Not one stone will be left on top of another

Fuck Baltimore.

I can't find the post now, but at one point during the resurgent riots after a Missouri prosecutor massaged a grand jury to ensure he had a fig leaf not to charge Darren Wilson, I wrote on one social media or another something to the effect that I was torn, that rioting would only be more ammunition for those who support police in their brutality, but that if I were a young black man in Ferguson, I'd probably be out there overturning cars as well.

I am no longer conflicted.

After the scripture reading, part 2

Maybe I'll make a series of this. I'm thinking this might be a fun ongoing project.

This week's scripture was Acts 16:23-34, which is the bit about Paul and Silas in jail and there's an earthquake but they don't run away and then they tell the jailer not to kill himself and then he becomes Christian and gets his whole family saved with him whether they become Christian themselves or not because woo.

Ok, that last bit was uncalled for. It's fairly standard for biblical texts to present decisions by patriarchal males as group decisions. And it does say the rest of the household rejoiced with him, so I guess it wasn't too onerous to change religions overnight.

But anyway, that's what was chosen to read in church. What comes immediately after? Is it horrible, like the two I cited last week? Well, not really, but there's a reason this passage isn't cited as much: it's Paul playing politics.

Reading between the (approved) lines

My favorite part of scripture readings at church is reading the verses immediately AFTER the chosen reading, which are invariably horrid. The reading ending with Isaiah 25:9 misses the wonderous bit in verses 10 and 11 about how the Moabites will be crushed into a dungheap, and EVEN THOUGH they spread out their arms like swimmers to stay afloat in the poop, STILL the Lord will smoosh them in deeper. A truly lovely picture of a loving God.

Or this week, the scripture was the bit at the end of Acts 4 about how the early Christians were actually as determinedly anti-Capitalist as a society can be, which is cool. And then it ended, and I kept reading the bit about Ananias and Sapphira, where God murders two people for being generous, but not generous enough. Because the Lord Almighty was Stalinist before Stalinism was a thing, yo. Still had a little Old Testament to get out of his system, maybe?

The first is less unsettling than the second - God may be disgusting and prone to stomping people who already are down, but at least isn't murdering them out of spite - but both are still definitely not high points for the biblical God. And yet more reason why anyone who claims their morality stems for a literal reading of the Bible is either full of (but not drowning in!) shit, or utterly insane.