To Gain Heaven, Stop Being Human?
A paradoxical dynamic, don't you think?
When confronted with fact that those he still believed were “God’s Chosen People” were massacring men, women and children at aid stations that had lured these starving Gazans into concentrated free-fire-zones that one IDF soldier said resembled “killing fields” summoning shades of recollection of the Cambodian genocide of 50 years ago, an old friend of mine told me, “Oh, that’s just sin.”
The statement hit me like some Buddhist koan, an impossible to reasonably decipher non sequitur, so much so that I was struck dumb that he could be so fucking blind. But I didn’t press the matter either, knowing that digging further could end the friendship if I dare accuse him of the unwitting madness he was exhibiting due to the spell he had fallen under for the sake of his evangelical dogma. A dogma that seems to come down to, “Regardless of if the Jews are genocidal monsters who have become the blood-thirsty terrorists they purport to be fighting, we’ve got to back them so we can have Armageddon.”
Thus, in his mind, this made genocide some kind of a divinely-sanctioned byproduct of this whack prophecy that had to be fulfilled so his spiritual ass would be guaranteed a seat at the right hand of his Lord Jesus Christ in eternity.
To me, this is a total absurdity and something that, if there is a “grand scheme” would never be one of the things that could logically be a part of the plan of some loving and benevolent God. Whereas my friend had reduced his system of Christianity down to a mechanistic equation that counted murder as a unit of subtraction in a cosmological marketplace of good and evil, my heart still broke at the realization of the senseless and brutal violence of every transaction.
Later on in his proselytizing filibuster, he said something about the highest priority for a Christian was loving your God with all your heart, soul and might. Second on that priority list was loving your neighbor as yourself.
Later, although at that point I was mostly tuning him out, I heard him say something about he wanted to be certain about where he was going after he threw off this mortal coil. (I added that “mortal coil” part just cuz it’s mort interesting, but you know what I mean.)
And adding all this together now it occurs to me that some people are so afraid of death and what may or may not come after it that they will grasp at and cling to anything that guarantees them some semblance of certainty in the matter, regardless of if it means bowing down to a god that’s a blood-thirsty monster and his psychopathic murderous chosen people. Again, let me reiterate that I do not believe the ultimate truth of these cosmological matters can at all be this way and am writing a book to prove that the lacuna created by the censoring of the gnostic system—as put forward in the Nag Hammadi Scriptures—is how we got to this cauldron of boiling shit that we find ourselves in today.
But if this is indeed a universe where this is the God that I am supposed to worship so that some End Times prophecy full of frivolous fanfares, needless suffering and endless war can commence, then I must demure, I will be no part of it. There is no rhyme or reason to having a belief in this kind of beastly system—no harmonious music of the spheres or sacred geometry—just the metal-on-metal clanging of an appeal to authority and the paranoid delusion bred of mandatory fear.
It cannot be. It isn’t even human, much less divine. Lord, hear my prayer: “What kind of god mandates his creatures gain heaven by losing their souls?”
