Posted by farid from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Friday, August 01, 2003 at 1:42PM :
The purpose of all this railing against the three sisters, but espeially Christianity, isn't because I was attacked by a priest or hate charity and kindness. The good that is in us is there in spite of religion not because of it. It's because Christianity, more than any other religion, teaches intolerance...and is dangerous and destructive of human well-being...especially if we want to leave the Dark Ages behind and avoid another one.
Anyone reading this has to stop him or herself from playing the Christian Rag in their heads...stop seeing images of saintly children whenever Christianity is mentioned, or even gentle Jesus, meek and mild. The word unfailingly conjures up images of cherubim singing sweet hymns of glory...children on their knees, sweetly smiling old folk and the small pittance spent on charity work that only sounds significant because none of us really knows how much money these bastards have socked away for the last one thousand years and like any Vegas Casino they have to give SOMETHING away to keep the folks coming in...as if the Nazi party didn't have its successes and poster children as well, it's paid vacations on government owned luxury oceanliners, the good wages and social programs and yes even the bright shining Hitler Youth choirs, singing regulation Christmas carols. Christianity is the booming international industry it is not because of the children...but because of the business of running a world-wide church, the oldest and richest corporation ever. The children and Easter bunnies and holidays is the window dressing intended to confuse and confound the real issue at hand whenever this religion is brought up...its real successes being nothing anyone wants to talk about.
Christianity brought no new kindness or hitherto well kept secrets for gentleness into the world. What it brought was the promise of a miraculous gift, a cheap carnival trick, a "death defying" act... the promise of cheating Nature itself...if only one believes unquestioningly in the divinity of a Jew carpenter...the more ridiculous the initiation the more maleable the mind that passes successfully through it. You've got to be pretty stupid and low to even want to benefit at such a price. And why...pray tell, does this whole thing have to be conditioned on the blood of an innocent young man? Why? Why, to prepare his followers to accept the shedding of the blood of countless other sacrificial victims, all of them less worthy than "He" was.
If you believe this rot...how can you fathom anyone refusing it? I mean just imagine if it were true...that for accepting this little "deal", you'd live forever in a paradise while everyone else rots away. What would you think of the idiots who refused this unbelievable benefit...this gift so ripe and easy for the getting? Why you'd think they were depraved, less than human...had no sense or care for their families, their children especially whom these inhuman parents would be damning to the grave and hell...wouldn't it be better to save them, or at least their children...even from themselves? And there you get the real engine that drives Christ Inc. and hides behind all this window dressing...a belief in Christian doctrine sets you above those who refuse its benefits...who must be incapable of accepting such an obvious and tremendous gift...do they really count...in the larger god-picture of things? Do they really matter? If you can't "save" them, aren't they already damned to hell for all eternity anyway, so what if you run right over them?
While "enlightened" Christians will patronizingly admit that many people living before Christ were good and decent and that among today's religions there are also many good and wonderful people...still, they'll hint, with a nod and a wink..."wouldn't you rather be good and kind AND get to live forever"? And the only way you'll do that is by being Christian and believing in the divinity of Christ. Okay, so I believe he was divine...I'll take your word for it, or his. I'll be satisfied with the loaves and fishes, the walking on water and raising the dead...I'm easy...no need to break his bones and bleed him dry just so he can get up and fly for my benefit. But that isn't good enough...you don't get into Heaven and cheat death just by accepting Christ's divinity without proof...without bloody proof...not until you have washed in his blood and drank it and ate his body, for you have to symbollically have been there as they nailed him up and done nothing to stop it...you have to admit in your black little heart that you're GLAD he was killed, his followers insist on it, cause that's the ONLY way, brothers and sisters, you're going to get the full benefits...100% coverage. You have to be a participant in His murder if you hope to benefit from it. That's what makes Christianity unique from other "good" religions. A Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Pagan, a Cannibal, may be ever so kind and sweet and good to their children...but ONLY a Christian has the edge...gets the ultimate goodie...and he or she only gets it by participating in the murder, symbollically of course...and eating the dead god, also symbollically too...what do you think they are...honest savages?
And what makes Evangelicals so much more rabid and virulent than the rest is their insistance that you have to be born in the blood all OVER again..that you have to make the decision deliberately...pledge yourself to it like an initiation into the KKK or any other fanatical organization with a bloody rite of passage. You have to DEMAND that the blood wash all over your grown, adult self...consecrate yourself knowingly...not as a baby, but in full, conscious control of your mature faculties, to the promise and benefits that accrue from murder most foul, a blood sacrifice of the most innocent. You have to knowingly embrace this most disgraceful of all "gifts"..."Yes, by all means, hang that Jew and slit his throat...I have to get to Heaven"!!! As if this type shouldn't be the LAST person to get there.
Even though it says, "thou Shalt Not Kill" over the doorway...there could never have been a Christian heaven or a means for you to enter it if Christ had escaped execution. You HAD to have Christ killed or no goodies...and it says right there he was killed FOR you...when you were the bastard who deserved it all along, if anyone did. The religion begins with a gross injustice, with ritual murder...with infanticide. After that, you can dress it up all you want to, sing hymns, hold hands, give to the poor and all the other stuff put out in the literature. But at heart, it's a religion of murder and of accepting the gifts that come from murder...like lots of petroleum, for one.
I keep coming back to this because in America for some time there's been a concerted, ongoing effort to "bring religion into our lives". By which religion is meant Christianity of course and not just any form of it but Evangelical, Puritanical Protestantism. Ever so slowly and steadily the advocates of this form of a "return to god" have been laying the groundwork...as they still are. Every so often one of them screws up and lets the rat out of the bag too soon, as if they just can't wait to get at the rest of us...and is quickly chastised and the impropriety papered over. Fallwell screwed up that way and Trent Lott also said some things prematurely.
They've suceeded in getting federal money for "private schools" that are nothing more than garage academies teaching a virulent form of Christianity only one step removed from teaching White Supremacy, homophobia, racism and male dominance...all over again. But when they say "Christian"...you all play that Christian Rag in your heads and think of kind Jesus and a host of heavenly voices. They aren't stupid, not by a long shot. Any Afro-American willing to bleach his or her soul is welcome to join as an equal partner...for now. Hell, for an Afro-American to be even BE a Christian is like reveling in the rape of your ancestors. The same is true of women, marginally, for now.
In these garage madrassahs a kind of darkling education is being funded by the rest of us nitwits that will produce, years down the line, a bumper crop of illiterate, ignorant, chauvinistic, suspicious, intolerant and prone to violence but very dedicated and passionate soldiers for god who'll want to return us all to the Good Old Days. Their one common bond will be hatred for the United States Constitution as that supreme document from hell that allowed god to be "driven out of daily life"...as they already want to put the Ten Commandments into every classroom...they'll want the Constitution removed or gutted, because the two cannot live side by side were "true" and awful Christianity exists. To their dim lights it's this document that allowed homosexuals out of the closet, that gave women more rights than they ever had in any Christian country before...that allowed Afro-Americans and then other ethnic minorities into schools and neighborhoods and restaurants etc. AND THEY ARE RIGHT...and bless us and it that it yet exists. The Constitution was designed specifically with one eye cocked back towards Europe, where the armies of the one true god were ripping the earth apart...as protection against the destructive force that is embedded in every "true" religion that believes in one supreme god...theirs...and manages to get its blood soaked and righteous hands on the instruments of government.
While the rest of us revel in the freedom to pierce our bodies and dance and get high...these burrowing, long-range planning Christians will plod steadily along doing more of what they've already managed to do to get us here, at the doorstep to another Dark Age.
If I say Christianity is doing this...people will play that Christian Rag... instantly conjure up angelic faces singing Christmas carols in quaint snowy streets. People sing, they always have, they always will. That isn't the face of Christianity most people see...certainly not the face the "enemies" of Christ see. These Christians aren't content to live and believe as they want...as I don't much give a good goddamn what they think, believe or want. Let them practise their religion in any way they want to...but I DO expect them to keep their hands off of the Constitution and I wouldn't mind a bit if they all lost their tax exemptions. But they don't return the favor.
Who bothers to go into their churches or bedrooms to see how they conduct themselves? No one. Let them go their ways, let them go to heaven or hell...no one bothers them. But THEY are botherd! They are bothered that gay people are considered human by the rest of us...they are bothered that Blacks who don't kiss their white arses should be free from discrimination and receive "white" benefits anyway...they are especially upset that women, not theirs, but any women anywhere have the same expectation men demand to control their bodies and earn equal pay and have all the rights and freedoms of any other human being. These things annoy the shit out of them because they are anathema to a sheepshit god from some desert outback over 2000 years ago.
It isn't in Judo-Christo-Islo teachings or leanings to live and let live. No Ma'am. If one person out of ten thousand believes he or she has a right to copulate with their pet in the privacy of their home...millions of Christians will lose sleep, beat their wives and spend their days marching on the State capitol demanding an end to Permissiveness...warning that the world will be destroyed unless this raging iniquity is stomped out...this one person done away with, this lone threat to ten million, whom you would think were just waiting for one guy to screw fido before they all went to hell and grabbed their own pets, so tenuous is their own hold on themselves.
And the scariest thing of all about these Christian soldiers is that their religious beliefs tumble over neatly into a set pattern of political, economic, social and ecological agendas that are as destructive of human happiness and well being...and the earth, air and sea, as their morals are. They buy completely into the notion of the white man...yeah the WHITE MAN, as lord of all Creation to whom the world and everything on it, over it, under it and in it was handed as his birthright by Yahwe to do with as he sees fit. To the Protestant Puritan, the soul brother of the dour Hebrew prophets of old, financial success, here on earth, is a sign...not of theivery and doubledealing, but a sign of god's favor, smiling down on you in a rain of greenbacks, stock options and no taxes. To them it is easiest of ALL for a rich man to enter heaven...he already knows the way.
Now I can hear several devout people on their knees saying..."Ah but this isn't REAL Christianity". It's real enough. Thalidomide didn't screw up everyone's genes it came in contact with...but enough to get it banned as a human health hazard for pregnant women, which means all the rest of us. It may not teach this stuff openly in the bible...doesn't have to. But if you've gone through the initiation rites of whatever branch of this religion you believe in...you're "ready" and ripe...your mind, your critical faculties have already been mangled...and a goodly proportion of all of you...Catholic, Presbyterian, Lutheran...you name it...are primed and ready to go that EXTRA distance "for god", even if it means shedding some of the "outmoded" dictates previously held so dear by you, because God's work is waiting and His word needs to be gotten out mo' bettah...even if it means killing the heathen and reprobate...which ALL of them have done with a passion, at different times, right up to and including this recent war on the people of BetNahrain.
Christian indoctrination produces conditions, in the minds of enough of them, to swell the ranks of this army of Evangelical Christians you're going to be hearing more from in the decades to come. As thrilling as it may be to work for UPS or Microsoft...it's far more satisfying to be working for the Lord. They aren't going to be content to leave things as they are...indeed that's what set them off, made them popular...all this freedom and sinful licentiousness getting out of hand, you know, Women's Lib...Civil Rights...Gay Rights...permisiveness...abortion, AIDS, Gay adoptions and soon Gay marriage...all the things their simple minds believe were sent to plague us (and are still with us and spreading) by a disgruntled Deity...as signs of his displeasure (another gift from them Hebrew "moralists" of old) and a warning call to get back to the right path...and drag the rest of us with them...or kill us...like they've always done when they had the slightest chance. And we...we dummies...intent on our own pleasure portfolios...are not only going to stand by and let them...we're also going to pay them our taxes so they can fund it all.
Educated and cultured Germans believed the early Nazis were a necessary evil in the fight against dreaded (and "Jewish") Bolshevism...and that when the fight was over, they could easily control these budding, evangelical Fascists. Our politicians and others are also using the Christian Coalitions in the same way...to muster politcal might for their own economic agendas and plow, under God, those who oppose them...and they too believe these dime store Christians will be easy to control and put down when no longer needed.
We'll see.
-- farid
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