Sorry to hear that. And I know how flip that may sound, but I’m truly sorry. I’ve encountered these schmucks at any number of places and I feel naught but true sorrow for anyone else who does. Didn’t somebody start doing a drive that supported AMFAR or something for every minute they stuck around?
Oh, it would be great fun and sport, but you can damned sure betcha that they would sue. Long and hard and repeatedly. (which isn’t quite the double entendre it appears to be) As you said, they just want to get on the news. And that would certainly do it.
I don’t know enough about the situation to say one way or another, but will address your points:
Yes God can hate, and can destroy:
Which I believe means that God loves us so much that He is willing to hate us and do whatever it takes if that’s what we need for us to come to Him.
Reveling in pain is not God’s way, but peace and sometimes even joy in suffering, which is a gift of God is. If you suffer for Him, He will uphold you and reward you:
Some members have, at various points, expressed a desire to spend eternity in Hell tormenting others.
The tormenting others aspect is the way of Satan and demons. I believe it is the way they deal with pain inflicted on them, they pass it down to those less powerful. We humans also do this, the saying ‘shit rolls downhill’ exemplifies this. The person at the bottom however has no outlet for this pain, and has no power to inflict anyone else with it and must bear it. This is where the cross comes in, Jesus is willing to accept that pain and provide the outlet even for the most oppressed.
But before anyone condemns this group I am reminded of:
If these people truly love God and are truly trying to follow Him, God will turn that for the good.
Look, you folks don’t understand the WBC. They aren’t in it for “attention” or to try to change the rest of us. The rest of us don’t matter. The pickets and provocations aren’t for us, they’re for them.
The point of the protests is to totally isolate the members of the church from every other human being in America. The church consists of Fred Phelps, his children, and his grandchildren. The Westboro Baptist Church isn’t looking for recruits, almost nobody joins the WBC instead they are born into it. And these kids are totally isolated from the rest of the world. They could leave the church, but that would mean leaving their family and every person they have any emotional connection with.
The seemingly bizarre and random targets chosen for protest are actually carefully chosen. They are chosen to make everyone in America hate the Phelps clan, even gay-hating fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist whackos. Why do you think they picket the funerals of American soldiers nowadays instead of funerals of homosexuals? They want to make sure that the kids in the church have absolutely no contact with anyone outside the church, not even other fundamentalists. They want the kids to experience only hate from the outside world, because that’s the way they keep the kids subservient to the Patriarch.
The protests aren’t trolling. They aren’t done to convince the rest of us to renounce sin and join the WBC. They aren’t done to get attention. Rather they are done to demonstrate to the kids in the church that they can expect nothing but hate and contempt from the outside world, to make it nearly impossible for the kids to leave the church.
Lemur866 I don’t know enough about the WBC to know if what you say is true, but I have no doubt such places exist, and it is absolutely horrible. Isolation is much worse then hatred, though it does seem to offer some security, which feeds the isolation.
If what you say is true, what these members need is prayer and love.
So, what, should we just smile and offer them cookies?
They’re assholes. Their kids, who are indoctrinated into too much fear to ever try to leave, are also assholes. I don’t give a damn why they do what they do and I don’t care that little Freddie the third is too scared to try to leave the church because everyone hates him. Tough shit, life’s a bitch and all that.
Also, honest-to-god serious question: how has no one mailed them a pipe bomb or anything yet? Just be done with it.
That there is a passage the WBC are particularly fond of quoting, often with the first five words in bold uppercase italics. It is magnified out of all proportion in their teachings and given by them to mean “If you are not with God (meaning a follower of WBC teachings), God hates you and will destroy you utterly.”
I’m not entirely sure that’s the intended meaning - most of the available commentaries seem to suggest that the treatment of Esau is mentioned as a comparison to that of Jacob, who was loved and favored.
Again, compare that sentiment to the quoted statement from Margie Phelps above. She says God is “kind and merciful” and then describes him as sending everyone but the 70+ (or however many) members of their church to Hell. I’m more inclined to agree with your Biblical interpretation than hers.
That was entirely my point. Yet Ben Phelps (grandson of Fred) and Charles Hockenbarger said to me on another messageboard some years ago that they hoped that God would allow them to spend eternity torturing sinners. I have great difficulty reconciling that viewpoint with someone claiming to follow Jesus.
I question whether these people really know what love is, after living all their lives under the thumb of Reverend Fred. It reminds me of those recent cases of people locking their family members in their basements and abusing them for decades - you have to wonder how these victims will ever adjust to real life after so long in the darkness.
You don’t have to smile and offer them cookies, because that wouldn’t do any good. I just don’t understand why you’d hate a five year old kid holding a sign that he can’t even read, much less understand.
It isn’t exactly a strech to compare your lack of compassion for the asshole indoctrinated kids in the Phelps clan to those asshole indoctrinated kids’ lack of compassion for you and the rest of us. It springs from the same human impulse to return hatred for hatred.
So feel free to hate the kids in the Phelps clan, just remember that every time you do you’re putting a smile of Fred Phelps’s face. That’s what Fred wants you to do. That’s his plan. And you’re helping him.
I’ll agree with what you say as part of it. But I believe we can see the pattern of God doing whatever it takes to get someone to come to Him. We can see this in Esau along with His people Israel, who He has repeatably poured out His wrath on to get them to repent, to Jonah who ran from God and spent 3 days in the fish, and at the same time in the pit (see Jonah 2:6), to His own Son, who didn’t deserve the wrath, but it was a substitute for the wrath we deserve, to (having Paul) hand over people to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme (very possibly this refers to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the only unpardonable sin). It is well within God’s character to do this if needed.
This is very possible, God speaks of it as hardness of the heart. They really don’t know and it would require God to soften their hearts. I like to view love as something you have to give out, and God refills with more then you started, but some people, due to their life and circumstance has run out, so they have none to give, and therefore can’t get more w/o divine intervention.
I recently watched a documentary on the WBC/Phelps clan that was made by Louis Theroux called The Most Hated Family in America (WARNING: Not Safe For Work. 59 minute video). I don’t think it has ever actually aired in the US, but in it you will see Shirley Phelps Roper confirm this.
She flat out says they are not trying to convince anyone, or win any converts. They believe they are the only poeple who are right and going to heaven, and they only protest to inform the rest of us of this.
They tend to picket only high profile funerals where they will get media coverage, but according to Shirly Phelps Roper (Fred himself is rarely seen), pickets of funerals are OK because a funeral is ‘worshipping the dead’, which is of course, an abomination in WBC’s eyes.
I do get the impression from the video that the WBC/Phelps clan has not really thought about the future much, since it doesn’t seem that there is any plan to recruit spouses for the youngest generation. Perhaps this is a good thing, and they will become extinct.
Well, not so much the “prayer” part, being an atheist, but Jesus, I can’t imagine anything worse than growing up with the Phelpses. Fred Phelps is as close to perfectly evil as a human can come. kanicbird, I know that you believe in the literal existence of demons. If you ever want physical proof of that idea, look to Fred Phelps. He’s a monster in every sense of the word. He’s spend the last thirty or forty years constantly torturing his family, mentally and physically. He’s exactly the sort of person humans had in mind when they first invented the concept of hell, because he’s such a foul and heartless creature that there’s no Earthly punishment that could possibly equal the evil that’s he spread in his life. When he dies, the world will be a cleaner place for his passing.
But that’s Fred. The rest of his family, I can’t help but feel nothing but pity for. They’re his victims. They have been from the day they were born, and will be until the day they die. Stacked against the daily torment that has been their entire existence, I can easily forgive their ridiculous protests. They’re sad, broken people, and there’s probably no way to fix them anymore. Fred’s damage has been too severe.
I’ll accept that the little kids are victims, because no one should bombard a kid with hate. But once they turn 18, there is nothing forcing a member of the Phelps clan to stay there. Move out of the hate-filled compound, change your name, and at least attempt to live your life like a normal person.
Or, they can make the decision to stay, for whatever reason, but by making that decision, they knowingly choose to accept that lifestyle, which doesn’t make them a victim. Your childhood was awful? That’s terrible and I’m truly sorry, but if you make the choice to continue living in that situation, with those people, once you’re of the age where leaving is an option, I have zero sympathy for you.
Phelps and his followers want to play the all-or-nothing “I hate you” game? Fine, I can play that too. Kids get a pass. Adults are either worthless buckets of scum, or make the decision to leave.
Just looking at this at the human only level (ignoring demons) really severally distorts the picture IMHO. Fred is as much a victim, but it is the power he wields that imprisons him, and the guilt of the pain he inflicts on others - which he must hide from himself - that blinds him to his cruelty. This creates a downward spiral that traps him. The only path Fred can see is the one that he is on, he has sold himself to sin:
Fred is truly a slave to his sin, he must do what his sin says to do, just as a slave must obey their master.
As for his children, using other examples that I know personally, I would WAG that his children were never raised spiritually to human adults, even though they may grow to physical adults. Fred, being a slave to his sin, would not be permitted to do so, but would raise his children as demons. Teaching them through pain and torment and not providing love and not trusting others. As long as the children are not raised and nurtured to understand love they will not be able to break away on their own.
(again I’m going with what you tell me about Fred, as I don’t know Fred or of the WBC)
No, either you’re willfully a member of a bigoted church run by a hate-mongering asshole, or you’re not a member of such a church. I don’t understand why, for a second, I should feel sorry for someone who was raised in such an environment, attained the age of majority, and continued, wholly voluntarily, continued to participate in that environment.
Because they don’t know any better. In their eyes the rest of the world are evil scum who hate them for their righteousness. Why would they want to turn their back on their family and friends to become one of the damned? A few have escaped the Phelps sphere of influence but it isn’t many and it hasn’t been remotely easy for them.
But I would argue that there is an important difference between God “hating” someone and God causing or allowing someone to suffer. I don’t believe that God hated Job but He poured down suffering upon him. Jesus’ suffering was not evidence of God’s wrath but of His love (and I acknowledge that the simplified nature of that sentence makes it sound more warped than intended).
In the OT where God “hates” or is wrathful, it’s usually where the transgressors are irredeemable: the worshippers of the Golden Calf, the children who mocked Elisha, the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. God does not pretend to love them; they serve as extreme object lessons for the faithful - “repent/believe or you’ll be next”. Fortunately by the NT God has started taking Prozac.
As for the WBC, Fred and his family are both victims and abusers; it is well-known that the former often become the latter. We may pity them, we may even forgive them, but we should not justify their unjust words and deeds. Even when we love the sinner we must hate the sin.
