Godless And Free (4 page)

9.
In Jesus’ Name

April 25, 2007

You want to know what I think? I think Satan has been born again. I really do. I think he has accepted Jesus into his heart because he knows a good racket when he sees one.

Here in the UK we’ve now got an evangelical television channel. It’s the kind of thing that will be very familiar to everyone in the United States, especially if you’ve ever switched on your TV set on a Sunday morning and seen one holy man after another urging you to send money so that Jesus can buy a new Cadillac. Apparently, Jesus can’t save the world until he’s been properly kitted out with a million dollar mansion and a private jet. Some small print in the Gospels that we must have missed.

They spend a lot of their time praising the lord and praying, these people (when they’re not having extramarital sex with rentboys, obviously), and preaching about a heaven that sounds to me like the afterlife from hell, because they’re all going to be there.

And everything they do, they do in Jesus’ name. This is one thing I’ve noticed, that almost every second sentence is followed by the words: “In Jesus’ name.”

Every fake healing and every insincere blessing, every lowdown skulking mean-spirited nasty mealy-mouthed double-talking lie they tell, is told in Jesus’ name.

Like baking soda, Jesus’ name just helps to take away some of the unpleasant odour of what they’re really all about, which is raking in mountains of cold hard cash, all tax free, so ultimately paid for by you and me. In Jesus’ name, of course.

In a way you can’t really blame the televangelists, because they’re only behaving according to their nature as blood-sucking predators. And they do fulfil a need, of sorts, because it’s said that about a third of the population are what’s called true blievers, people who want to believe, who have a need to believe, and who are determined to believe in something. So you don’t even have to threaten these people with damnation. They already want to believe your bullshit, and more importantly they want to give you their money, like chickens throwing themselves into the fox’s mouth. What self-respecting conman is going to turn down that opportunity, any more than the fox is going to say: “No chicken for me thank you, I’ll just have a salad.”

And they’ve got such a good sales pitch, too. It’s just irresistible. “If you send us money, you’re preaching the Gospel. And the more money you send, the more Gospel you’ll be preaching.”

What a dilemma. What should I do with my last few dollars, should I feed the kids today, or should I do something useful with it and preach a little more Gospel, in Jesus’ name?

In some ways you’ve just got to hold your hands up in admiration at the sheer barefaced effrontery of the whole operation. But the problem is they use this vast wealth to buy influence in government and to interfere in other people’s lives. And personally, that’s where I draw the line.

So, if you’d like to have some fun, and I suspect that you would, I had an e-mail from the people at a website called earthsgreatestlawsuit.org,* and they tell me they intend to sue organised corporate religion right back into the slimy hole it crawled from for making advertising claims that it can’t justify and for selling a product that it can’t deliver, which is of course illegal. And, if you’d like to, you can help them do it, and it won’t cost you a penny. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

And the best thing is, if you’ve read the Sermon on the Mount, you’ll know it’s what he would have wanted, so you really can do it in Jesus’ name. What a wonderful blessing for us all. Peace.

* The website no longer exists, alas.

10.
United States of Jesus

May 3, 2007

Hi everyone. I’ve had quite a lot of e-mails and comments about my videos so far, mostly very positive and supportive, so thank you to everybody for that.

Predictably some people have been less than friendly. Some have told me they hope I die a horrible death. I’ve been threatened with all kinds of violent retribution, and I’ve been called some pretty inventively disgusting names because of course the human imagination is very fertile, as we know from reading the scriptures.

One guy was particularly preoccupied with anuses and boners for some reason. I think he had a thing for Jesus.

But some people even went so far as to call me anti-American, which has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Actually, I take that back. Intelligent design is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, but that one runs it pretty close.

No, I’m not anti-American. What I am is anti-stupidity, anti-ignorance and anti-bigotry, and I suppose that could be construed as anti-American if you’re a stupid ignorant bigot, but I think most intelligent people would see it as very pro-American.

I do think it’s a shame that America, like Britain, is governed by criminals. But there’s not much we can do about that because we live in a democracy.

What are you going to do? Vote? Yeah right. Good luck with that.

No, I’m much more concerned about America’s relationship with God, because that’s not actually based on anything real, whereas its consequences are extremely real for everybody on the planet, including me.

So excuse me if I’m a little picky about this, but I just don’t think that anyone who’s looking forward to the afterlife is qualified to run any country, and right now in the United States of Jesus it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for an atheist to be elected president.

The American people have made it clear they want a born again Christian president, even if it meant putting a ten gallon hat on a half pint head, because in the land of the free in the twenty-first century if you don’t believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and physically ascended into heaven, and that we’re all going to join him there just as soon as we can arrange the end of the world, then, my friend, you are not fit for public office.

And this is why there’s now daily Bible study in the White House and in the Pentagon, because they’re all experts on their Bible in those two places. They know all about who begat whom, and who smote whom, and who spake unto whom, but they’re not quite sure where Italy is.

But maybe I’m wrong to be concerned about all this, or about the fact that forty-five percent of Republican voters call themselves born again evangelical Christians (and they don’t mean it as an insult). Or that President Bush senior says he doesn’t think atheists should even be considered citizens. Or that so many people in the world’s most advanced country don’t want evolution taught in schools because they believe the earth was formed six thousand years ago, shortly after the invention of the wheel. It was a world where people and dinosaurs lived together, apparently, just like in the Flintstones.

And this is appropriate, because to me America is like a dinosaur, a massive powerful animal with a tiny brain.

My country, Britain, is like a much smaller animal, but with a brain that’s just as tiny; those two things could rattle around together like two peas in a bucket, and you couldn’t tell them apart.

So if I’m anti-American, I’m also anti-British, because I’m anti-stupid.

And yes, that would include anyone who thinks America is one nation under God any more than it was before the Pledge of Allegiance was hijacked by Christian zealots.

Or that “In God we trust” is some kind of American national motto any more than it was before the currency was hijacked by Christian zealots.

The truth is America is not a nation under God at all. It’s a nation under a spell. It’s only a matter of time before these people start pushing for the cross to be shown on the American flag. You think I’m joking, but you know I’m not.

Now the real irony here, of course, is that if Jesus Christ was American president what a different world this would be. But of course that’s just an impossible dream, because there’s no way that Jesus would ever be elected president. How many right-wing Christians are going to vote for a liberal Jew? You’ve got more chance of getting blood out of a Jehovah’s Witness. He’s from the Middle East and he looks like a goddamned hippie. The Fox network would crucify him, if he hadn’t already been arrested as a terrorist.

No, I think right now America is just a little too Christian for Jesus.

But I’m optimistic that this will change, because I love America and everything it stands for. Well, everything it originally stood for before it was hijacked by Christian zealots.

And I know that if everybody on the planet followed the principles of the American Constitution this would be a much more civilised world than it is.

Right now it’s a world of chaos, choking under the poison cloud of religious dogma. Wherever you look, from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East to Africa to the future Islamic republic of Europe, you know in your heart that if America isn’t going to lead us out of the Dark Ages, nobody is.

And that’s why you won’t find anybody on this planet who is more pro-American than I am.

Thank you very much, and peace, especially to Americans.

11.
Why Are We Friends with Saudi Arabia?

May 14, 2007

Despite the current war on terror, or Islam, or whatever you want to call it, both Britain and America are still very good friends with certain Arab countries because these countries provide us with a valuable service. They allow us to send people we don’t like to their countries to be tortured legally, and that way we’re not doing anything morally wrong.

One of these countries is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is well known as an exclusively Islamic country. None of this multifaith nonsense for them. In fact, it’s against the law even to preach Christianity in Saudi Arabia, and the penalty is death. Well, that would certainly put a stop to it, so let’s not dismiss it out of hand.

This is because they subscribe to sharia law, the Islamic legal code, which has been designed to put the fear of God into men and to put the fear of men into women, it seems to me – particularly the fear of men with beards into women.

But there’s an irony here, because everybody knows that Muslims don’t drink alcohol; they won’t have a drink, not even at Christmas. And yet sharia law has a lot in common with The Campaign for Real Ale. Both were devised by men with beards for the benefit of men with beards.

The big difference, of course, is The Campaign for Real Ale doesn’t have women stoned to death for no reason. And a very good thing too. After all, somebody’s got to work the bar, and then somebody’s got to drive afterwards. Well done, lads. That’sing the brain. Congratulations on that one.

Now despite the fact that most of the 9/11 lunatics were Saudis, and a quite a few prominent Saudis were spirited out of the United States by the Bush family before the FBI could ask them why they did it, we’re still friends with Saudi Arabia because they’ve got lots and lots of oil. In fact it would be difficult to think of a more oily country than Saudi Arabia.

You might say: Why be friends with people like this? They’re obviously scumbags. Why don’t we just go in there and take the oil like we usually do?

But if we did that they wouldn’t buy any more weapons from us, and our whole economy would probably collapse.

And this is why, for example, the Saudis were able to embarrass the British government recently (and with their record that takes some doing) by threatening to cancel a massive arms deal if the British police continued to investigate bribery allegations against members of their so-called royal family. Naturally, our government caved in to these threats like a paper cup because apparently it’s in our country’s interests to brown-nose a bunch of sleazy medieval gangsters, which in my opinion makes us almost as creepy as the Bush family, and I thought that was genuinely impossible.

Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Saudi Arabia that couldn’t be cured by civilisation, because it’s not my place to say that. The truth is I haven’t visited the country, so, for example, I’ve never had the privilege of attending a public execution. Watching somebody have their head removed with a sword, what’s uncivilised about that, apart from the fact that you can’t get a cold beer to enjoy while you’re watching it? Now that really is uncivilised.

No, I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia, so I’ve never had the chance to witness the religious police prevent the rescue of young women from a burning building because they’re not wearing the correct headgear. I wasn’t actually there when those fifteen young girls burned to death for absolutely no reason, so I can’t comment on it, and I wouldn’t dream of doing so. That would be disrespectful.

And anyway, just because Saudi Arabia is single-handedly responsible for the poisonous Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist Islam that has plagued this planet like the AIDS virus for the last few decades, and just because Saudi Arabia finances the murderous madrassas in Pakistan where the London bombers learned their godless ideology, that doesn’t mean I’ve got anything against the place or its rulers. Far from it – about that far from it.
(Shows finger and thumb very slightly apart.)

But if I could just make one small positive suggestion. Everybody knows that Saudi Arabia is very rich in certain mineral deposits – notably, of course, sand. My goodness me, it’s got so much sand it could export the stuff. Or even better, it could import a load of water and cement, mix itself into a giant block of concrete and do us all a huge favour.

Oh, and another thing, nobody is going to convince me that the king of Saudi Arabia has never had a drink. I don’t care what you say, with his money there’s no way that he just limits himself to cocaine and hookers. He looks like a Jack Daniel’s man to me. Obviously, I can’t prove that statement, but then we all know you don’t need proof when you’ve got faith.

Peace. You know it makes sense.