BURNING IN HELL

Watching the TV documentary called “Through the Wormhole” on the Discover channel is an excellent exercise in realizing just how insignificant my life and my being really is. The purpose of the Morgan Freeman hosted show seems not to explore whether there is a god or not, but whether the cosmos is simply too magnificently complex and inscrutable to even entertain the question. Still, given these parameters, the likelihood of a personal god hovering over us and feeding our every thought and word into some kind of eschatological system for eternal judgment seems remote and illogical, at best, and inane and vacant at worst.

On planet Earth, however, the insanity continues apace. Should the whacko nut job Muslims be allowed to build a 10 million dollar center a few blocks from “Ground Zero” or, should the Christian latter day WASP bigot, all hot and drooling dogma all over the place, force the closing of such an “offensive” structure on such hallowed territory?

And, just as befuddling, nearly a fifth of the American populace thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim and perhaps a terrorist himself. (Of course, there are parts of the world that think every American President since Truman was (or is) a terrorist in their own right. Think about that one.) They also feel that the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of ‘their’ religion (not necessarily Muslim) instead of guaranteeing that we, as a government, are free FROM religious interlopement. We have to discount the possibility that George Bush actually talked to Jesus on a regular basis as he claimed, yes, right out loud.

Freaking me out too is a fraud named Joel Osteen preaching to overwhelming crowds of pew sitters who rake up Osteen’s apostolic pitch of feeling good and getting rich for Jesus. The new pseudo-christian doctrine comes without the usual drivel concerning hell, sin, mortification, flagellation, etc.

The more traditional dogmatic fare introduces a new missal for the panting, post Vatican II Catholic that makes the typical mass of blatant superstition even more mysterious and complex. It helps, one might suppose, to deflect attention from the sexual deviants who permeate the church at every level.

In the end, all of these pontifical and farcical organizations continue to suck up good land that is no longer taxable. The buildings share a narcissistic quality of greed and opulence and the faithful rant against the perverse, the deviant, the infidel, the sinner, the unfaithful, abortion, contraception, indiscretion and poop. There has never been devised a more profligate institution to divide people against other people. The one humanity somehow supersedes your disparate humanity for reasons insidiously unknown.

But they all invariably claim, with the almighty truth standing to the fore, and whether they pray to the East or the northwest, whether they live in North America or Iran, whether the icon is an aqua Buddha or a Dove shampooed Jesus or a cock on a roost, that god loves them best and without so much as a shard of evidence to back them up, they will kill, maim or molest anyone who claims otherwise.

We are, and have been, a race of idiots.