I think maybe I will take a few minutes just to to say something that I find repulsive about especially monotheistic messianic religion. With a large part of itself, it quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over whenever you read any of its real texts or listen to any of its real, authentic spokesmen not the sort of pathetic apologists who sometimes masquerade for it. Those who talk – there was a famous spokesman for this in Virginia until recently – about the rapture, say that those of us who have chosen rightly will be gathered to the arms of Jesus, leaving all of the rest of you behind. If we’re in a car it’s your lookout, that car won’t have a driver anymore. If we’re a pilot, that’s your lookout, that plane will crash we will be with Jesus and the rest of you can go straight to hell.
The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity: if you don’t believe that there is to be an apocalypse, that there is going to be an end, a separation of the sheep and the goats, a condemnation, a final one, then you’re not really a believer, and the contempt for the things of this world shows through all of them. It’s well put in an old rhyme from an English exclusive brethren sect that says that:
We are the pure and chosen few
and all the rest are damned.
There’s room enough in hell for you;
we don’t want heaven crammed.
You can tell it when you see the extreme Muslims talk. They cannot wait. They cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the world. They can’t wait for what I would call without ambiguity a final solution. When you look at the Israeli settlers, paid for often by American tax dollars, deciding if they can steal enough land from other people and get all the Jews into the promised land and all the non-Jews out of it, then finally the Jewish people will be worthy of the return of the Messiah. And there are Christians in this country who consider it their job to help this happen, so that Armageddon can occur, so that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilisation and trying to acquire learning and knowledge and health and medicine, and to push back the frontiers, can all be scrapped, and the cult of death can take over. That to me is a hideous thing in eschatological terms, in end times terms on it’s own – a hateful idea, a hateful practice and a hateful theory, but very much to be opposed in our daily lives where there are people who sincerely mean it – who want to ruin the good relations that could exist between different peoples, nations, races, countries, tribes, ethnicities, who say, who openly say they love death more than we love life and who are betting that with God on their side, they’re right about that.
So when I say as the subtitle of my book that I think that religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without big brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. We must be afraid. We must also be forced to love someone who we fear, The essence of sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master slave relationship, and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil.
And though I do some nights stay home, I enjoy more the nights when I go out and fight against this ultimate wickedness and ultimate stupidity.
--Christopher Hitchens
But it is beautiful because Christ will return at the end of the world so fix this broken world full of sin and suffering, and create a new heaven and new Earth and there will be no more sin and suffering.
Christianity promotes morals such as helping the poor and sick. The fear of God can prevent people from committing immoral deeds. God deserves to be our master because he created us.
Too bad the Christopher Hitchens won’t get to experience the new Earth, because he in hell for eternity. I pray that you will repent, so that you will not join him there.