While out at Coney Island I got into a talk with a Christian evangelist. He was holding this big sign saying something about everybody going to Hell. I asked him what I always ask professing Christians.
Why?
Why if your G-d is all merciful does he chuck good people into the Lake of Fire.
Folks that don't happen to buy the born again line are condemned to fry. If they were moral, and kindly all their lives they still get the molten lava enema.
I got the usual answer. "God is Just". So unless you Believe you'n your is toast,...literally.
The Nuns told me the same thing btw,..."Just".
Merciless, but "Just".
Actually he was a nice guy, and was trying to save me from Hell. I wasn't disrespectful of his stuff. In fact we agreed on several points. I kept saying that his gawd was cruel, and he kept to the that "just" thing.
I hope I one day run into him in some Hashish house in Paradise so we can continue our conversation.
Below are visions of the Managements eternal mercy.
Btw, they always blow away New York in these things. Never Moose Jaw or East Saint Louis. Better yet,...Paris!
I always get in trouble when I go after anything French. So for the record I love the French,..especially their boys. I just want to see the aliens or some big bug take out the City of Light for a change, and give us a rest.
Stay Tuned.
4 comments:
New York is such a perfect symbol of modernity and its hubris: all those skyscrapers. Watching the Louvre burn up just wouldn't have the same sizzle. But if you want to see L.A. City Hall struck down by death rays instead of NYC for a change, check out the old version of "War of the Worlds."
People like that fundy preacher to me are truly scary. Mad ideologies like his are exactly what permit otherwise decent, or decent-seeming people to torture and murder in the most hideous ways imaginable, as during the Inquisition. Mr. Jefferson, build up that wall 'twixt church and state!
Aw I just like yanking their fundy chains. Though I'm sincere about the question.
Why?
Why is their gawd so damned cruel.
They never have a real answer. This is what happens when you appoint yourself press agent for the Founder of Dreams, She who Painted the Void with Fire!
She's one heck of a Lady.
If ya gonna speak for Her you better have your bleep together.
...and these guys don't.
Okay we'll compromise on the end of the world target.
Scratch Paris, we'll blast Shanghai. It looks more futuristic that Manhattan.
Also as far as I know it's never been vaporized in any movie. I can hardly wait.
Re:'Actually he was a nice guy, and was trying to save me from Hell.'
and:
'Why is their gawd so damned cruel?'
Are you SURE this was really a 'nice guy', Sidney? I think we go on being sentimental about Christianity out of a kind of cultural inertia, and few of us stop to look at it objectively. One problem is that it cloaks itself so thoroughly in GOOD INTENTIONS of the simpering and suffering kind, and Christians always manage to present themselves as victims.
Your question: 'Why is their gawd so damned cruel?' is more to the point. The answer (for me) is that God is made in Man's image, and the people who made this god are damned cruel.
Their cruelty is another version of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil', the banally evil state of mind that enabled apparently civilised Germans to herd Jews into Auschwitz - at bottom it is a sheer lack of imagination. These fundamentalists - like 'sociopaths' - simply do not grasp that other people (especially people with ideas different from their own ideas) actually exist. It requires an act of imagination to realise the existence of other people; it requires an imaginative intelligence. These people don't have it. They are locked in the little world of their 'Book' as thoroughly as the Taliban are locked inside their little Book - in both cases the only book they will ever read or think about.
Shanghai is a ripe target. Or it could be Hong Kong. I have a neighbor from Hong Kong who's simply awful. Warning: very big image.
http://www.bni.com/Portals/0/Mary/HongKong2.jpg
Can't you see Godzilla munching up this cityscape? Very tasty!
"...God is made in Man's image, and the people who made this god are damned cruel."
I think Sion has hit it on the head. Man is much worse than your average giant lizard.
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