February 16, 2004
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You just had to go and do it, didn't you? You had to go scavenging
through the bone yard of buried religious delusions and dig-up that
putrescent lie. Yet: When anger and scorn come your way as a result, you
want to portray yourself as the aggrieved party in the situation.
Poor lamb. Let's get one thing straight: No one ever killed anyone's god (Jews, Romans, Geeks playing Dungeons and Dragons) -- but I'd gleefully nail you -- you conflated manqué of Christian martyrdom, you fundamentalist dunderhead, you delusional, celluloid asshat, you who have retrieved and promulgated the ancient, blood-libel of deicide -- to a cross of derision. Where did you get the unmitigated gall to make such inane claims? When did the golden light of the sun abandon its position in the eastern horizon and begin rising each morning from out of your silly, Hollywood ass? Where do you come off claiming the right to speak for divine thunder, declaring that you, and only you, can understand the arcane text of the ocean's rolling scrolls? These divine truths remain hidden from the rest of us dim-witted heathens, you would have us believe; it is true that for the rest of us such mysteries and meanings are vague, arcane, ineffable.... These things seem the stuff of: swirling tea leaves, congealing sheep entrails, the random splay of mystic cards.... They're the stuff of musty reams of obscure texts, written in dead tongues, that limned the lives of shepherds, now a thousand years dead, and chronicled the hallucinations of barbarians who believed they had mined the mythic admonitions of their vengeful god. The secrets of creation, you claim to know. How is it that you are privy to such timeless truths, that the mind of God is available to you, and that God's words and wishes resonate through yawning millennia to be understood by you -- and you alone? You medievalist simp, You retrograde dip-shit, You counterfeit prophet waxing psychotic for cretinous hypocrites, You cannibal who dines on the flesh of dreams... Can't you let us be.... Can't you keep your life-defying lies to yourself, keep them within the confines of your church and the cramped quarters of you own mind? Since you've chosen to display these opinions in a public arena, then you risk being questioned, even ridiculed and renounced. And don't go into a victim-swoon about it, you phony. Because when you go so far as to claim that you have apprehended the secrets of boundless creation -- and that all those who don't believe your version of events will be condemned to the torments of eternal damnation -- then you can bet your fatuous ass that those claims will be scrutinized.... What in the blue blazes did you expect -- for us to fall to our collective knees before you, for us to lower our heads in perpetual supplication before your towering truths, to have our muddied minds and our sullied, little wills dissolve in the baptismal waters of your rivers of immanent righteousness? To hell with that, you charlatan, you tent-revivalist mountebank, you who claim you have come to heal us, but who offer our ailing souls only snake oil... You and your holy army of mass media crusaders may be in possession of "mega-churches," filled to capacity by a desperate and dim-witted flock, you might own cable television empires reaching a gullible audience numbering in the millions, you might make expensive movies that awe zealots and manipulate dullards -- but there are millions more of us who will resist you, who are on to your toxic con, who will not be punk'd nor demeaned by you. We see though your empty, virtual iconography; we will do our utmost to topple the false edifice of your spurious piety and to reveal you for the fraud you are. And if you truly do believe in these inane myths, then that makes the situation all the more unsettling. Why not try this: Instead of attempting to contact Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or Casper the Friendly Ghost -- why don't you attempt to channel the departed spirits of Voltaire or H.L. Mencken? There will be no otherworldly conjuring (or con jobs) required to perform this miracle: Simply go to the public library and check out their books. Then you might want to stop by the science section, where you could happen upon a few delusion-decimating tidbits such as this: While your bible tells you that the earth is a shade over seven thousand years old, the actual figure is (approximately) 4.6 billion years. How do you account for this slight discrepancy of say... 4,599,993,000 years? Furthermore, that's calculated against the approximated age of the earth, itself, not that of the universe, which is estimated to be between ten to twenty billion years old. You can do the math on that one, Mel. And those aren't the only things in your bible that just don't add up. In your Book of Joshua (10:13) it is stated that God commanded the sun to stand still in the sky... Really now? Pardon me... but how is it possible that this omniscient god of yours, who you believe created the earth and heavens, didn't realize that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth? Furthermore, he was apparently ignorant of numerous smaller details as well, such as, wherein Matthew (13: 32) he identified mustard seeds as "[...] the smallest of seeds." How can it be that the creator of the universe could have had such an embarrassing lapse of basic knowledge on the subject of botany? And what about the many other lapses in logic (flights of fantasy that are insane by any standard, with the exception of the sublime logic found in the realm of cartoons) such as the one about the fellow surviving for three days and three nights in the stomach of a monstrous fish (Jonah 1:17) -- and what was up with that wacky, talking donkey in Numbers (22:28)? We're in Looney Tunes territory here, all you highly suggestible Children of the Lord... In Exodus, instead of leveling plagues and pestilence upon the guilty and innocent alike in Egypt, The All-Mighty should have simply dropped an ACME anvil down from heaven on the head of Pharaoh and been done with it. Which brings up the subject of the abject cruelty of your deity of choice, Saint Mel of the Flickering Cinematic Light: Don't you think this is a lovely little passage from Deuteronomy (32:23-25): "I will spend mine arrows upon them... The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs." Then there is this bit of divinely inspired baby killing and faith-based rape from Isaiah (13:9,15-18): "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger... Every one that is found shall be thrust through... Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes... and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them.... [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children." I can't fathom how it is possible that you believe these pathological ravings to be sacred. Furthermore: That you think I should feel guilty for my belief -- that it is all a steamy pile of behemoth dung. Where do you come off believing we should all hang our heads in everlasting shame, due to this cracked-brain notion of yours that more than two thousand years ago -- at the behest of a wicked cabal -- a mammon-worshipping, blood-lusting collection of ramble went on a cosmic killing-spree and murdered your god? Have you thought this whole thing through? The implications are staggering, Pious Mel, Our Divine Apostle of Perpetual Psychosis; therefore, it must follow that the earth and heavens are teeming with murderous intrigue. Have you also considered this, that since one must "burp" the oxygen out of a container of Tupperware -- thus rendering its confines similar in composition to an extraterrestrial environment -- that, in this dangerous, demon-haunted universe, conniving space aliens must certainly be behind such a scheme and they are lying in wait for a secret signal, something along the lines of "let's have some of that left-over three bean salad tonight," for their moment to spring forth and enslave us all? Yes, you have to watch those space aliens, Mel: They're almost as cunning and conniving as the Jews. · · · · · ·
America the 'beautiful' on Swans Phil Rockstroh on Swans (with bio). Do you wish to share your opinion? We invite your comments. E-mail the Editor. Please include your full name, address and phone number. If we publish your opinion we will only include your name, city, state, and country. Please, feel free to insert a link to this work on your Web site or to disseminate its URL on your favorite lists, quoting a few paragraphs or providing a summary. However, please DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work on the Web without the expressed written authorization of Swans. This material is copyrighted, © Phil Rockstroh 2004. All rights reserved. |
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