September 1985

I learn from the "Christian News" that more than six hundred pious Christians, of the varieties that a friend of mine likes to call "funny-mentalists," met in Basel in the hall that was made sacred when the first publicly announced Zionist Congress met in it eighty-eight years ago. The god-fearing folk were representatives of various churches in Europe and America and pledged themselves to make their churches understand that it is God's will that all Christians dedicate themselves, body and soul, to helping God's People exterminate the Semites in at least part of Asia Minor. Their "inerrant" Bible, they said, imposes on all "goyim" a "philosophical [sic!] mandate" to venerate, love, and serve God's Own.

In addition to the various sects of "funny-mentalists," the Roman Catholics were represented by some of their high-pressure theologians, including a professor from the Catholic University of Tilburg, who deplored the failure of his Pope to cooperate closely with the holy folk who are at present terrorizing and butchering the inhabitants of Lebanon, in accordance with the will of their blood-thirsty god. The professor knew somehow that "Jesus prayed for unity between Jews and Christians." Since Jesus is at least a piece of God himself, Jesus must have been praying to himself in a kind of divine soliloquy, and although the professor did not disclose the time at which the praying was done, Jesus must obviously have done it when back home in his Heaven, and one wonders what the sanctified souls of Martin Luther and a hundred other holy men, now revered by Fundamentalists, thought when they heard Jesus contradict what he had told them.

I know there are many Christians who will dissent from the pronouncements of their delegates in Basel, but unfortunately they are trapped in a dilemma. If their Bible is "inerrant," as they claim, no sophistries can avail against Yahweh's explicit and repeated promise that he will help his ferocious pets annihilate by stages "all" the inhabitants of all the countries they invade. More than that, he had laid upon his People the absolute duty to exterminate not only all anthropoids in the countries they take over, but every animal: "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth" ("Deuteron." 20.16; 7.16); although at other times Yahweh seems to be content with less blood: "ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you ... and ye shall dispossess them" ("Numer." 33.52-53), and at other times he promised his Chosen that the "goyim" would be their slaves ("Isaias" 61.5). And the Christians can't pretend that their god changed his mind, because their Jesus emphatically stated that he was interested only in Jews and called non-Jews dogs ("Matt." 15.24-26; 10.6). So Christians, if their Bible is "inerrant," had better hasten to do obeisance to their god-given masters. And if it isn't "inerrant," but is just a story-book full of nonsense, their religion has no basis at all and is certainly less entertaining than the "Arabian Nights" or the "Kathasaritsagara."

I am sincerely sorry for the poor folk who are impaled on the horns of that dilemma, but there is no escape from it. The Jews are foreclosing their mortgage on their Christian subsidiary, and that should be no surprise. It was in 1886 that Rabbi Solomon Schindler told a Christian congregation in Boston that Christianity was just a wayward daughter, who was out having her fling, but would have to come home to her nice Jewish mamma and beg to be forgiven.

The only question is whether the American delegates in Basel, in their preoccupation with what the Jews are doing again in their old Canaan, quite perpended the fact that they, like the other Americans, are the inhabitants of the New Canaan and can learn from the passages in their Bible that I cited above just what is in store for them.

BROTHERS UNDER THE SKIN

The Religious News Service reports from Vatican City on the latest promotional work of John Paul II, Vice-President in Charge of Sales in the Catholic Corporation. (The President, a Jew named Jesus, has retired to his home in the clouds, and does not visit the office.) After having tried to tap the huge market in China without much success, John Paul paid a visit to King Hassan II of Morocco, who claims to be a descendant of Mahomet. The Pope told the Moslems that they all worshipped the same god and that the only obstacle to a merger of two great corporations was a trifling difference of opinion, the question whether old Jesus was a piece of Allah or simply a divinely-inspired precursor of Mahomet.

That proposition would have left dumbfounded all the heroes of Western Christianity, from the legendary Roland to the historical Charles Martel, Godefroy de Bouillon, and the thousand other leaders of the millions of Christians who, during thirteen centuries, smote the paynim hip and thigh and died on behalf of a god whom they called Christ, incidentally saving Europe from conquest by Semites and asserting the valor and power of our race. Had they known what John Paul, in his official capacity as their God's Vicar on Earth, was going to tell King Hassan, they would have hanged their priests on Odin's tree and our civilization would not have flowered with a lethal canker in its heart.

There are today many literate Christians, who have read both their Bible and the Koran ("Qur'an," 'the Reader,' edited by Mahomet from the text in Heaven). They have probably heard of John Paul's sales talk to Mahomet's great(33)-grandson, but I don't know whether they threw both books into the trash-bin or retired with a quart or two of Glenlivet to think things over.

There could be no better proof that Western Christianity is dead and gone. It was part of a great era in our history and deserves an honorable burial.

L'ENVOI

I have had frequently to discuss in these pages what appears to me to be the crux of our race's dilemma and the prime cause of its prostration, religion. I have often spoken of it unsympathetically, but not without a latent regret for a past for which we may all feel a hopeless nostalgia. One aspect of it, I think was most concisely expressed by Sir William Watson in his well-known poem, "The Churchyard":

I wandered far in the wold,

And after the heat and glare,

I came at eve to a churchyard old:

The yew-trees seemed at prayer.

And around me was dust in dust;

And the fleeting light; and Repose;

And the infinite pathos of human trust

In a God who no man knows.