When I was an evacuee during WWII I lived with many sets of foster parents who included Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, Church of England, Plymouth Brethen and a few other very minor Christian cults. Half of the families were convinced that the English version of the Bible that they used was literally true. All of it. I even suspected that some of them thought that Jesus had existed, for the personal benefit of their trifling sins, and spoke English.

This unique experience of living with so many different facets of the religion has served me in good stead in the end. In spite of their irreconcilable differences, all the families I lived with, and the churches they represented had two things in common. Each group were convinced that they and only they held the truths of Christianity, and also that the enemy of their true Christianity was the two-headed monster of the Catholic Church and modern science.

Those people I lived with were sometimes very strange but none were vicious. They were uniformly ignorant of the most elementary facts of science, but they weren’t likely to be delighted at the misfortunes of others, even sinners. “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” they would say. Or, “There but for the grace of God go I.” or “He that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone.” That of course was just my own experience. Maybe there were vicious Christian folks around but I didn’t encounter them during the War when anyone at all could have their last day at any time, depending on where the bombs fell.

Of course I wouldn't dream of pointing out to the historically challenged that Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were all Christians and that Stalin had had training in a seminary. The Catholic Hitler in particular used exactly the sort of language to gain support of the Church that our current President uses to net the fundamentalist right, sometimes in eerily similar sentences.

It wasn’t till I came to America that I encountered insanely vicious cruelty among the groups who claimed to follow the teachings of the one who said, according to them, “Love thy neighbour as thyself. Judge not that ye be not judged. The kingdom of God is within you” and other matters that have to do with kindness and compassion.

I recently received a e-mail as a forward from someone I know. The writer is someone belonging to a conservative (very Republican), fundamentalist (ignorant) group in a Southern State. The writer is the Expert I referred to in the title.

I thought it was bad enough to have preachers claiming that our soldiers in Iraq were dying because their voyeur god was obsessed with sex and decried any same sex relationships. The intelligence or compassion of someone actually believing that and the following must be in the single digits. But they all have votes.

Here then is a pretty revolting piece of work actually sent out by someone who thinks they are doing a favour to the recipient and undoubtedly doing what they think the loving and compassionate Lord Jesus wants them to do. I received it on Good Friday. As the dog in the cartoon recently said, “Wars, corruption, violence, crime…it makes me ashamed to be man’s best friend.

I feel a little queasy myself at having the same label biologically as the writer of this letter. Any comments in italics are mine. The letter begins at the quotation marks and ends with the centered sign -o0o-.

“Death is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death! Make a personal reflection about this. Very interesting, read until the end. It is written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7): Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man sow, that shall he also reap.

Here are some men and women who mocked God :
John Lennon (Singer) (1966):

Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said: Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about that. I am certain.
Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than ‘Him'
Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times. (This is the sort of thing the paranoid god of the Old Testament would do. I doubt that Jesus would shoot him six times for speaking what was then the truth.)

Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):

During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency.
Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died. (This god must be really lacking in self esteem to be bothered about what a politician says about Him)

Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):

During A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ), while smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said:'God, that's for you.'
He died at the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner. (Millions of people every day offer flame and smoke to their deities. Witness the candles in Catholic cathedrals and Hispanic groceries. )

The man who built the Titanic

After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be.
With an ironic tone he said: 'Not even God can sink it' The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic (So, to punish the engineer, who was on board, hundreds of innocent people killed to make a point.)

Marilyn Monroe (Actress)

She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show.
He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her. After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said: 'I don't need your Jesus'. A week later, she was found dead in her apartment (I’m sure there were many preachers who would like to have netted Marilyn as a star on their resumé. Who needs that sort of invasion of privacy? Was it Jesus who called her home to save her from the preachers?)

Bon Scott (Singer)

The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang:
'Don't stop me; I'm going down all the way, down the highway to hell'. On the 19th of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.
(Doesn’t he get any credit for accuracy as a prophet?)

Campinas (In 2005)

In Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a friend.....
The mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter holding her hand, who was already seated in the car:
'My Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You.' She responded: 'Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause Inside Here.....It's Already Full ' (Some Gods have absolutely no sense of humour)

Hours later, news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident, everyone had died, the car could not be recognized what type of car it had been, but surprisingly, the trunk was intact. The police said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was broken. (Yeah. Right)

Christine Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and entertainer)

said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written. In June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle. (That’s the way to get people to change their opinions. Kill them. Incidentally, how did they know it was her if she was burned beyond recognition. Maybe God screwed up and killed an innocent person.Look at the Titanic)

Many more important people have forgotten that there is no other name that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus.
Many have died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still alive. (EVERY god in the Mediterranean area died and rose again, and is probably as alive as Jesus)

'Jesus' (I have to assume this was meant as a signature to show that Jesus would approve of the message)

PS: If it was a joke, you would have sent it to everyone. So are you going to have courage to send this?. I have done my part, Jesus said 'If you are embarrassed about me, I will also be embarrassed about you before my father.'

You are my 8 in 8 seconds. I am not breaking this. No way!

I'M TOLD THIS WORKS!!!!! Bishop T.D. Jakes '8 Second Prayer.' Just repeat this prayer and see how God moves!! 'Lord, I love you and I need you, come into my heart, and bless me, my family, my home, and my friends, in Jesus' name. Amen.'

Pass this message to 8 people {EXCEPT YOU AND ME}.You will receive a miracle tomorrow. I Hope that you don't ignore it and let God bless you.”

I remember once having a discussion that got rather heated on the part of an atheist, trying as all cult members do to convert me to his idea in order to validate his own. I remember saying to him, “ I can see why you can’t believe in a god like the one you are describing. I’m sure nobody else could either.”

Well, how we can expect to have peace and happiness in our country when people like the writer of the letter support any politician who says “I am a born again”, no matter what his or her level of ethics, education or morality is? If the people who believe this sort of thing about their god managed to get to their high level of judgement by being born again, who wants to be born again?

Why can’t they drop the god of the Old Testament and focus on the Jesus they claim to represent. Very few of them would act like the Good Samaritan if the beaten up one was gay. They may even have helped beat him up in the name of Jesus. None of them would ever consider for a moment that their dogmatic insistence that Jesus wasn’t married to a woman would be evidence to them today that a modern man was gay.

As I am typing this the news is reporting extraordinarily severe flooding in exactly those parts of the South from which this e-mail was sent. Am I to think as the author of the letter would, that this is the punishment of the Lord on the wicked people in the area who perpetrate hate in the name of the gospel of Love? Double standards are normal in matters of religion so maybe we can let that thought go, as an act of charity.

When I taught social studies to seventeen year old young men in England I used to surprise them by saying, “There are actually only two kinds of people in the world: those who can put themselves into other people’s shoes and feel what they feel, and those who can’t. And you are all likely to be working for one of those who can’t because they get into their leadership positions by trampling over the more sensitive people on the ladder, without even noticing what they are doing.”

Religious fanatics everywhere have the same built-in unawareness of the values of the world of anyone else who doesn’t use exactly the same words and language as themselves. And they claim moral authority over everyone else in the name of their god.

Would you like someone like the writer of this letter, obsessed with abortion and gay marriage issues, and a definite bias against entertainers, to choose who is to be in charge of your life? They will always have the energy of the single-issue voter to vote for others like themselves. Will you have the energy of the multi-issue voter to vote for those like you, if there are any in the current crowd of very well financed people aiming to eat from the public trough.

I tend to the opinion that democracy in this country has been dead for many decades, though that fact is now more obvious than it used to be because of the Internet. I am also of the opinion that anyone who wants to be President, and inheritor of the current, carefully planned mess, is probably mentally unbalanced, however smart. I can see why some obsessives would want the power, but who in their right mind would want the impossible problems?

Happy Easter again!