Emails from Hell, part nine.

{beginning of email}

            As we sat there with General McArthur, we saw a man in a robe coming along. His robe was all the colors of the rainbow. And with him was a flock of the cutest animals you ever saw. Kitty cats with big eyes, puppies with big eyes, hamsters with big eyes. Animals that would have torn each other to pieces in the wild but as a result of human domestication and the influence of Heaven, they played with one another in peace. The lion and the lamb, as described in two places in the Old Testament, followed. Then along came lobsters and octupuses and levitating fishes. I was puzzled, because this was supposed to be Hell.

            The man drew closer and wished us an effusively good day.

            “Good sir!” I called out. “I think I know why your robe is all the colors of the rainbow.”

            “You do?” he said in a piping voice. “What do you think the reason is?”

            “You are or were a member of the GLBT community.”

            “The what? Never heard of it,” he said.

            “Okay, let me guess again,” I said. “You are Joseph with the Amazing Dreamcolor Coat right out of Genesis 37.”

            “Wrong again,” he said. “I am Noah, and the rainbow was associated with me a long time before Joseph or the BLTs.”

            “You should have guessed it, with the animals,” Joe whispered to me.

            “Please explain, Mr. Noah, why you are in hell.”

            “I built an Ark—actually, I contracted the work out—and saved two of every kind of animal from dying in the Great Flood.”

            “So how did you get them to all come into the Ark?”

            “It was a miracle,” said Noah.

            “Two of each species of insect?”

            “It was a miracle.”

            “Two of each species of spider?”

            “It will always be the same answer. It was a miracle. I still don’t know how it happened, or how we found places to stash all of them.”

            “Very well. But how did that get you sent to Hell? Oh, wait, I know. It’s when you got drunk afterwards.”

            “No, that wasn’t it. As I said, I saved two of every species of animal.”

            “Am I missing something?” I asked.

            “You most certainly are,” Noah said. “Every species. Not just the ones that humans found useful, but even the rattlesnakes and the mosquitoes and the spiders. They each had their place in nature, regardless of their utility to humans. Why, you may ask.”

            “Why?”

            “Partly because no one could know which species might be useful later,” said Noah. “We had to look all over the place to find the flatworm Caenorhabditis elegans, and we never knew why. But nowadays it is one of the favorite animals that scientists use in genetic research. Same thing with that fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. But also, it is just because God had this idea that if He made it it was good.”

            “I still don’t see what was so bad about that,” I said.

            “Do I have to explain everything to you?” asked Noah.

            “Yes,” said Joe.

            “Well, it’s like this. The fundamentalists who decide who goes to hell believe that most species are useless, and that it is not worth the trouble or the cost to save them. You saw how much the conservatives despised the Endangered Species Act in the United States! God did not ask me if I could afford to save all of them, or even if I wanted to. But you just let an American environmentalist say that we need to save the Lesser Prairie Chicken, for example, and the conservatives start howling like extinct dire wolves—Canis dirus—and calling them godless communist atheists. See, they believe that God wanted me to save all the species so that American conservatives can let them go extinct in the twenty-first century. I, sir, was the original bleeding-heart environmentalist. And so, here I am.”

            “Well,” said Joe, “being as you know all the different kinds of animals, can you recommend what kind of meat we can have for lunch?”

{end of email}

How Christianity is Destroying the Earth

The topic of why Christianity is wrong is of no mere academic interest. It is perhaps the most important topic in the world today. The majority of people in the United States adhere to a form of Christianity that leads, consciously and unconsciously, to the destruction of the Earth. And the United States is the leading consumer in the world; if we act destructively toward the Earth, it will be destroyed, and no bleeding-heart environmentalists in Norway can stop it.

I realized this as I began to read Bart Ehrman’s book from eight years ago—Lost Christianities. Ehrman is an excellent Biblical scholar, but I am an evolutionary scientist, so I read the first part of his book with different eyes than he used while writing it. I saw the evolution of Christianity as an example of cultural evolution—in particular, of one branch of Christianity that forced other branches into extinction, often violently, by decreeing them to be heretics. “Orthodox” Christianity suppressed the other branches, sometimes completely into extinction, but otherwise into such obscurity that only the luckiest of archaeological finds have revealed them. This is what happened when the church stopped being a haven for women and slaves and started turning into a political force with a hierarchy.

The “orthodox” Christianity that prevailed got to dictate which books would be in the Bible. There are lots of other gospels, epistles, acts, and apocalypses that they tried to destroy. But one of the books that they made sure was in the Bible was Revelation, written by somebody named John, whom most churchgoers assume was the Apostle John, though the author nowhere claims this to be the case.

It had been awhile since I had looked at Revelation, though I have read it carefully twice. Those previous times, however, I read it through the eyes of faith, assuming it to be divine revelation. This time I could see it for what it really was. Previously, I had tried my hardest to interpret it in a loving fashion. But now I could see the hatred that seethes from it. In a later entry, I will summarize it. But for now I just point out that it—presented in the form of a vision—is actually a nightmare of blood and gore and hatred. The author must have gotten some bad hash from Damascus.

First, you will not recognize the Jesus who is in Revelation. He is a conqueror, with a sword coming out of his mouth, and making the earth to apparently flow fathoms deep in human blood. Second, you will not recognize God the Creator of the Good Green Earth. Every few verses there is another disaster, both human and ecological—the Earth seems to get destroyed about fifteen times in that book. If one green sprig survives, it is sure to get pummeled and poisoned a few verses later. The disasters are concatenated: as soon as you think it is about over, another series erupts—within the Seventh Seal were seven trumpets, but within the seventh trumpet were three protracted woes, within which were crammed seven plagues. And so on. A cavalry of 200 million supernatural horses. People believe this stuff.

And at the end, when there is supposedly a heavenly city that takes over all of the universe, what do you have? A city consisting entirely of gold and jewels. The animals in that world are creepy monstrosities that look like Dr. Moreau invented them. And there is one tree—just one—left standing. This is the conservative Christian view of eternity—one in which everything that they claim God created has been destroyed and replaced with a total artificiality. You can bet your bottom ribosome that the “glassy sea” has no phytoplankton in it.

That is what conservative Christians want to have happen to the world—they look forward to God bringing plagues and destruction upon it, and then to have all of its biodiversity and greenness destroyed. Many Christians take a highly figurative interpretation of Revelation, and they are (as I was) frankly embarrassed by that book. But conservative Christians relish in the thought that environmental destruction will come upon Earth as part of a horrific suffering inflicted upon the human race. At least subconsciously, they will go along with and contribute to activities that will bring environmental destruction to pass.

And that is exactly why we need to discredit and disempower “Bible-believing Christians” in every way we can. If they actually believed in Jesus, the peaceful man who would go out on the hillsides and preach sermons about wildflowers, they might be a positive force. But they hate the Jesus of the Gospels. They revere only the Warlord of the Book of Revelation, and they want to do their part to make all of those ghastly images become reality.

I am developing these ideas into a book—Last Tree Standing: How Conservative Christianity is Destroying the Earth. Here is your chance to make comments that may help form the book, including comments that will prevent me from making errors that you may see in my ideas.