The Greatest Catholics of All Time constantly struggle to find new and fresh ways to say, “Jesus didn’t actually love most people. He looked down on them just as much as I do and only got close to them to tell them off, just as I am bravely doing now. The average person makes him sick. I don’t, of course. He thinks I’m awesome. But most people? Gross!”
Case in point, this meme making the rounds:
The Reactionary Sect fears love so deeply, they don’t even want to appear to love anybody. Avoiding the near occasion of charity is a huge priority for them.
Another marker of the Reactionary Sect is its intense fear that even the slightest kindness might be perceived as weakness. It is about the detection and expulsion of enemies, not about love. Love is always understood as either contemptible or else redefined as the infliction of pain on sinners who need to be tormented, punished, and tortured into complying with the will of a tormenting and pissed-off God in the image and likeness of the sadistic culture warrior.
The actual gospel, in contrast, uses the term love first and foremost as Normals do: meaning to love somebody, to treat them with respect, honor, joy, delight, patience, gentleness, compassion and so forth. In the mouth of Reactionary religion, it virtually always means some variation on inflicting pain in a mixture of pleasure and satisfaction. It trades in bizarre urban legends like this beloved chestnut of conservative American religion:
This is, not to put to fine a point on it, malignant bullshit. But it sacralizes the sadism of the Reactionary sociopathic narcissist who wants to believe that his joy in cruelty is somehow “love” and not domination of his victims.
Bottom line: If you are so fearful of other people that merely welcoming somebody (just about the most minimal form of love there is) makes you feel weak, you are in no position at all to pontificate to fellow Christians or any other Normal about the love of God.
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True story: my horse has lived in the same herd of horses for 18 of his 19 years. The same herd, but some horses leave sometimes and new ones arrive. My horse assigned himself the job (which no one wanted him to do) of chasing new horses for a while before accepting them into the herd. Recently two new horses were introduced. He chased them so relentlessly that that the barn manager was afraid that one of them would get hurt, so my horse is now in solitary confinement. When people at the barn asked me why my horse was out of the herd I started saying the first thing that popped into my head. “He didn’t listen when Jesus said to welcome the stranger.” It turns out a lot of people do not know that Jesus said to welcome the stranger, but only two people challenged me on it. The two who go to church.
I just figured out a way to turn the above meme on its head: “Jesus didn’t call people to repentance because He hated their guts and took pleasure in watching them squirm. Jesus called people to repentance because He loved them unconditionally and wanted as many people as possible to find their way into His kingdom.”