32) he identified mustard seeds as "[...] the smallest of seeds." How can it be that the creator of the universe could have had such an embarrassing lapse of basic knowledge on the subject of botany?
And what about the many other lapses in logic (flights of fantasy that are insane by any standard, with the exception of the sublime logic found in the idiom of
cartoons) such as the one about the fellow who survived, for three days and three nights, in the stomach of a monstrous fish (Jonah 1:17) -- and what was up with that wacky, talking donkey in Numbers (22:28)? We're in Looney Tunes territory now, all you highly suggestible Idiots of God. Plus, in a cartoon universe, such as the one described in the Book of Exodus, why didn't The All-Mighty, instead of leveling plagues and pestilence upon the guilty and innocent alike in Egypt, simply, drop an ACME anvil down from heaven on the head of Pharaoh and been done with it?
Which brings up the subject of the deplorable cruelty of your deity of choice. Ergo, isn't this a lovely, little passage from Deuteronomy (32:23-25)? "I will spend mine arrows upon them ... The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs."
Then there is this lovely bit of divinely inspired baby killing and faith-based rape from Isaiah
(13:9,15-18): "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger ... Every one that is found shall be thrust through ... Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes... and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them.... [T]hey shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children."
As is the case with your current, genocidal adventure in Iraq, where you believed the vengeful ghosts of the Crusades could be dispatched, dissolved in the beatific light flaring from the bombs that your holy
(armchair) warrior, Commander and Chief ordered dropped from Kabul to Bagdad ... In your madness, you believed you could make the citadels of the New Jerusalem manifest in Mesopotamia. Upon every bomb detonation, you were certain that the heathen hordes cowered before your righteous fury, that ghost and demon would flee back to Hell, and the wicked would trembled before your sacred fury. Now, of course, that all worked out just like you saw it in your head beforehand -- didn't it?
As we speak, your Armies of the Lord (who more closely reassemble a collection of economic conscripts) wince and stumble, blinded by blown blood and squalls of searing sand ... The desert wind taunts you true believers; your visions of conquest evaporate, as the pitiless sun glares down upon the folly of yet another legion of hubristic Crusaders, who came to free the heathen hordes from their brutish ignorance -- by way of relieving them of the confusing burden of their untapped wealth.
Of course, the only small recompense you ask from these monumental ingrates is unfettered access to their oil. And the only reason for that is: a purpose as exalted as yours requires a great amount of energy to sustain its radiant glory; such a selfless enterprise of holiness demands a few rewards for the long suffering Christian martyrs on the home front -- because American's God-kissed flocks of pious consumers must be permitted to sit, in perpetuity, high above the roadways of the land, serene within their over-sized pick-up trucks, SUVs, and RVs -- their junk food-bloated countenances must never be darkened by want, doubt, nor self-reproach.
In accordance with this self-referential lunacy, you sermonized that Satan's earthly emissaries, such as Hugo Cha'vez, should be righteously slaughtered -- because he and his ilk scheme to deprive American drivers of their God-given right to the oil, which, inconveniently, happens to be located beneath lands belonging to inconsequential people. Those brown-skin, oil hoarding wretches, down in Venezuela and their false idol-clutching counterparts in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, must be taught that God, seated upon his golden throne, scorns the sight of their iniquitous ways. The Kingdom of the Lord stands before us, you proclaim ...
If we listen closely, we can hear the voice of God above as he counts his money. Furthermore, the era of George W. Bush has brought a new revelation: If America's plutocratic class had even more blood money
-- then the Baby Jesus would smile.
The Reverend Pat Robertson, Mary Fowler -- and every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis -- listen up. Given the self-evident fact that your beliefs bring little relief to your own troubled souls and have, on the whole, served to engender tragedy worldwide, don't you think it's time you gave it a rest for while. In other words, this is a polite way of suggesting to you that you shut your pie-in-the-sky hole and take stock of the things you're saying -- because your utterances are becoming sicker and sadder, by the hour.
If not, you could, at least, in the words, of Tom Waits, "Come down off the cross -- we can use the wood."
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist, and philosopher bard, exiled to the island of Manhattan. He maybe contacted
at: philangie2000@yahoo.com.
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