Our regularly scheduled pogrom

America's version of Good Friday has come and gone. It was ugly, but nobody died.

"Where they burn books, soon they will burn people." Unlike most who solemnly quote those words, I don't believe Heinrich Heine was foreseeing the Holocaust. I think he was describing the preceding fifteen hundred years of European history, when the Catholic Church and its offshoots burned books and people with great zeal -- more people than books, before the invention of moveable type. On Good Friday, which is supposed to be a time of reflection, prayer and repentance for Christians, the pious would leave their churches, frequently led by priests, and invade the nearest ghetto or shtetl, avenging the death of Christ by killing as many Jews as they could find. In America on September 11, led by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rudolph Giuliani, the pious enforce a hatred of all Muslims that stops just short of murder. So far. And although the promised Koran-burning did not take place in Gainesville, Florida, it might as well have. The big tenth anniversary is only a year away. What will they burn then?

Fire has a permanent hold on the reptile brain, the part that harbors religiosity. To our first ancestors it must have seemed like magic -- it illuminates, it warms, and it destroys. In Greek myth, Prometheus is hideously punished for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to puny humans. The most honored women in ancient Rome were the Vestal Virgins, who gave up everything to tend the sacred fire, for if it went out, Rome was finished. These were sophisticated societies. Imagine what fire meant to those at the fringes of Europe still painting their faces blue. Imagine what it meant in the Dark Ages. Well, we know what it meant: fire was for burning witches and heretics and books that challenged the authority of the Church. Into the fire Savonarola cast works of art that he called "vanities." In our own time fire has been the destination of everything that gives offense to the mystic-minded, from the writings of Einstein to the albums of the Beatles. It's the ultimate "fuck you" of the Christian world.

But there are other gestures of equivalent scorn and contempt. Before humans tamed fire -- before humans -- chimpanzees were flinging their shit.* They do it when angry or provoked, or maybe because they're stressed by having to live in zoos and be stared at all the time, but they don't do it to harm. For that, you need stones, a human refinement. Stoning, it happens, is enjoying a resurgence in places like Iran. Think of it: they build nuclear reactors at the same moment they imitate primate behavior. (According to the Old Testament, they're also imitating Jews. I wonder which they would prefer to acknowledge.) I know I'm not the first to point out that the people who became most hysterical at the thought of a few singed Korans -- not even the real thing, an English translation -- are people who believe it their religious duty to hurl rocks at a woman until she dies. Pile of smouldering paper vs. dead person. There's no moral high ground, is there?

Burning books is dumb, but it's protected free speech, like burning a flag or an effigy. Stoning a human being is killing, and you don't get to play the indignation card. So shut up, all of you. Just shut up and take your sanctimony and put it where the moon don't shine, because as an atheist, I am tired of all of you. I'm tired of demagogues, and pundits, and overpaid radio bellowers and bigots and assholes. I was in New York that day, unlike Neuter and Sarah and "Pastor" Terry Jones, who should change his name so no one will ever confuse him with the Terry Jones who directed Monty Python's Life of Brian. I saw the smoke and dust cloud from my window, for days. My neighbor went to work at Cantor Fitzgerald and never came home. So go and pray to whatever sky-daddy has your loyalty, or do something worthwhile like read to children or clean up a vacant lot, or join the Marines (if they'll have you) and go kill troublemakers in Afghanistan. Spare us any more of your stupidity and hatred. Amen.




*I don't know why Darwin never pointed to this as evidence of our shared ancestry. Maybe he didn't study enough chimps. Maybe he had enough trouble with the religion lobby. Maybe as a Victorian, he just couldn't think of a polite way to describe shit-flinging.

Theodicy watch

It has been almost forty-eight hours since an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile, and still the Reverend Pat Robertson has not told us why God is punishing the Chileans. Was it their wickedness in electing Salvador Allende president back in 1973? Their refusal to protect Augusto Pinochet from prosecution by the Spanish authorities for mass murder? Their choice of a woman to lead their country?

I'm no theologian. I'm groping in the dark here. Sure, it must have hurt for such a sensitive man to be called an "evil moron" by Christopher Hitchens, but why punish the rest of us? Give us a sign, Pat! Or at least a hint.

Chalice half-full

Look on the bright side: At least Bishop Richard Williamson is unlikely to compare legal abortion to the Holocaust, a rhetorical device much loved by Christian clergy, because according to him, there was no Holocaust. The Nazis killed 600,000 Jews, tops, and they probably had it coming because the Jews are bent on world domination, according to the bishop, recently welcomed back into the Church by ex-Hitlerjugend Joseph Ratzinger, a/k/a Pope Benedictineandbrandy XVI. Oh, and the Vatican is controlled by Satan anyway, says the bishop. Well...

All this has caused quite a tempest, and for the usual reason: money. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has called on the Pope to explain his actions. Here's something I didn't know: when Germans file their tax returns, they can check a box for a portion of the payment to go to the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, or any other recognized religion -- like the checkoff for public funding of presidential campaigns on US tax returns. (Why the American religion industry hasn't demanded something like this, I don't know.) Since denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany punishable by imprisonment, there is talk in the Bundestag of cutting off this lucrative source of church money. Of course, Williamson doesn't live in Germany -- he runs a seminary in Argentina, you'll be surprised to hear -- and the Vatican's position is that he can say whatever he wants about the twentieth century as long as he doesn't violate Church doctrines prescribed in the preceding nineteen.

The timing is curious. This year on Good Friday, by papal decree Catholics will once again pray for "the conversion of the Jews," an insulting bit of liturgy that was dropped some years ago. In apocalyptic Christianity, this conversion is a necessary step in bringing about the Final Days. We already have a pretty good idea what this pope thinks of Islam, so why is he planning a trip to Jerusalem this year? Having angered all the Jews in Italy, is he looking for more people to piss off? Or are his intentions more sinister? At the very least, ecumenism is dead and it's every believer for himself.

For two thousand years, Christians have been expecting the end of time. They have been consistently disappointed, but that's why it's called faith. Now for the first time, they are capable of self-fulfilling prophecy. The days ahead will be terrible -- we seem to be in for a global depression, ecological catastrophe, and more hideous violence as in Darfur, Rwanda, Gaza, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, a dozen other places. True believers of every stripe will be tempted to utter a despairing "Fuck it!" and detonate whatever they have lying around. The last thing they will need is encouragement.

Inspired

Brilliant. There's no other word for Barack Obama's choice of Rick Warren to deliver the traditional religious rant at next month's inauguration. It works on so many levels, I wish Machiavelli were here to chronicle a true Prince.

Apparently you can't have an inauguration without an invocation, no matter what the First Amendment says. That being the case, Obama knew exactly what he was doing when he selected Warren over "a dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiances," as Christopher Hitchens wrote in Slate, presumably somebody of the Billy Graham stripe. Warren will not win the Democrats any votes in primitive backwaters like Kansas, but he will cancel out even more vicious bigots like Fred Phelps (think of him as Phelps with a quasi-human face). He will also subtly convey that, like the Republican Party, American Protestantism has been hijacked by end-time extremists and warped ideologues. That may be unfair, but it's going to take a lot of disproving. And Warren, with a record of dehumanizing Jews and Mormons as well as gays, is not at all interested in disproving it.

In addition, the elevation of Warren has driven a wedge between the pastor and his sheep, who are bleating all over the Christian websites that Rick is palling around with Antichrist. There was never any chance he wouldn't. When they met last summer, Senator Obama must have homed in on Rev. Warren's defining characteristic, vanity. (I know, I would have said gluttony, too. That's why I'm not about to become president. A fat guy who thinks he's disguising his superfluous chins with a shitty goatee might as well be cast as Vanity in a production of The Seven Deadly Sins.) It's hard to refuse on principle when visions of a national stage and lucrative book sales are dancing in your head. If you're an opportunist like Warren, it's impossible. It would be like turning down Oprah.

There may also be an element of personal revenge-taking here, though I wouldn't presume to read Obama's mind. Of course, there have been outraged responses from gay supporters of Obama, but where are they going to take their anger? I can't see David Geffen holding fund-raisers for Schwarzenegger, much less Sarah Palin. So Barney Frank is unhappy (as a gay man, interestingly, not as a Jew.) What is he going to do, quit the party and form a power bloc with Bernie Sanders? The Barney-and-Bernie Party? Even if they invite Joe Lieberman, they still need seven for a minyan. Obama is treating gays the way the Democratic Party has treated blacks for forty years, taking them for granted while doing as little as possible to earn their support. But maybe it isn't personal at all, just what Solozzo in The Godfather would call "una cosa di business."

Would I rather see a latter-day William Sloane Coffin or Daniel Berrigan at the lectern? Well, yes, it would be exhilirating for five minutes, but as an atheist I've fought all my life against being seduced by the "cool" clergy who say all the right things but expect you to show up, sooner or later, at their church. At the end of the day, they don't stand with us -- look what happened to Robert Drinan when the Church yanked the string. And we don't need them and their Iron Age superstitions. If the measure of a man is the enemies he makes, Barack Hussein Obama is already twenty feet tall. I'm content to have him keep this particular enemy close. I also intend no insult by invoking Machiavelli. The world is a dangerous place, made infinitely more dangerous by the antics of the Cheney-Bush regime. We need someone as brainy and devious, maybe even as ruthless, as Cesare Borgia.

I can wait until January 21.