I'm writing to complain about a problem that I believe has escaped your attention. This concerns a group of people that, in my humble opinion, should be stoned.
To wit: fundamentalist Christians. One of them accosted me the other day and informed me that if I failed to accept Jesus Christ as my own personal savior, I would definitively and most assuredly be damned.
I pondered this assertion and arrived pretty quickly at the conclusion that if this is the case, there is no doubt about it: I am damned. I've committed too many sins and am ill-equipped to repent, since most of them have been pretty fun. I've always felt sort of resigned to my damnation, maybe even ambivalent. I mean, if heaven is filled with the likes of Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney, it's not going to be too good anyway.
I don't object to damnation. The devil may have his faults, but at least he likes to party and has a decent sense of humor. No, what I object to with these people is the implicit, wholly blasphemous assumption that God needs their help.
Look at it this way: If I've got a plan to, say, build a house, and I want to implement the plan in a particular way that may be baffling to outsiders, then I don't want any interference. If there are a bunch of buttinskis standing around telling me, "No, that post goes over there," or "Make the angle of the roof sharper," then after awhile, I'm going to get pretty pissed off. Clearly, God has a plan. The fundamentalists say so. And if it is the case that He is both almighty and has a plan, then He doesn't want a bunch of people telling Him what to do. Too many cooks really do spoil the broth. And is anything more genuinely annoying than doing all the work yourself while a bunch of slackers hang around pointing out every time they imagine you misstep? When I was building a cage for my kids' reptiles, that's exactly what went on, them standing around going, "Oh, that door isn't going to work," or "Oh, that kind of wire isn't strong enough." I mean, if that kind of thing bugs me, I would think the Almighty would be about up to here with it by now.
These fundamentalist Christians should shut the hell up already. If God is everything they say He is and they keep pestering Him, when He blows, it's gonna be big.
He can take care of everything without help, thank you very much. He can damn people like me, as well as homosexuals, fornicators, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Animists, pantheists, plagiarists and communists.
God summons tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and plagues of not just frogs, but locusts and boils. He is, as the Christians like to say these days, the ultimate "intelligent designer." (They used to say He was creative. Hence "creationism," but that's way too poncy for these macho times, and it has almost zero chance of making it into high school textbooks.) God can cause virgins to appear on freeway underpasses and quarterbacks to make touchdowns. He can turn water to wine and sinners to salt. But these blaspheming bastards on the Christian right would enact legislation banning gays from everything from sperm banks to the workplace. They would enact tax laws screwing the poor and denying upwards of 40 million Americans health care. They would physically and financially promote the invasion of nations ranging from Iraq to eventually, Syria, all the while toadying up to American Jews and Catholics by supporting both the Israelis' conservative hardliners AND the new makes-the-Spanish-Inquisition-seem-like-a-bunch of-nancy-boys pope.
They think God needs their help doing all this? Let's face it: If this is what He wants, He can certainly manage it Himself.
On second thought, I think maybe stoning is too good for these meddling Sinners (capital "s" intended!). In other fundamentalist countries, they come up with all kinds of inventive punishments for ungodly upstarts. Perhaps we should ask Saudi Arabia.
