“De Profundis”: One is amazed, and even astonished, to consider those millions who today claim spiritual lineage from a being called Christ. For if one were from outer space, and able to view life on this planet for a century or so, one might observe this: Christians are the wealthiest humans on the third planet. They seem to be the most violent humanoids, having brought about two world wars, tens of thousands of murders, and millions of rapes, assaults and lynchings. They’re the only group to have dropped an atomic bomb on other non-Christian people, to have colonized and enslaved whole races of other humans, Africans, indeed the bulk of the non-Christian world, and to have committed genocide on an unsurpassed scale. American Indians, Jews, for example. One of their nations where vast numbers of Christians have settled, called America, cages and imprisons more of its people per capita than any other nation state. They destroy and fail to replenish enormous expanses of land to secure quantities of paper called “money.” Their cities have vast numbers of people who live in the streets, whom they call “homeless.”
This alien perspective seems facetious, of course, but it allows us to ask questions that challenge that body of humankind that claim spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth. Isn’t it odd than in this nation, the majority of the population–Christian adherents–claim to pray to and adore a being who was a prisoner of Roman power, an inmate on the Empire’s death row; that the one they consider the personification of the Creator of the universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten, and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the Imperial periphery at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its inhabitants, called adherents of the crucified God, strenuously support the state’s execution of thousands of its imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors and lawyers, those who condemn, prosecute, and sell out the condemned, claimed to be followers of the fettered, spat upon-naked God, who are we speak [inaudible]
