nolongerinbetween

The election of Donald Trump as president of United States is one of the biggest events in the recent history of mankind, after the Holocaust. If there’s any lesson that the Second World War and Shoah taught us was that underneath the surface of civilization lies barbary. If you scratch the shallow surface of an otherwise civilized man you will find a terrifying beast. After Auschwitz the idea of firm progress and definitive civilization is just a convenient delusion. We can no longer take for granted our humanity and our mankind moving forward. The claims of historicism, that our civilization goes inexorably and necessarily toward a determinate end, supposedly great, we all know by now that are untenable.

Trump’s election as the president of United States is yet another living proof that we don’t learn anything from history and our past mistakes. After 80 years our civilization was tested again and it failed big time. Humanity stumbled once more into one of its darkest moments of toxic populism. And the fact that Christianity is the one that invested Donald Trump with power and crowned him as the ruler of our world is a demise of the Christian Church as the Light of the world and speaks volumes about the hidden darkness that lies deep within religion. The legend of the Grand Inquisitor where the Church turns the teaching of Christ upside down and rejects Him while embracing the Inquisitor is more actual than ever. The idea that a decent Christian can vote for someone who is overtly the exact opposite of what Jesus taught us and he even urges us to be the same and follow in his steps is beyond comprehension. If you look at his ideas and his facts you will find hate, division, lies, exclusion, disdain, bullying, misogyny, mockery, pride, greed, racism, deceit, sexism, cowardice. You will find biblical illiteracy (“When I drink my little wine and have my little cracker in church”). You will find lack of remorse (“Forgiveness from God? No, I never ask for it. I don’t bring God into this”). You will find vengeance (“My favourite verse from the Bible? That’s easy: an eye for an eye.“). You will find cruelty (“Waterboarding? I love it!!!! We should make it even tougher!“) etc How on earth is this Christ-like? How on earth can a Christian witness all that horror and then vote for him because he defends the Christian values? Am I missing something? Is hatred a Christian value? Is disdain for the poor and underprivileged a Christian value? Is lying a Christian value? Is sexual assault and cheating on your spouse a Christian value? Is defending a paedophile a Christian value? Is lack of compassion for the oppressed and victims a Christian value? Is breaking your promises a Christian value? Is making fun of disabled people a Christian value? Is denigrating war heroes a Christian value? Is blaming others and taking no responsibility for your actions a Christian value? Is racism and telling black American women to “go back” to where they came from a Christian value? Is bragging about the size of your genitals on television a Christian value? Is paying porn actresses and prostitutes to silence them a Christian value? Is praising murderous dictators like Putin or Kim Jong-un a Christian value? Is admiring a dictator like Rodrigo Duterte for his sinister extrajudicial executions a Christian value? Is defending the royal Saudi when they brutally kill and chop up dissident journalists into pieces while they are still alive (Jamal Khashoggi) a Christian value? Is separating babies and children from their mothers before deportation a Christian value? Is demonizing migration and calling the migrants rapists a Christian value? Is, for the love of God, demonizing refugees, people who are fleeing war, starvation and rape a Christian value? I can’t think of a more grotesque situation than when I saw those crowds of Christians cheering when he started demonizing and speaking ill of refugees escaping war and persecution. Refugees, for Christ’s sake, not migrants! “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you didn’t take me in, I was naked and you didn’t clothe me. Whenever you did not do it for one of these, you didn’t do it for Me.” (Mathew 25) How on earth can you be a Christian, look Christ in the eyes and then cheer for such a disgrace? Mocking starved and displaced refugees who are running from brutal wars and to whom you are supposed to offer sanctuary and protection, while telling me and yourself that he, Donald Trump, the most ungodly president of the United States, is the saviour of your Christian values? Are you for real? Don’t you have any shame? Just because it happens to have the same stance on two issues (homosexuality and abortion), even though we all know he just capitalizes on them for electoral purposes, doesn’t mean he is a supporter of the Christian values. Hitler too had the same stance on these issues, for goodness’ sake, but that doesn’t make him a defender of Christianity. You could easily tell his real identity if you bother to expand your tunnel vision and look at the entire picture!

Since the moment he got elected, four years ago, I live in a constant state of bewilderment. The stink and ugliness he brought to this world is unbearable to me. Most people, after the initial shock, got used to it. They became numb and desensitized to evil, their senses are now dulled and they witness his sordid behaviour with no outrage and indignation. He normalized evil. He normalized hate, injustice, lying, incompetence, threats, ignorance, violence, racism, nepotism, conflict of interest, tax avoidance, abuse of power, obstruction of justice, name-calling, contempt for experts, intolerance, misogyny, scapegoating, chauvinism, attacking the free press, pardoning criminal allies, mocking the weak and praising the strong, greed, you name it, to the extent that people no longer perceive his dereliction. They know he’s morally reprehensible and some of them will even admit it but he doesn’t offend their senses enough to make them outraged. Let alone sick or nauseous. When he was bragging about his sexual assault on women he was right in the way he described our dire reality: “I can do anything”. After two thousand of years of teaching that character matters, now the Christian Church all of a sudden tells us character is not relevant anymore, providing the Church gets the power and dominant control of the culture. All that matters is the Church takes over the reins again to exert their control. “The end justifies the means” is the latest addition of the Church to the Nicene creed. To think that such a terrible outcome where evil became normalized and people are no longer appalled by this vile moral landscape was done in the name of Jesus by a saviour (geeeez) of Christianity is ludicrous and reveals the rot, corruption and hypocrisy that lie at the heart of the Christian people nowadays. As far as I am concerned I will never get used to this despicable state of affairs. I will never cave in. I will never get numb and insensitive to this horror. Political is personal, not only the other way around. Whenever I come across stupidity or malice I feel my world is shrinking and it’s under attack. Stupidity suffocates me. Literally. It sends me into a frenzy state of despair. For the last four years the stench and the toxicity of his words poisoned my world and made it unfit to breathe. And the idea that this stink was brought into our world by Christians and my former brothers in faith and they are willing to do it again gives me the chills and horrifies me. They destroyed any notion of accountability by succumbing to a vessel theology, where their greater good is all that matters and so the vessel, the means become irrelevant if not outright inerrant. If it rings a bell with you is because you heard all that before. You and six millions dead Jews. Heil mein Führer! Heil Hitler! The King Cyrus argument used to justify this vessel theology is just a poor rationalization of their corrupted soul. It was employed before for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Mussolini, you name it. They werent’t dirty vessels used by God to achieve his celestial goals and neither is Trump. And the lesser of two evils argument, employed by supposedly better Christians, who will follow him not wholeheartedly but by holding their nose, is not even worth refuting. Not being able to stop their glorious marching toward abyss while they follow their new Pied Piper is painful to say the least. The notion that Donald Trump saves Christianity under attack is surreal and farcical. If you manage to see through their denial and the charade they are playing, you will find, in most of them, the old dream of a theocracy still alive and kicking and their crave for revenge and power in a cultural war they are losing and about which Jesus made clear He took no part in :“My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) Two thousand years ago Judas didn’t get the point and he wanted to force His hand and make Him the King of this world. At all costs. Now the Christians fall into the same trap. Make the Christendom Great Again. Bring Jesus to Washington once and for all. Let’s tear down “the wall of separation between church and state” from our founding Constitution. The inability of the self-righteous to restrain their religious hegemony and not to impose their ideals on other people is well known and documented. Fortunately for them, in just a month, they can receive their share of the intoxicating power they so much desire and their thirty pieces of silver….