J.R.Prentice

Humans are a pack animal. This may be hard to understand if you are evangelical and think the book of genesis is literal rather than allegorical, but humans are a pack animal. What this means is that the human desire for the acceptance and support of a tribe is as fundamental as the desire for food, for air, for water, for sex, for sunlight, for love. If you tell young men that they cannot have a tribe, they're not going to accept that. Ever. Especially if you tell that only to the young men of one tribe in particular. They're going to wonder why everybody gets to have a tribe and they don't. And they're eventually going to decide that you are the enemy. Because you are. Anyone who stands between young men and what they need for a healthy, fulfilled life is their enemy. That includes you. And if you manage to convince them that god doesn't want them to have a tribe, it will also include god. The more you push back against their healthy and natural desire for a tribe, a homeland, and a birthright, the more they will hate you, and the more exclusive their definition of that tribe will become. There is no way you can stop this. The only thing you can control is how far they have to go, how radical they have to become, in order to get it. Because this can go all the way from enforcing immigration law, and shutting down corrupt visa programs right now, to gangs of young White men in balaclavas with Ar15s going door to door ten years from now. We have to do something about the 14th amendment. I don't care if that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. It's not a choice. The constitution exists to serve Americans, not the other way around. If that sentence confuses you, read the first paragraph of the constitution. If we do not, young men of the future, the same little boys who are being radicalized right now by your malicious indifference, will treat a piece of paper that says they cannot have a homeland the way they would treat a piece of paper that says that can't eat food, or a piece of paper that says they can't own a home, or have a wife and children. You may think that you offer them a tribe in the form of the universal kingdom of god, the community of all believers, but that's just a word game and you know it, which is why you are so defensive about the whole thing. Where was the universal community of believers when these young men needed help? When they needed not just the surface appearance of a tribe, but someone to do the things that tribes actually do for younger generations they care about? The pack serves a concrete set of functions in the life cycle of the human species, and you cannot perform those functions with a cardboard cutout. Young men are sick of religion that offers them responsibilities with no rights, lectures with no help, demands with no love or empathy. It's odd, in a way ironic, that, I, the man of zero faith, should have to be the one standing here telling self-styled religious leaders how they failed both their people and their god. But having no faith does give me one advantage. It frees me from the delusion that Jesus is a puppet that I can pull out of my pocket, slip over my right hand, move his mouth and make him say what I want. I used to wonder, as a child, what the phrase "taking the name of the lord in vain" actually meant. But I no longer wonder, because when I became a man, I looked around me and saw all these people who talk to god and somehow get told exactly what they want to hear. Then I understood that the key phrase here wasn't "in vain". It was "taking". Taking the name of god and using it as a tool for one's own goals. Joel, here, is sad that his friend is getting sent home. This personally inconveniences both him and his friend, which effects Joel in a way that young men being denied their birthright does not. So he finds an interpretation of scripture that says that god wants him, Joel Berry, to get his way, and that god wants all the young men who want a homeland and a birthright to go get fucked. I'm not terribly impressed.