I will never know what the solider was doing on her computer. But I suspect that she and the colleague who stood beside her Googled my name and found my articles and essays on Islam. In college, I’d published a bit on Islam and my experiences of Muslim-Christian dialogue. It wasn’t much—mostly blogging and one published piece, and nothing on Israel-Palestine—but it seems to have been significant enough to ruffle the soldier’s feathers. Dialoging with Muslims and trying to upend anti-Muslim stereotypes shouldn’t be problematic, but being Muslim or Arab, or seeming to sympathize with them, is often met with ire at [Zionism’s] border. There are a couple dynamics at play.

First, closeness with Muslims is often viewed (rightly or wrongly) as synonymous with support for the Palestinians. And second, [neocolonialism] benefits from Islamophobia; if Americans and others have negative perceptions of Muslims (including Palestinian Muslims) it makes the subjugation of the Palestinians all the more palatable. As we walked away from the window, I took a mental note: anything you write could be Googled and used as reason to deny you entry next time.

Before and after that trip, I heard lots of stories from Arabs, white Americans, and others who’d gone through much, much worse at the Allenby Crossing or at Ben Gurion airport: forced to wait for hours without their passport; searched and patted down in undignified ways; interrogated about religion, family, and other personal matters; and insulted and treated as inferior.

In some cases, travelers were turned away completely, especially those who were known to participate in activism on behalf of Palestinian rights. Knowing all of this, and having had my own suspicious experience, when I returned from the Holy Land I didn’t write anything publicly about what occurred at the border, not to mention the injustices I witnessed.

[…]

I know that, in many ways, all of this writing is too little too late. If I—and the many other Americans who have traveled to the Holy Land and have seen similar things—had shared these stories sooner, maybe things would be a bit different now.

As disappointing as it would be to not return to the Holy Land—I love that place deeply—I’ll be content with the four incredible experiences I’ve had, which outnumber what most people will get. Many Palestinians, whether they live in the West Bank, Gaza, or in the diaspora, have never been able to visit the sites I have, to walk through and become familiar with the places from which their ancestors hailed. Unlike me, they have been denied the chance to feel the spray of the sea water of the Galilee, to smell spices wafting down the stone corridors of Jerusalem’s Old City, and to touch the tombs of Jesus, Abraham, and other holy figures.

It may turn out that, one day, I will get to return. Even despite my writing, as a white Catholic woman I will undoubtedly face fewer barriers to entry than my friends who are Arab or Muslim. And perhaps the [neocolonial] guards didn’t Google me after all. Maybe the musing of a Midwestern girl are not a concern to a major world power…

Either way, I feel compelled to write, to speak about what I’ve seen and learned. So you can expect to read further stories about Israel-Palestine here on Digging Our Well. It’s beyond time for me to take advantage of the fact that I was able to cross the Jordan, even despite my name.

Here at the Church of Santa Maria Magdalena, in the heart of Rome, administering mass is very much a male affair. In fact, throughout the Roman Church, the corridors of power are full of men. Women have a rôle, but it’s as a mother; virgin; wife. The churches argued that it’s a model which extends right back to the time of Jesus himself. The four Gospels all record that he chose twelve disciples, and that they were all men. It follows, they argued, that the priestly office should be held only by men, in imitation of Jesus’s decision two thousand years ago.

But among the many remarkable discoveries in Nag Hammadi were gospels which painted women in a very different light, the way [that] they came to be portrayed within the canonical Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, women are barely mentioned, and certainly Jesus didn’t have any female disciples, but in the suppressed Gospels of Philip and Mary, and in the Acts of Thecla and Paul, the picture is very different.

Far from being minor characters, these gospels reveal a church where in the first centuries after Jesus’s death, women took centre stage. And even more surprising: they suggest that in the years of Jesus’s life, women were even involved at the heart of his mission. And one of these texts suggests that there was one woman in particular who played a very important rôle in Jesus’s ministry. She’s someone who’s more usually associated with prostitution and madness than teaching the word of G‐d. She’s the bad girl of Christianity: Mary Magdalene.

For centuries, in art and literature, Mary Magdalene has been depicted as the repentant sinner: the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. But with the new discoveries of Nag Hammadi, a radically different and far more controversial picture of Mary is emerging.

In these texts, Mary appears very frequently as one of Jesus’s prominent disciples, and in one of the Nag Hammadi documents, in a text attributed to another of Jesus’s apostles, there’s an even more striking revelation. In a relatively unknown work, the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene plays a key rôle and it is implied within that Gospel that her relationship with Jesus wasn’t just spiritual.

…wow.

The Revelation consists of a series of visions. In the first Christ appears in the garb of a high priest, goes in the midst of seven candlesticks representing the seven churches of Asia and dictates to “John” messages to the seven “angels” of those churches. Here at the very beginning we see plainly the difference between this Christianity and Constantine’s universal religion formulated by the Council of Nicaea.

The Trinity is not only unknown, it is even impossible. Instead of the one Holy Ghost of later we here have the “seven spirits of God” construed by the Rabbis from Isaiah XI, 2. Christ is the son of God, the first and the last, the alpha and the omega, by no means God himself or equal to God, but on the contrary, “the beginning of the creation of God,” hence an emanation of God, existing from all eternity but subordinate to God, like the above-mentioned seven spirits.

In Chapter XV, 3 the martyrs in heaven sing “the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb” glorifying God. Hence Christ here appears not only as subordinate to God but even, in a certain respect, on an equal footing with Moses. Christ is crucified in Jerusalem (XI, 8) but rises again (I, 5, 18); he is “the Lamb” that has been sacrificed for the sins of the world and with whose blood the faithful of all tongues and nations have been redeemed to God.

Here we find the basic idea which enabled early Christianity to develop into a universal religion. All Semitic and European religions of that time shared the view that the gods offended by the actions of man could be propitiated by sacrifice; the first revolutionary basic idea (borrowed from the Philonic school) in Christianity was that by the one great voluntary sacrifice of a mediator the sins of all times and all men were atoned for once for all — in respect of the faithful.

Thus the necessity of any further sacrifices was removed and with it the basis for a multitude of religious rites: but freedom from rites that made difficult or forbade intercourse with people of other confessions was the first condition of a universal religion.

In spite of this the habit of sacrifice was so deeply rooted in the customs of peoples that Catholicism — which borrowed so much from paganism — found it appropriate to accommodate itself to this fact by the introduction of at least the symbolical sacrifice of the mass. On the other hand there is no trace whatever of the dogma of original sin in our book.

But the most characteristic in these messages, as in the whole book, is that it never and nowhere occurs to the author to refer to himself and his co-believers by any other name than that of Jews. He reproaches the members of the sects in Smyrna and Philadelphia against whom he fulminates with the fact that they

“say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan”;

of those in Pergamos he says: they hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a stumbling-block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication. Here it is therefore not a case of conscious Christians but of people who say they are Jews. Granted, their Judaism is a new stage of development of the earlier but for that very reason it is the only true one.

Hence, when the saints appeared before the throne of God there came first 144,000 Jews, 12,000 from each tribe, and only after them the countless masses of heathens converted to this renovated Judaism. That was how little our author was aware in the year 69 of the Christian era that he represented quite a new phase in the development of a religion which was to become one of the most revolutionary elements in the history of the human mind.

We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the Socialists.

In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the Socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets — although there are prophets enough among both of them — they are mass movements.

And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy.

So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.

It was only one century ago that many would have been shocked to hear the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’, as it simply wasn’t something that ordinary churches enjoyed teaching. While a few premodern Christians (including the infamous Protestant pioneer Martin Luther, who responded with a massive wall of text after Jews kept telling him ‘nah, I’m good’) were aware of this knowledge, evidently nobody was really in the habit of emphasizing it either — quite the opposite of the current situation, where the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’ has become a cliché.

Since many churches considered anti‐Judaism part of their job, it made sense that they would have wanted to keep quiet about J.C.’s Jewish background, as it would have inevitably raised all sorts of awkward questions, e.g. ‘If Jesus was Jewish, why don’t we all convert to Judaism?’ However, since some Christians feel guilty about nearly two millennia of violent Christian anti‐Judaism, including the Shoah, and many other Christians want to show their support for Zionism, the teaching that J.C. was Jewish has switched from being an arcane detail to basic knowledge.

Now, certainly not all who repeat this trivia are directing it to Jews. In fact, a decade ago I usually saw it directed at blatantly antisemitic Christians, though I doubt that it was always persuasive (as one ‘political pastor’ painfully learned in 1939). This counterargument is also a little irksome in its own way, as J.C.’s Jewish background should not be the only, or even the main, reason why somebody should respect contemporary Jewish people. The paradox of Jews inspiring two overwhelmingly gentile faiths does fascinate me, but Jewish people have worth aside from that.

In any case, if you have been lurking Jewish communities for a while then you have likely noticed that when Jews mention this phrase, they tend to mention it unhappily. It isn’t just that the phrase has become cliché and pedantic, but mainly because the intentions behind it are almost always misguided. At best, telling Jews that J.C. was Jewish is only a quite minor, woefully inadequate way of expressing solidarity. At worst, it is an evasive rhetorical trick, basically the Christian equivalent to saying ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend!’ or ‘I’m part Cherokee!’, hence why somebody deemed the phrase antisemitic. I find both of those authors harsh, personally, so this is my attempt at putting it more gently if anybody finds their tones too off‐putting.

While it delights me to see Christians who are sincerely interested in demonstrating solidarity with Jewish people, I suspect that all Jews would agree (for once) if I said that reminding others of J.C.’s Jewish background isn’t enough. Maybe better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough. How, then, should one go about it? Click here for my suggestions, zero of which involve supporting an antidemocratic régime! Evangelicals, take note! And if you want to discuss Christianity’s Jewish roots in a way that actually sounds sophisticated and interesting, Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts is arguably the way to get serious about understanding them. See? Christianity’s Jewish origins don’t have to sound like boring trivia!

If you tell a Jewish person that J.C. was a Jew, the politest response that you’ll get is simply ‘good for him’. Few people want to bluntly tell you ‘I don’t care’, let alone patiently and respectfully explain to a stranger why they find this knowledge irrelevant, so this my contribution for anybody who needed help. Hopefully I articulated this well!

https://apnews.com/article/israel-christians-taxes-church-palestinians-ac106bb1d49dd3d0d96613af53d4fcf7

[An address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968.

In his usual biting and sometimes sarcastic style, Illich goes to the heart of the deep dangers of paternalism inherent in any voluntary service activity, but especially in any international service "mission." Parts of the speech are outdated and must be viewed in the historical context of 1968 when it was delivered, but the entire speech is retained for the full impact of his point and at Ivan Illich's request.]

In the conversations which I have had today, I was impressed by two things, and I want to state them before I launch into my prepared talk.

I was impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the gift.

I was equally impressed by the hypocrisy of most of you: by the hypocrisy of the atmosphere prevailing here. I say this as a brother speaking to brothers and sisters. I say it against many resistances within me; but it must be said. Your very insight, your very openness to evaluations of past programs make you hypocrites because you - or at least most of you - have decided to spend this next summer in Mexico, and therefore, you are unwilling to go far enough in your reappraisal of your program. You close your eyes because you want to go ahead and could not do so if you looked at some facts.

It is quite possible that this hypocrisy is unconscious in most of you. Intellectually, you are ready to see that the motivations which could legitimate volunteer action overseas in 1963 cannot be invoked for the same action in 1968. "Mission-vacations" among poor Mexicans were "the thing" to do for well-off U.S. students earlier in this decade: sentimental concern for newly-discovered. poverty south of the border combined with total blindness to much worse poverty at home justified such benevolent excursions. Intellectual insight into the difficulties of fruitful volunteer action had not sobered the spirit of Peace Corps Papal-and-Self-Styled Volunteers.

Today, the existence of organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. I wanted to make this statement in order to explain why I feel sick about it all and in order to make you aware that good intentions have not much to do with what we are discussing here. To hell with good intentions. This is a theological statement. You will not help anybody by your good intentions. There is an Irish saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this sums up the same theological insight.

The very frustration which participation in CIASP programs might mean for you, could lead you to new awareness: the awareness that even North Americans can receive the gift of hospitality without the slightest ability to pay for it; the awareness that for some gifts one cannot even say "thank you."

Now to my prepared statement.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

For the past six years I have become known for my increasing opposition to the presence of any and all North American "dogooders" in Latin America. I am sure you know of my present efforts to obtain the voluntary withdrawal of all North American volunteer armies from Latin America - missionaries, Peace Corps members and groups like yours, a "division" organized for the benevolent invasion of Mexico. You were aware of these things when you invited me - of all people - to be the main speaker at your annual convention. This is amazing! I can only conclude that your invitation means one of at least three things:

Some among you might have reached the conclusion that CIASP should either dissolve altogether, or take the promotion of voluntary aid to the Mexican poor out of its institutional purpose. Therefore you might have invited me here to help others reach this same decision.

You might also have invited me because you want to learn how to deal with people who think the way I do - how to dispute them successfully. It has now become quite common to invite Black Power spokesmen to address Lions Clubs. A "dove" must always be included in a public dispute organized to increase U.S. belligerence.

And finally, you might have invited me here hoping that you would be able to agree with most of what I say, and then go ahead in good faith and work this summer in Mexican villages. This last possibility is only open to those who do not listen, or who cannot understand me.

I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans.

I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. A group like this could not have developed unless a mood in the United States had supported it - the belief that any true American must share God's blessings with his poorer fellow men. The idea that every American has something to give, and at all times may, can and should give it, explains why it occurred to students that they could help Mexican peasants "develop" by spending a few months in their villages.

Of course, this surprising conviction was supported by members of a missionary order, who would have no reason to exist unless they had the same conviction - except a much stronger one. It is now high time to cure yourselves of this. You, like the values you carry, are the products of an American society of achievers and consumers, with its two-party system, its universal schooling, and its family-car affluence. You are ultimately-consciously or unconsciously - "salesmen" for a delusive ballet in the ideas of democracy, equal opportunity and free enterprise among people who haven't the possibility of profiting from these.

Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders. Ideally, these people define their role as service. Actually, they frequently wind up alleviating the damage done by money and weapons, or "seducing" the "underdeveloped" to the benefits of the world of affluence and achievement. Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.

By now it should be evident to all America that the U.S. is engaged in a tremendous struggle to survive. The U.S. cannot survive if the rest of the world is not convinced that here we have Heaven-on-Earth. The survival of the U.S. depends on the acceptance by all so-called "free" men that the U.S. middle class has "made it." The U.S. way of life has become a religion which must be accepted by all those who do not want to die by the sword - or napalm. All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford. Such is the purpose of the Alliance for Progress of the middle-classes which the U.S. signed with Latin America some years ago. But increasingly this commercial alliance must be protected by weapons which allow the minority who can "make it" to protect their acquisitions and achievements.

But weapons are not enough to permit minority rule. The marginal masses become rambunctious unless they are given a "Creed," or belief which explains the status quo. This task is given to the U.S. volunteer - whether he be a member of CLASP or a worker in the so-called "Pacification Programs" in Viet Nam.

The United States is currently engaged in a three-front struggle to affirm its ideals of acquisitive and achievement-oriented "Democracy." I say "three" fronts, because three great areas of the world are challenging the validity of a political and social system which makes the rich ever richer, and the poor increasingly marginal to that system.

In Asia, the U.S. is threatened by an established power -China. The U.S. opposes China with three weapons: the tiny Asian elites who could not have it any better than in an alliance with the United States; a huge war machine to stop the Chinese from "taking over" as it is usually put in this country, and; forcible re-education of the so-called "Pacified" peoples. All three of these efforts seem to be failing.

In Chicago, poverty funds, the police force and preachers seem to be no more successful in their efforts to check the unwillingness of the black community to wait for graceful integration into the system.

And finally, in Latin America the Alliance for Progress has been quite successful in increasing the number of people who could not be better off - meaning the tiny, middle-class elites - and has created ideal conditions for military dictatorships. The dictators were formerly at the service of the plantation owners, but now they protect the new industrial complexes. And finally, you come to help the underdog accept his destiny within this process!

All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in your "community development" spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends_ and you rush back to your middleclass neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about "spits" and "w*tbacks."

You start on your task without any training. Even the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?

In fact, you cannot even meet the majority which you pretend to serve in Latin America - even if you could speak their language, which most of you cannot. You can only dialogue with those like you - Latin American imitations of the North American middle class. There is no way for you to really meet with the underprivileged, since there is no common ground whatsoever for you to meet on.

Let me explain this statement, and also let me explain why most Latin Americans with whom you might be able to communicate would disagree with me.

Suppose you went to a U.S. ghetto this summer and tried to help the poor there "help themselves." Very soon you would be either spit upon or laughed at. People offended by your pretentiousness would hit or spit. People who understand that your own bad consciences push you to this gesture would laugh condescendingly. Soon you would be made aware of your irrelevance among the poor, of your status as middle-class college students on a summer assignment. You would be roundly rejected, no matter if your skin is white-as most of your faces here are-or brown or black, as a few exceptions who got in here somehow.

Your reports about your work in Mexico, which you so kindly sent me, exude self-complacency. Your reports on past summers prove that you are not even capable of understanding that your dogooding in a Mexican village is even less relevant than it would be in a U.S. ghetto. Not only is there a gulf between what you have and what others have which is much greater than the one existing between you and the poor in your own country, but there is also a gulf between what you feel and what the Mexican people feel that is incomparably greater. This gulf is so great that in a Mexican village you, as White Americans (or cultural white Americans) can imagine yourselves exactly the way a white preacher saw himself when he offered his life preaching to the black slaves on a plantation in Alabama. The fact that you live in huts and eat tortillas for a few weeks renders your well-intentioned group only a bit more picturesque.

The only people with whom you can hope to communicate with are some members of the middle class. And here please remember that I said "some" -by which I mean a tiny elite in Latin America.

You come from a country which industrialized early and which succeeded in incorporating the great majority of its citizens into the middle classes. It is no social distinction in the U.S. to have graduated from the second year of college. Indeed, most Americans now do. Anybody in this country who did not finish high school is considered underprivileged.

In Latin America the situation is quite different: 75% of all people drop out of school before they reach the sixth grade. Thus, people who have finished high school are members of a tiny minority. Then, a minority of that minority goes on for university training. It is only among these people that you will find your educational equals.

At the same time, a middle class in the United States is the majority. In Mexico, it is a tiny elite. Seven years ago your country began and financed a so-called "Alliance for Progress." This was an "Alliance" for the "Progress" of the middle class elites. Now. it is among the members of this middle class that you will find a few people who are willing to send their time with you_ And they are overwhelmingly those "nice kids" who would also like to soothe their troubled consciences by "doing something nice for the promotion of the poor Indians." Of course, when you and your middleclass Mexican counterparts meet, you will be told that you are doing something valuable, that you are "sacrificing" to help others.

And it will be the foreign priest who will especially confirm your self-image for you. After all, his livelihood and sense of purpose depends on his firm belief in a year-round mission which is of the same type as your summer vacation-mission.

There exists the argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight into the damage they have done to others - and thus become more mature people. Yet it is less frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of their "summer sacrifices." Perhaps there is also something to the argument that young men should be promiscuous for awhile in order to find out that sexual love is most beautiful in a monogamous relationship. Or that the best way to leave LSD alone is to try it for awhile -or even that the best way of understanding that your help in the ghetto is neither needed nor wanted is to try, and fail. I do not agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn't have been volunteers in the first place.

If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as "good," a "sacrifice" and "help."

I am here to suggest that you voluntarily renounce exercising the power which being an American gives you. I am here to entreat you to freely, consciously and humbly give up the legal right you have to impose your benevolence on Mexico. I am here to challenge you to recognize your inability, your powerlessness and your incapacity to do the "good" which you intended to do.

I am here to entreat you to use your money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/25/europe/carlo-acutis-mother-sainthood-pope-francis-intl/index.html

He has a police badge bumper sticker and like 4 Scottish rites Freemason bumper stickers lol

Link here if you want ro subject yourself to the crankery of protestants and "catholics" that are protestants in denial

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2402275

I'm reading Levy's The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 and thought I'd share this screenshot. Really well written and researched book. Levy cites the midrash (fn77) from:

Pirqe Rebbe Eliezer, 24. [Heb], editio princeps, Constantinople, 1514. folio 16b. Digitized Copy, Hebrew Union College, Klau Library, in the Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer Manuscript Database.

Jesus: "You did WHAT in my name?!? Why would you torture gay ppl, wtf is wrong with you?!?! Why do you treat poor people so terrible, did you read my book at all?!"

"Oh my dad! Look at how much you've polluted Fathers planet, he is going to be so pissed. What do you mean prosperity gospel? That's not what that means!!! Me-Christ, you people are the devil!"

Graph in discussion

Just need to do some more lgbtq+ education and these losers will finally make it to the starting line of being "alright"

‭Proverbs 30:10 NLT‬ [10] Never slander a worker to the employer, or the person will curse you, and you will pay for it.

https://bible.com/bible/116/pro.30.10.NLT