torture worship

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jesus asks us to hate our parents and siblings for him:

"if any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my
disciple.--luke 14:26

wow, that's some serious family values.

this quote and others like it throughout both the old and new testament are listed
on the quotes page of the skeptic's annotated bible, at
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com.

when wondering why civilization is careening on the edge of knocking itself off
and has been for years, one need only look at the dominant monotheistic religions
and their sacred texts to see a big contributing factor.

back in 1991, before i had a place to live and was hopping from one transient
hotel to another, i had to take my relief from boredom where i could find it. i
had no money to buy books with, and no computer.

one day i was waiting for a bus and saw a bible that someone had left under the
bus shelter. being raised in an atheist family i'd never read the whole thing. i
was wondering just what it was about this book that had moved so many people to
embrace ideas that, to me, have always seemed fairly batty. so i picked up the
bible and took it home with me.
i then read the whole thing cover to cover, as a sort of a historical research
project.

afterwards, i pretty much felt the same way about it that i had felt about it
before reading it: that the "golden rule" has a great deal of merit - but beyond
that, the bible is for the most part a redundant, repetitive chronicle of hundreds
of years of murder, rape, and insanity.

its highest value is as a collection of cautionary tales about abuse of power and
its consequences. if you read between the lines, you might see that there's an
unintentional message to be found there: when seen as a whole, the bible presents
a convincing case against institutionalizing religion.

it is full of dark omens reeled off by prophets babbling in metaphors three and
four deep, very likely while zoned out on amanita muscaria, or belladonna, or the
lysergic acid from ergotified rye bread, and not knowing that they were responding
to the effects of a drug. either that, or their brains were afflicted with that
particular sort of schizophrenic tendency which allows their own glands to pump
stuff into their brains that induces visionary experience. visions of burning
bushes and wheels within wheels and monsters with lots of heads and horns are
something that your average non-drug-using person doesn't usually experience while
in waking reality.

the christian coalition and other similar groups would very quickly condemn anyone
who did have such visions in modern times as a devil-possessed demon worshipper.
two thousand and some years after christ, the ones most fanatically rabid about
drug prohibition are extremist christians like john walters. there is some quality
of fundamentalists that seems to allow them the ability to engage in hypocrisy
without having the resulting cognitive dissonance that one would normally
experience.

how did this sick, self-contradicting, illogical craziness ever get to be so

mainstream? are human beings really that sadomasochistic? that lacking in common
sense?

there are more aspects of fundamentalist and mainstream christianity that are
aberrant and psychotic than there are ones which are helpful, inspiring and
empowering - and which don't promote behaviours matching christianity's own
definitions of "evil".

what strikes me as a symbol of the fundamental sickness embedded in this religion,

one which contradicts the idea that christianity is a faith of civilized humanity,
can be seen in the icon of christianity itself: the cross. in every church, in
every christian home, you will find the symbol of a figure of a man dying slowly
from wounds sustained in an act of torture, inflicted upon his body and mind by
sadistic fellow human beings.

this gruesome, intensely painful image of suffering, bleeding man hanging from a
couple of boards with nails pounded into his wrist tendons, is supposed to inspire
christians by showing them a sign of god's goodness and glory. but i must have
missed this, because what i see when i look at it is an image of god's son, jesus
christ, hanging on a cross dying after some romans put him there because he made
them politically nervous. as a sacrifice which in some wholly illogical way is
supposed to remit our wrongdoings for us if we simply trust that it does.

i have quite simply never been able to adequately wrap my mind around this whole
concept.

over the years i've seen some value to humanity in religion but only as it is
practiced by the non-zealous and the non-evangelical...the ones who let their
actions speak instead of haranguing the public and harping on people to change
their beliefs. such people know that their own satisfaction in their faith, the
glow that they get from their good works and private conversation with god, is by
far the best advertising and promotion that one can be for any life-programming or
belief system. it inspires not rebellion and resistance, but interest.

but sadly it seems that a large portion of the christian population are just plain
fanatics, which means there's no talking sense to them, their minds are made up
before they even speak. it's difficult to know just how large this group is, or
know if it represents a majority of christians or just a very large minority.
whatever the numbers, it's plain to see that elements amongst them have ridden
george w. bush's very illicit, highly suspicious coat-tails into government
power...and anyone ought to know that it's dangerous to put power into the hands
of fanatics. i suppose given the dearth of sanity and sensibility in the bible,
it's no wonder they're such wingnuts...but this doesn't do anything to assuage the
dread i have of what such a fanatic would do if he thought he had a mandate from
the people this time around - or merely once again decided such things don't
matter.

whatever george w. bush's true religious beliefs are, and whether or not his
mandate comes as he said it does from god, he acts much more like some sort of
crazed death cultist than a compassionate, love-your-enemies christian is supposed
to act.

a true christian would not mimic the pleading voice of a woman begging for her
life before an execution in texas. how sick does a person have to be to do this?
that such a person could be sitting in the highest office of the country - and
without the mandate of an election, yet - this shows us, in a way no other bush
atrocity has shown us so far, how far into the dark we've skidded our collective
vehicle and how deep the quicksand is that we've gotten ourselves into. we have a
maniac in control of our lives. he has appointed scores of other maniacs, some of
them already proven felons, to help him. the security of our "homeland" appears
to have been so shabby that a crazed terrorist not only managed to live in this
country right under everyone's noses...one managed to sneak into the very oval
office, where he has become the conductor of wildly belligerent, illogical
orchestrations of pre-emptive war. he commits terrorist attacks under the aegis
of the us military and gets away with it in the name of national security and its
reliance on secrecy in investigations. it would be bizarrely funny in a film, but
it's happening to you and me, so it's getting harder and harder to laugh.

being that bush and his pals all loudly profess their christianity, i can
understand where this craziness comes from, of course...even if i am not able to
condone it, since a central part of its doctrine pushes the true believer to
aggressively propagate the christian meme by "witnessing" - whcih is what secular
humanists and those christians of the non-cuckoo-cloud stripe refer to as
"preaching".

the crucifixion and its symbol the cross is central in every way to all
christianity. what does any act of satanic ritual abuse have on this, anyway, in
terms of the derangement factor? even if jesus christ did rise three days later
and go to heaven to sit next to daddy's throne, it still feels wrong to me to
iconize the act of violence that killed him. it does not make any sense to me,
even in the most esoteric and metaphorical of contexts.

and what's more...the purported reason for this barbaric cruelty is absurd.

wow...it says here that jesus died "for me". and "for you", too. we are the ones
in whose name this atrocity was committed?

well...gee, that's nice. sort of. actually, it's not very nice at all. it's
nasty, violent, and horrible. and i never asked anyone to die for my sins. i never
asked anyone to do anything for my "sins" in the first place. on top of that, i
just don't think that anyone should have to pay for anything i do other than me.
and for whatever reason, i never would want anyone to die for me.

so i hereby withdraw myself from culpability on this count. you can go around
saying "jesus christ died for our sins...with the exception of ms. thraam, who
apparently lives for them." at least that would be something like the truth.
pretty close to it, actually, though i'd beg to differ in the matter of "sins":
i'm not ashamed of my fornication, or my "strong drink", or my lack of belief in
the idea of jesus being resurrected and god having the personality and face of a
human being who seems to be a cross between dwight d. eisenhower, rip van winkle
and a hyper, peeved-off five-year-old who likes to build lego universes and then
demolish them over and over again.

i am saying i don't accept the idea of jesus christ dying on a cross for my sins,
but even if i were to accept this, it would be moot, since i also cannot believe
in it. i cannot reconcile it with what my senses and my memories tell me about
what lies both beyond my skin and inside my skull.

the truth? here's some more of that stuff...it's dangerous, yeah, but it's an
amazing buzz.

jesus christ died because there are human beings who get off on torturing other
human beings, and in order to assuage their own guilt and break the cognitive
dissonance, they constructed various high-and-mighty excuses for this barbaric
behaviour. all appearances are that when the romans put christ on a cross they
were murdering a dissident. his memes were threatening the status quo so they did
away with him. as he was dying, bewildered that the divinity he had praised all
through life was letting this happen to him, he asked "why hast thou forsaken me?"

indeed, why? how can this christian religion be so embraced by the people who call
out for "family values"? if jesus was god's offspring, what a model parent god
turned out to be. what sort of father would refuse to save his son from being
tortured to death?

and now, all these centuries later, christians find the icon representing this act
to be uplifting. they say to us that god "so loved the world" that he "gave us"
his "only begotten son".

god, hold on a moment...i got issues here.

you supposedly created a whole universe in a week - with one day off, yet. so
something just isn't adding up here.

what's this "only son" bit? can't you have anything you want? you're god! how can
anything be a "sacrifice" if an all-powerful god offers it?

why not just make another "only son". why not make 5,000,000 more jesii?

then maybe you should send them to baghdad. maybe that will make the creeps who
murder people for your glory - or because they think that excuse will sell - think
twice about taking the money away from their kid's schooling and healthcare, and
their own social security, to use it for throwing daisycutters at children in
faraway lands in some sort of twisted holy war that your followers got mucked up
in along with the followers of that twin brother of yours, allah, who got them
mucked up in it in his own equally bent version of the same breed of illogic. as
far as i can tell, christianity, judaism and islam are all mixed up with the same
variety of big deep badness. there are individual believers with a spiritual calm
and an inner life that comes from their faith, but you never see these people
because their relationships with their god are much more private, instead of being
a spectacle. the spectacles are what you see pushed into your face everywhere.
they're the aberration, made out to be the norm.

maybe sending all those jesii to baghdad would be a fiasco. after all, god's word
says he created human beings "in his own image" and if humans all supposed to be
like little mirror-images of god, that means as a species, they've got a cruel
streak that would reach from here to eternity plus one day.

or maybe it's just the mass cross-cultural belief in you that's the problem. the
bible is full of some truly mind-twisting, stomach-turning stuff, and parents not
only don't hide it from their children - some of them actually make their children
read this book.

with all those wonderfully profound, blood-soaked yet moralistically-bent stories.

with the onerous drumming of all those repetitive references to women who enjoy
sex as the most offensive abominations in the world. with all the fire and
brimstone of revelations, which is becoming the best example the world has ever
known of a "self-fulfilling prophecy".

in god's name, can we please have a different god?

--
*the bible refers to him several times as the "son of man", though - what's up
with that? aren't the implications a mite profound?

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