Refudenounce the Roots III: Romans, Chapters 2 - 3

Part III of my "Refudenounce the Roots" Series.

Chapter 2

• Verses 1 - 2: Whenever you judge, you condemn yourself, because you do the very things you're judging. There is a parallel here between Freud and Paul. Freud had a lot of great babies and a lot of really bad bathwater. It took us a while to separate them, but the ratio of bathwater to babies has decreased enormously since Freud's time. We have this wonderful thing called progress. Paul has a fantastic baby here, but it's trapped in an ocean of filth. Of course we tend to criticize and despise in others that which we hate or fear in ourselves. Of course we do! That's an excellent point. But Paul brings in this crap about having no excuse for this behavior, and God's judgment against those who judge. Pardon me, but being human is a perfectly good excuse (if you must call it that) for behaving like a human. It only took us about 20 centuries to ditch Paul's filth; now we go to counseling and try to understand our fears and self-loathing, and learn how to have compassion for ourselves and then compassion for others, especially those who share our "failings". Well, I say we, but Yahwehismists are still mostly mired in the excuse / judgment paradigm. Folks, it's time to outgrow Paul, and Jesus, and Moses, and Yahweh. Time to put away childish things.
• Verse 4: God's kindness leads us toward repentance? No, God's kindness, in the form of threats concerning hideous, wildly disproportionate punishments, leads us toward obedience (whether it's morally right or not) derived from terror.
• Verse 6: God "will give to each person according to what he has done." Who will give to Yahweh according to what it has done?
• Verses 8 - 9: "...for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger...trouble and distress". Remember this verse the next time some so-called liberal or progressive Jesusianismist tells you that hell is just "separation from god, the absence of his loving presence" Fuck that. Their bible says "wrath and anger".
• Verse 11: "God does not show favoritism." Outrage. What is most of the Old Testament about if not Yahweh's favoritism toward the Jews?
• Verses 12 - 16: I want to say something about these verses, but I can't even get them to resolve into a coherent message. Paul must have been on drugs when he wrote this epistle.
• Verse 24: "Gods name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you." I couldn't have said it better myself. Jesusianismists, have you guys read this verse?

Chapter 3

• Verse 2: The Jews have been entrusted with the very words of God. No, that's not arrogance.
• Verses 3 - 24 or so: I hate to skip over so much deep theology without comment, but it seems like he keeps getting lost on tangents. Here it's something about how stupid it is to say that we should be evil in order to throw God's righteousness into sharp relief. Dude's on drugs, I'm telling you.
• Verse 25: In its forbearance, Yahweh had left unpunished the sins committed before Jesus. So drowning all but a handful of humans in a flood, and setting an army of rabid Israelis the task of slaughtering every living thing in one's town is somehow not a punishment? Wow, don't piss off this god.
• Verse 26: Oh, I'm starting to understand Paul's weird, nonsensical outpourings. Remember when the band Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young discovered alliteration? We ended up with dreck like their song "Helplessly Hoping": Wordlessly watching he waits by the window and wonders... Someone please shoot me. But I see what's going on with Paul: he's stoned, for sure, and whenever a word pops into his head he plays with it for a while to see what kind of stoner-profundities he can come up with. In Chapter 1 he toys with "gospel" and "righteous" a bit. Then in his antithesis of I Corinthians 13 he discovers that there are a bajillion ways to say that people suck. In Chapter 2, he starts with "judgment", fiddles with "law" for a bit, then wraps up Chapter 2 with "circumcision". At the beginning of Chapter 3 he goes a bit abstract, toying with the concept of juxtaposition of God's truth and righteousness against our lies and unrighteousness. Suddenly his train of thought is derailed by a barrage of Psalms, and a smattering of Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. Then he regains some focus and fiddles with "justify" for a bit. I've cracked the Pauline code! He finishes up Chapter 3 with some tail-chasing concerning whether the law is to be observed or nullified. Wow, I'm so glad I finally started to figure this out.