SOLO-International Op-Ed: God Is A Psychopath ... And Freedom Is His Prey

Lindsay Perigo

February 20, 2008

What grown men and women are still prepared to believe in the twenty-first century is ... well, hard to believe. I've been watching a lot of Fox TV lately, and am incredulous at the parade of shysters who've just written books claiming they've been to heaven or hell and back, and the deferential tone adopted toward them by supposedly intelligent interviewers who are, supposedly, human beings.

One such chicane is Bill Weise, a Christian who claims to have been plucked from his body by Jesus and dropped off in Hell, so that he could come back, scare the bejeezus out of us wretched sinners and terrify us back to the straight and narrow. A Christian website's blurb for his book calls it:

"An incredible testimony of Bill Wiese and his 23-minute trip to Hell. Bill was placed in Hell, not as a casual observer, but as someone who was not saved. He recounts all the horrid details with such precision that it captivates the listener from start to finish. If you haven't heard these testimonies, stop everything and hear them. They will permanently altered [sic] your outlook on life. My prayer life moved away from 'Lord, bless me here and bless me there,' to 'Souls, Souls, Souls for Jesus.' Jesus came to save us from unspeakable doom, and your love for Him will grow once you hear what He saved us from. Bill's testimony will wake up the Lukewarm, convict the Backslidden, warn the wicked, motivate the timid to share, and put the fear of God into all that hear."

Fox interviewed Mr. Weise and dribbled respectfully as this hornswoggler uttered the most horrendous hogwash. Two drooling beasts were on hand to batter and bruise his ribs as an accoutrement to the sizzling of his flesh, he told us. And he was out of his body? He was assailed on all sides by writhing and screaming, he averred. Heard and seen how, exactly, if his ears and eyes were back at the house still? But aside from such elementary howlers is the fathomless inhumanity of it all ... and it would be nice, though apparently unrealistic, to think such vileness had been put behind us by now.

Robert G. Ingersoll expressed it best:

The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh, told his disciples not to resist evil, to love their enemies, and when
smitten on one cheek to turn the other, and yet we are told that this same God, with the same loving lips, uttered these heartless,
these fiendish words; "Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels."

These are the words of "eternal love."

No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror.

All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul.

This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God -- the mercy of Christ.

This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.

Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed.

It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge.

That was said in the nineteenth century. Ingersoll went on to express the hope that Christians were civilizing up and abandoning their belief in this reason-banishing fiendishness. Yet here we are in the twenty-first century and Christians are being beamed around the world via one of reason's greatest technological marvels promoting precisely this fiendishness!

God remains, in this resurgent Christian view, a psychopath. For "Jesus came to save us from unspeakable doom, and your love for Him will grow once you hear what He saved us from," read, "Jesus came to save us from the unspeakable doom that He Himself created for us, and your gratitude to Him will grow once you know He might ... might ... spare you from it while consigning billions of others to it." If this is not psychopathy masquerading as theology it is proof that they are one and the same.

One of the hallmarks of psychopathy is the absence of conscience, the ability to contemplate the most hideous of propositions and actions without scruple or qualm, with equanimity, with a smile even. Following its interview with the fiendish fake, Weise, Fox trotted out a Jesuit priest for further elaboration on the delights of Hell. This man was clearly gay, and it amused me to reflect that centuries ago he would have been burned by his fellow-zealots even before his God got to him. But there he sat, benignly affirming the most malignant of propositions. Eternal torture, justified and dispensed with a psychopath's smile. More galling still, the Fox interviewers raised nary an eyebrow nor a protest.

It is the abiding disgrace of American public life that presidential candidates on both the Right and the Left are beholden to such barbarous balderdash, and even now a freethinker like Ingersoll would be squandering his pearls seeking a high office like the presidency (which he was often urged to do). One of the current contenders, mercifully not a frontrunner, even proposes to amend the Constitution to accommodate this perverted piffle. If Americans value their freedom they must smite not just the Islamofascist theocrat from without but Christian theocrats like Huckabee from within.

Religion relies on the seduction of the gullible by the psychopathic, the psychopaths affecting to speak for a Super-Psycho. Americans inhabit a Republic founded on reason. They must embrace it anew if they are to secure their liberty ... for liberty is secure only where reason is sacred.

ENDS

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