A rant against those damned Fundamentalists

Dear diary,

God I hate Christians. Yet I wanna specify that I mean Fundamentalist Christians — I add this qualifier, because most other Christians I love; Christians make up the best and the worst of people… I think my heroes William Blake and Emily Dickinson both considered themselves Christians. If that’s the case, then even I, a card-holding atheist, call myself a Christian. But what I worship is the opposite of what the Fundamentalist worships. My biological mother is a Fundamentalist Christian; and she’s what sparked this morning’s session of Christian hatred, for yesterday she violated the quarantine law during this pandemic to go buy flowers — a grossly nonessential act — and deliver them to my house with a card that said “Happy Easter.” To those of you who were not brought up in an abusive religion like Fundamentalist Christianity, it may sound like I’m joking about my anger, but I’m dead serious: this act of shoving the Easter holiday in my face, at such a time, is the most severe insult. I’ve told my mother repeatedly throughout life:

Your God is my Devil.
My Devil is your God.

Or as Blake puts it, in “The Everlasting Gospel”:

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy . . .

Thine loves the same world that mine hates
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates . . .

Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read white

So she knows full well what she’s doing. My mother’s God is the Accuser of Sin, who demands blood sacrifice to lift the punishment of eternal damnation. Whereas my God is any human or creature who acts in accordance with genius and compassionate forgiveness. (These are loose definitions, given off-the-cuff, but I hope you grasp the contrast.)

The other thing I hate about the Fundamentalist Easter is that it obscures the far superior holiday of Passover. Again, speaking loosely, Passover is the commemoration of an enslaved people’s escape from their oppressor. (The ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.) I’m all for celebrating that: I think it’s one of the most important things we can do as humankind, to remember that we ourselves were once oppressed and thus we should never let ourselves oppress any thing that lives.

The ceremony that preserves this notion deserves to be a high holy day. But the Fundamentalist Christians come along and mask over that message’s empathy with the barbarity of a Cosmic Judge demanding blood-payment. Their Jesus, who is a smug prig, dies in torment to pay the debt of sin for believers alone, and this is the only way that his Father, a strict accountant in Heaven, can tolerate humans. Then we’re told that Jesus climbed out of the Grave, spent a brief spell on Earth, got beamed back up to the Sky, and will return in the future — so just keep slaving away at your day jobs until he shows up; & he’ll cast your enemies into Hell for all of the afterlife; and believers can watch the damned writhe.

I was doing so well with Christianity; I was making such advances in seeing the good that is in it, in finding the humane message in the teachings of the Nazarene, and of James his brother — for I truly love the Epistle of James the Just: it’s one of the only texts that I can tolerate in the New Testament; and the things that Jesus is allowed to say in the gospels of Mark and Matthew (and sometimes Luke) are genuinely wise to me: I love that Jesus: he is my fellow prophet and my mother’s devil — but the moment a Fundamentalist pops up and shoves a knife in my gut, all my progress flies out the window: I’m back to hating Christians again: Fundamentalists.

Worst of all is that I really despise writing like this. I am ashamed to be doing so. I dislike denigrating any religion; I’d rather discover the aspects that have worth in its ideas, and elevate those while ignoring all shortcomings; or at least enjoy wrestling with its most Dada Apostle (Paul)’s absurdities. This critical complaining is a waste of time, both mine and yours, gentle reader. So I thank you for tolerating my bad attitude this morning. I just needed to vent my frustrations. —Now I feel better:

Long live the true Jesus, who is a genius and an artist. And long live my fellow Christians, even us atheists, who FORGIVE one another, who are far too distinguished to cast judgments or accuse each other of sin, & also (most importantly) who expect no reward for acting with compassion.

If you treat others with love for the sake of gaining a reward in the afterlife, you’re just a merchant with a slightly more farsighted profit motive. You’re no better than a publican.

It is good to love the Jesus who teased the rich. It is good to love the Jesus who befriended sex-workers. This Jesus read the church’s own Holy Scriptures aloud to its members, and the passages that he chose to emphasize so enraged those churchgoers that they sought to dispose of him. The church meekly approached the state and said, “Sorry to bother you, but, since you’re executing so many people anyway, why not take this troublemaker as well — not only is he our problem but he’s also a threat to you, as he’s attempting to organize a general strike, & he’s unwilling to join the military; not to mention he’s undermining the sacredness of the concept of debt, both monetary and moral, with his stump-speech about forgiveness.” So the church and state joined hands and danced their favorite routine.

P.S.

What a shit entry this was. I blame Christian Fundamentalism. May it rot forever in the Hell of its own making. All you Fundamentalist Christians out there, I say unto ye: Your sins are NOT forgiven — I Bryan hereby retain them, as our fellow deity himself implored me to do:

Then said Jesus to Bryan his friend: “Peace be unto you: as our Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” And when he had said this, he kissed Bryan, and said unto him, “Receive the Holy Ghost! Henceforth, whose soever sins thou forgivest, they are forgiven unto them; and whose soever sins thou dost retain, they are retained.”
(Gospel of John 20:21-23)