 
American Taliban
This is a disturbing column (titled "Jesus and Jihad") by The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof from the other day:
If the latest in the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is Glorious Appearing, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of Glorious Appearing and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In Glorious Appearing, Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."
"The riders not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.... Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they, too, rattled to the pavement."
One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.
These scenes also raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell?
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself -- and infidels headed for hell.
No, I don't think the readers of Glorious Appearing will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think Glorious Appearing describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.
I often write about religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society. Since I've praised the work that evangelicals do in the third world (Christian aid groups are being particularly helpful in Sudan, at a time when most of the world has done nothing about the genocide there), I also feel a responsibility to protest intolerance at home.
Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God's word -- but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.
Wow. I've always intuitively known that the Left Behind books were pieces of shit. I mean, the title alone says it all: Left Behind. There is a large segment of "Christians" in the United States -- on their cars are bumper stickers that read "Warning: In case of rapture, this vehicle will be empty" and "The Bible says it, I believe it and that settles it"* -- who relish the idea that their pious, self-righteous asses will be "saved" and those who don't go to their fundamentalist wacko church will die a biblically grotesque and painful death such as Kristof quotes from Glorious Reappearing. ("Glorious reappearing"? What Kristof quotes is "glorious"? Reminds me of the Muslim fundamentalists chanting "God is great" while they sever heads in the beheading videos. Yeah, glorious, all right. God is great.)
What disturbed me most about Mel Gibson's sick and twisted "The Passion of the Christ" (read my review of that piece of shit here) is that so many "Christians" equated (and still equate) having seen the world's first Jesus Christ snuff film as having had some sort of fucking religious experience or having done some sort of fucking religious duty.
"The Passion of the Christ" and the Left Behind phenomena (Glorious Reappearing is amazon.com's No. 300 best-selling book right now, and "The Passion of the Christ" is amazon.com's No. 5 best-selling DVD right now and it hasn't even been released yet) demonstrate that millions of American "Christians" are just as bloodthirsty (as long as it's someone else's blood, of course) as are the fundamentalist Muslims they hate. The only difference between the two camps is the particulars of their scriptures. Their mindsets -- their ignorance, their fear, their hatred, their potential for violence -- are cut from the same cloth.
Many Americans believe, I think, that it's up to the sane Muslims to reel in the Muslim extremists, the ones who commit or who are capable of committing acts of terrorism.
But it's up to us sane Americans as well to reel in the "Christian" extremists, the ones, like "President" Bush & Co., who commit acts of terrorism, and those who are capable of committing acts of terrorism. As Kristof notes, we need to clean our own house, too.
National Housecleaning Day is on Nov. 2.
I'm with Kristof; although I find them sickening and anti-Christian**, I wouldn't dream of censoring such pieces of shit as the Left Behind series and "The Passion of the Christ." When the nutcases who believe in this "Christian" shit involve the rest of us Americans in their insanity, however -- such as by dragging us into an unprovoked war upon a Muslim nation based upon a pack of lies, and by then abusing and torturing prisoners (most of whom were innocent of wrongdoing) in that Muslim nation, dragging our names through the mud along with theirs -- it's time for us stop them.
Hopefully, we can do that democratically, without bloodshed, and the "Christian" lunatics won't have to experience the wailing and gnashing of teeth that they incorrectly believe is reserved for others.
*Actual bumper stickers I have seen.
**All you have to do is read the gospels -- what Jesus actually said and taught -- to see that the interpretation of Jesus as a bloodthirsty terrorist is "Christians'" own darkness that they project onto Jesus Christ in order to justify their own darkness.
10:22:24 AM 
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