Where you gonna run to, all on that day?

Because I am not a crazy person, I had not been keeping up with the doings of Westboro Baptist Church.  But for some reason, I decided to see what they've been up to lately, and WOW are those people ever insane.  "Golly gee," you say, employing heavy-handed sarcasm, "what a shocking revelation!  Tell me more, perfesser!"  Ho ho.  But if I can employ an extremely gross analogy, it's like this: every day, you have to walk past a certain house, and when you do, your nose is assailed by the intense, unrelenting stench of human feces (why you don't find another route is anyone's guess).  It is pretty doggone obvious from this that there is something seriously wrong with the people who live there.  But then, in your capacity as the city's health inspector, you get an order to enter the house and see what's going on (the neighbors are complaining, as you might expect), and when you do, you find that the entire interior is just nothing but floor-to-ceiling shelves, on which are thousands and thousands of carefully labeled mason jars each containing a separate bowel movement, and you realize that you are not dealing with ordinary howlingly insane people here.

You may remember (though I'd be surprised) that years ago, I did a rundown of a number of some, uh, songs that WBC produced on their at-the-time new website, God Hates America.  They were all to the tune of normal patriotic songs, only now the lyrics were about how America sucks, and also fags.  Well, it is with a heavy heart that I am forced to inform you that these songs appear to no longer be available on the internet.  In fact, it appears that the group ultimately decided that "God Hates America" was too limiting as a concept--so now, there is "God Hates the World."

Loathe as I am to recommend visiting a WBC site, you might actually want to in this case, to get a flavor of the full magnitude.  You can't see it, but the list of countries goes down much further than this screenshot cuts off:

Don't you love the way the O in "world" is a globe?  Gives the whole thing a fun, lighthearted touch!  My assumption on first seeing this was that, oh, sure, you can click on each country/territory (why do some non-independent countries get included?  You guess is as good as mine, but I guess if you want to know why the Isle of Man specifically is doomed, you're in luck…?) but they're all going to be the same only with different names slotted in--boilerplate about how they don't hate fags enough, blargh (even super-homophobic places like Uganda and Jamaica could always be more so, after all!).  

NOT SO.  Yes, they have a blurb for why every single country, individually, is hated by God.  And not only that, but each country has five different sections--"filthy manner of life," "God's wrath revealed," "false religious systems," "government," and "poster children for sin."  Somebody has put an absolutely mind-boggling amount of effort into this thing.  I mean, finding at least one example for every one of these countries, no matter how tiny, in every category?  MY GOODNESS!

As you can imagine, there appears to be a certain amount of theological confusion here.  Everything is adduced as evidence of a country's sinfulness.  Obviously, if a place has gay marriage, home run, but natural disasters, pogroms, and corrupt leadership are all cited as well, and cause and effect are blurred together: God hates some countries because of an insufficiently murderous attitude towards gays, but she (just fucking with them there) hates another as inferred from the fact that there was a famine?  Hmm.  Here's a thing about the president of the Central African Republic (former president as of now):

François Bozizé: Current President, he came into power as a result of a coup like so many of his predecessors. CAR is cursed with corrupt despotic leaders. The Lord controls the hearts of the kings and places whom he will in positions of power. Therefore, Central African Republic’s tyrannical presidents are appointed specifically by God to rule over those people.

Boy, a country doesn't really stand a chance if God is actually inflicting bad leaders on them.  Maybe she could give them good leaders, and then she wouldn't hate them so much?  Just a thought.  I know, I know; there's no point in trying to be rational here.  Whoever wrote this started with the premise that God hates everyone and everywhere, and then just looked for evidence proving this hatred.  But this goes to what I was saying above: this shit becomes even more insane when seen in such maximalist detail.  "God hates fags:" that's something we can all understand.  It's short and to-the-point.  But this…good lord.  Actually, I have to say, they're kind of devaluing their brand here (for whatever definition of "value" you think it ever had).  When you just have one single, repellent message, you can muster a lot of force behind it.  You  can really appall people.  But when you just go crazy like this, it just comes off as a twisted joke.  Before, people took you seriously to the extent that it seemed worth yelling at you over your hateful rhetoric.  Who's gonna yell over this?  Oh, I suppose they believe it to some extent, but it's also such obvious trolling that no one's gonna bother.  It's the same dynamic with Ann Coulter, whose work people used to bother trying to engage.  I'm afraid you've jumped the shark, WBC.

And still, the question looms large: should we take any of this shit seriously, or is the whole cult just an insanely committed group of performance artists?  If so, they certainly successfully gulled Louis Theroux, and I suppose in that case we would also have to assume that Nate Phelps and the other offspring who successfully resisted the brainwashing are just here to lend veracity to the whole thing?  All this seems, to put it mildly, implausible.  I mean, I suppose it's conceivable that their webmaster is a deep-undercover double agent working to discredit them, but even that, I dunno, man.

So you have to face the very real possibility that all this comes from true believers, which is just bone-chilling.  I mean, I kind of doubt that the people who vomited up all these words were actually shaking with rage as they thought about the horrendous sins of Guinea-Bissau; I assume they viewed it as a sort of game, to come up with good ex post facto reasons why a country was hated.  But if, in spite of this, they really believe what they're saying, that actually kind of makes it worse: it means they have normalized it all to the extent that it's just considered a casual fact of life that God fucking loathes everything about her creation, and is damning every other human on the planet to hell.  It's no surprise, obviously, that these people's worldview is monstrous, but that it should be so deeply engrained--oh my.  Gives me nightmares.

But hey, there's still hope: if you go to the site and look at the map, you will see that there are a number of tiny islands in blue, indicating that the info for them is "coming soon."  A cynic might see that as definitive evidence that God's hatred was considered preordained, and that they came to their conclusions based on no research, but I prefer to believe that, in a surprise twist, it may turn out that God actually loves the Pitcairn Islands (UK) or Niue (NZ).  May Her name be praised!

In conclusion:

There is no evidence to suggest there is any righteousness anywhere on the rock of Gibraltar; none who live here have the remotest interest in identifying and obeying the standards set by God. None here walk in an upright way, speak truth in their hearts or bear fruits suggesting they have any fear of the Lord. Instead, the indolent inhabitants of the Rock of Gibraltar naturally cleave to any wicked conduct that is pleasing to the eye and satisfying to the lusts of the flesh.