceremonial garments)
That last one is fun. Because anybody wearing a cotton-poly blend is violating it.
but gee, somehow that third one is less important than the other two. Yeah. Right.
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
Did not know this
This interpretation of these verses is not one I have come across before.
AP
Painting a house with one brush
It is not prudent to use one brush to paint a house because of all the different surfaces, angles, and nooks and crannies. Also, some areas would take an inordinate amount of time to paint.
As with houses, using one brush to paint everyone the same because of a few causes one to miss those who live as they believe. It causes one to only see the vile and ugly and makes it hard to see the flowers among it all.
Too often beliefs are paraphrased because it isn't convenient or timely to try and put the shortened phrases into context. And if the shortened phrases are put into context, they no longer mean what it was believed and no longer fits what is commonly believed.
Care must be taken to accept or reject individually or those who live as they believe will be missed, and the light they offer will slip by. For those who condemn will be condemned, and those who judge will be judged, regardless of their beliefs.
Others have feelings too.
I think you're saying ...
that black and white is too limited a view and that shades are important. In which case I agree strongly. I always hope that even the blackest person or action has a touch of white (yin-yang style)
Thanks
AP