Once I rejected Catholicism, I drifted around but couldn't stick to much of anything but Eastern philosophy. Eventually, Tom Paine talked me into deism. If anything, I'm a deist—someone who, as my dictionary puts it, believes that "God created the world and its natural laws, but takes no further part in its functioning [as evidenced by the flies crawling on starving babies' eyes in Ethiopia]." I added the latter bit in case you were wondering.
That said, I invite you to consider this. ...
So there was this program on one of the God channels recently, about the Rood and Christ's crucifixion thereon, and one of the talking heads with a turned-around collar was saying how God harbored so much love and compassion for mankind that he allowed his only son to become a man in order that his only son could then be offered up to him as the blood sacrifice necessary to appease his otherwise eternally and fatally implacable anger toward mankind.
He didn't say that exactly, but that's exactly what he was saying; and the thing that curdled my blood (besides the Manson-like arrangement of his facial features) was that he obviously saw nothing illogical or unconscionable or reprehensible or grotesquely pagan—or even mildly disappointing—in the "rationale" he was spouting.
I mean, it's so perfectly reasonable. ...
GOD: I am mad at all of mankind for something just two of them did. I will therefore allow malicious, sadistic men to beat the bejesus out of my only begotten son, and then cruelly and slowly murder him in order to make me feel better. See? See how much I love mankind after all?
I'm sorry, but if that makes sense, so do thousand-dollar Hannah Montana tickets.
Seriously. Are you seriously going to tell me that the only way God could feel mollified, could stop feeling so goddamned hateful toward human beings, was through the grisly slaughter of his own son? That's insupportable. Couldn't God, being God, have just simmered down? More to the point, couldn't God, being God, have just not hated the imperfect beings he himself created in the first place?
Forgive me, please, but I like to give God credit for having more, um, humanity than that. Speaking of which ...
Sometimes I think there's just no hope for humankind; that this is still the Planet of the Apes. Bonobo chimps seem more rational to me than we. Ditto for whales, elephants, dolphins, dogs, and assorted farm animals.
And sometimes the malevolence that seems to underlie the general insanity of human existence makes me literally shudder.
Don't throw any Bibles at me for this one. I've already read both Testaments. I've also read Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, and wish more people would do the same.
For further reading:
Inquisitive minds want to know ...
Phew! So grateful I didn't make altar boy after all ...
And for your penance, ten years in the laundry, missy ...
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