And God said, "Let there be ignorance."

I am condemned. I am a heretic, and a blasphemer, and an apostate. And if what eight years of indoctrination into fundamental Christianity taught me is correct, I will be greeted at my death with rejection and damnation from the ever-merciful, loving God who knew and loved me before I was born.

A fellow blogger described the branding of divinity onto the human figure of Jesus as the "evil of Christianity." Don't even get their hopes up! The only evil Christianity is guilty of is not something it has exclusive rights to. It is a trait inclusive to both Western and Eastern culture, modern and ancient, religious and secular. The most popular substitute for peace of mind, the most common weapon of fascist regimes, the most prominent subject in the lesson plan of many educational institutions, the very thing a man named Yeshua bar Joseph sought to overcome in the first century C.E.

The best way to keep any population in check is to keep them ignorant. The Nazis knew this, the Khmer Rouge knew this, the Church knew this. Suppress knowledge, you suppress individuality. Suppress individuality, you suppress disobedience. Next comes love, then goes submission, then comes a whole civilization centered around a belief system that thrives on the willful suspension of knowledge.

This is not a critique on the rationality of belief in a higher power. Faith is, after all, belief without evidence or logic. And we admire this. Is belief in God any more legitimate than belief in Santa Claus? Especially in this day and age, where subscription to the doctrines of a religious institution comes principally from cultural/familial traditions or conversion through fear tactics, religion is now goal-oriented toward the prospect of eternal salvation. Be good, get the toy.

What faith offers is an ostensibly concrete, pointed source of objective reality to believe. And this brings comfort. Without objectivity, the messiness of a subjective universe with no boundaries and no limitations produces an endless amount of chaos and anxiety and the fear of the unknown. So we combat this with belief in the unknown. Everyone wants to believe there is a purpose outside their own. Everyone wants to believe there is some reward for those good deeds gone unseen. Everyone wants salvation and meaning from without, and not from within.

How is it that as one of the leading economic and military superpowers in the world, among the most developed Western nations the United States has the largest number of people who outright reject a scientific principle that has become the very cornerstone of modern biology? Not surprising for the nation with one of the highest murder rates, whose literacy ranks among the poorest. What is the correlation among all this? We tend to destroy all things that make us uncomfortable, from the culture of indigenous tribes to the heretical beliefs of dissidents. We shoot, pillage, bomb our way to victory, and if that doesn't work, we reserve a special spot for our enemies in a fiery inferno to justify our hatred.

Disregard the fact that Jesus sat with prostitues and walked with lepers. That Jesus himself advocated social and economic principles suggestive of Marxism. The fundamental Christians of today use God as a justification for intolerance. Jesus died for the salvation of all, but of course God hates fags. God loves each and everyone in his creation, but the heathens and pagans will burn forever. It is not simply the inclusion of divinity in the image of Jesus that stains Christianity, but the propagation of ignorance and the fear that goes with it.

Many so-called believers do not fit this desciption, and indeed, Christians are not the only to do this, nor are they the first. Jesus himself actively spoke out against such hypocritical bigotry rampant throughout society, culture, and religion. He was himself a victim of the very anti-intellectualism and xenophobia his current "followers" preach today. It is not mere ignorance that is the problem. Knowing that humans share a common ancestor with squirrels is not going to make anyone a better person. The true threat is where the line between truth and untruth, fact and fiction, literal and metaphorical become blurred to the point of senseless fear and aggression.

Could it be that the doctrine of hell is nothing more than a recruitment device? Or perhaps a symbolic representation of an individual's disconnection with himself and others? Perhaps the kingdom of heaven is a figure of speech denoting a community of love and compassion and equality--it was, after all, according to Jesus "at hand" here on earth. Instead we confuse these for literal spacial locations, and thusly mistake an ever-merciful, loving God as a damning judge. Of course, who am I, as a lowly mortal, to make assumptions about the judgment of an infinite being? I may not comprehend God's justification, but I am capable of experiencing love. And if God is love, surely I can determine whether or not sending what one loves to an eternity of pain and suffering and degredation and isolation is truly in the agenda of love. Perhaps my logical framework cannot understand the logic justifying damnation of his own creation. The very same, neither is anyone else qualified to pass judgment on the eternal destination of anyone else.

I shouldn't pick on Christianity, perhaps other religions will follow. The true atrocity is again that salvation is sought from without, and not from within. Comfort and security are won at the expense of autonomy. Peace of mind through ignorance. The suppression of intellectualism and knowledge widely evident (though of course, not universal) in religious thought creates a power dependency in which individual meaning is lost, ostensibly gratified under the guise of a "spiritual relationship" that is nothing more than a blindly followed set of instructions telling us what to believe, justified because it proclaims itself to be objective truth. Whatever helps you to sleep at night shouldn't allow you to judge in the morning.