Pondering the Orlando Killings

I have been thinking about the Orlando gay bar massacre.

Jesus told us not to cast our pearls before swine. He was addressing the general principle that some people are so irrational, it’s a complete waste of time to try to help them. In order to help people change, you have to be able to communicate with them, and it’s impossible to communicate with people who don’t listen.

There are peoples and segments of societies that are so screwed up, they can’t be reasoned with as groups. Many of the world’s Muslims now fall into this category.

Twenty-first-century Muslims kill journalists. They kill missionaries. They crucify children. Now one of them has murdered 49 homosexuals and friends of homosexuals. Muslims kill people who pose no threat to them, and they kill people who can be useful to them.

Gay men are overwhelmingly liberal, and liberals are the friends of jihad. I’m not saying liberals hope Islamists take over the world. I’m saying liberals make waging jihad a lot easier. They blame the West. They recommend unprofitable approaches of negotiation and appeasement. They tie the hands of officials and soldiers who would otherwise take effective steps to fight Islamism.

When Omar Mateen shot up the Pulse disco, he was killing, and making enemies of, people who were useful to his cause.

It’s hard to think of a more senseless crime. Gays aren’t rising up against Islamism, even though they are imprisoned and killed in Muslim countries. Gays tend to vote for politicians who tout diversity to absurd extremes. The gayer America gets, the better things will go for jihadists. By murdering gays, Mateen probably opened the eyes of many people who were helpful to his movement and turned them into enemies.

Now I’m wondering: will this crime produce blowback against those who mindlessly advocate blind tolerance for Muslim extremists? Also, will it produce blowback against Christians and religious Jews, who are also opposed to homosexuality?

The current political climate has similarities to the climate in Germany before World War Two. The Germans and Austrians blamed Jews for all sorts of things. No one wanted to listen to reason. These days, Christians receive the kind of criticism and ostracism jihadists should receive. Our own government, with no cause, sets us aside for the same kind of scrutiny they give potential jihadists. My guess is that somehow, we will catch some of the overspray from this massacre. Some people will surely blame us to the exclusion of Muslims.

I don’t approve of homosexuality. When I was young, I thought it was perfectly fine, but I got to know God, and I realized homosexuality interferes with one’s relationship with him. Then I saw that homosexuals were colluding to persecute Christians and dissolve American Christianity. I am not happy about those things, and I plan to speak honestly about it for the rest of my life. But you’re not going to see me or other Christians, in significant numbers, advocating violence against homosexuals.

I have very little interest in fighting the enemies of God with earthly weapons, including political solutions. I will recommend voting for politicians who will help us, but I don’t contribute to campaigns any more, and I no longer take part in the venomous, infantile political tussle of the Blogosphere (if it still exists). I believe in owning guns for self-defense, but there is no way I would use one to advance my religion. Truthfully, I am becoming less attached to this world, and I realize America is already lost. All I want, while I am confined in this world, is to be relatively comfortable in my own little realm, and to accomplish whatever it is God keeps me here to do.

Christian terror is extremely rare in America, militia groups and other nuts notwithstanding. Once in a while, someone shoots an abortionist, but that’s about it. You don’t see us popping up in the audience at Ellen Degeneres’s show with suicide vests. I don’t think we will ever see much Christian violence in America, and Jews don’t seem to have much interest in it either.

Right now, it looks like the most violent factions in the United States are Muslim extremists and Democrats who go to Trump rallies.

To get back to the principle of pearls before swine, it’s the reason hell was created. It’s not for mean people. It’s for people who won’t listen.

Anyone who still has breath can be saved, if he will listen. Jared Fogle can be saved. Charles Manson can be saved. Kim Jong-un can be saved. If they will listen. Everyone has sinned; the fact that one person has sinned more than another doesn’t make him ineligible for salvation, because you don’t earn salvation by being good. After all, Paul made a living murdering Christians.

The problem is that there are many, many people who use their free will to tune God out. Those people have to go to hell, largely because they are unfit to be associated with in the hereafter.

Here on earth, God will let you be a cruel, insolent sexual pervert and pagan with a thousand obscene tattoos, a split tongue, and fake horns under your skin, but heaven is a clean and peaceful place where that kind of irksome being is not permitted to exist. It’s bad enough, putting up with creation’s brats for seventy to a hundred years here on earth. God is not going to subject himself to their presence for all of eternity.

Would you?

One of the best things God has shown me is that it’s okay and even mandatory to reject certain people. I have improved my life much more by rejecting people than by including them. The people who enrich my life don’t bring me pleasure comparable to the misery caused by people who are toxic. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

The other day I was thinking about that, and some part of me felt like I should feel guilt over it. Then I thought about Noah. What happened to his relatives? Not all of the people who drowned were strangers or mere friends.

Only eight people are known to have been saved in the ark. Some say Og the giant clung to the outside, but that’s a legend, not scripture. Noah didn’t appear spontaneously from dust; he was the son of Lamech, and Lamech was the son of Methuselah. These people had family. What happened to them?

Noah had a wife, three sons, and three daughters-in-law. They had relatives, too. Surely they must have loved some of them. But when the rains came, none of the relatives were saved.

How awful it must have been, sitting in the ark, knowing that everyone you grew up with was outside dying. But when it was over, the world was cleansed. A lot of horrible, cruel people were gone. Persecution of the righteous was temporarily over. War was gone. Pagan worship was gone. Cannibalism was gone, if we are to believe what we read about the giants.

Sometimes you just have to flush.

I don’t know if Omar Mateen ever had a chance. Maybe he never heard the right words, but on the other hand, he may have been so arrogant and sadistic it was never possible to reach him. If so, he has a lot of company. In any case, he is accountable, and there is no help for him now, nor will there ever be.

Whatever the families of the dead are going through today can’t compare to what is surely happening to Mateen in the hereafter. I suppose many of the victims are in the same situation, though.

It will be nice when the battle for this world is over. It will be wonderful to see an end to disharmony and misery. It’s tragic that so many people won’t get to see it.

More

It’s so easy to get it right these days; disturbing. I feel like a Jew who decided to leave Germany in 1932.

I said people would blame Christians for the Orlando killings, and here is an example that just popped up while I wasn’t looking for it. It’s so crazy, it motivated me to do something out of character. I’m posting a link to Pajamas Media.