Wednesday, July 07, 2004

 

God Only Knows

I was flipping through some of Shack's archived material from his journal. He's a great recapper, really funny, and is probably who I'm going to be in 15 years.

Anyway, I read one of his finer works, written right after 9/11 when Jerry Falwell shat all over American unity by claiming that God made the WTC attacks happen because of all the nasty feminists and gays. And it led me to thinking: Why the hell do people like him even worship that kind of God?

Now, I'm a Christian myself, but a very lenient one. I believe that good people of all faiths- be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, Jainist, atheist, etc.- get into Heaven. Certainly I believe in the existence of Hell and the existence of sin, but only really bad stuff counts as sin, such as murder, rape, theft, and abuse.

The kind of God Falwell and his ilk worship leaves me perplexed. The kind of God who brings plagues upon people just because they love members of the same sex. The kind of God who only lets Christians, and only "saved" Christians, into Heaven, and sends everyone else, no matter how good they were in life, into the Greatest Barbecue Pit in the Universe. And, as seen above, the kind of God who lets planes get hijacked and crashed into buildings because we all don't love him enough. I could just say that they're gigantic gaping assholes who are letting their own sordid views of humanity taint the perception of the Supreme Being.

Then I realize the truth: They're afraid.

They've had this stuff pounded into their heads by their parents, and their parents before their parents, and so forth. They're afraid that no matter how disagreeable they find God's policies, how atrocious they find them, they have to answer to his every beck and call, or else they'll get the slow roast. They may hate what God does, but he's such a tyrant that they have to put on a happy face and say, "Sorry, suckers, God hates you." And what do I say to that?

Bull. Shit.

Let's say, for one minute, that God is some sort of fascist tyrant who tosses people into Hell with reckless abandon. Would you actually go along with that? Or would you rebel, and try to find some other way? If God is really like that... well, would being grouped with Lucifer et al really be such a bad thing?

We wouldn't put up with this shit from Hitler, from Mussolini, or from Stalin. Why should we (wholly theoretically, of course) put up with this shit from God?

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