It's like a children's Bible, just full of lies! What a wonderful way of killing the innocent joy and hope in little children!
When I was a child, I lived in a morbid world of prophets and Apocalypses, courtesy of my grandparents.
Every time we saw her, grandma would shift the subject to how Jesus was coming back Any Day Now, and that when he came back, he was going to slaughter everyone who wasn't a committed born-again Christian and send them to Hell to burn, while His people got to watch.
She got a little ugly when I asked her what people would do when they saw their loved ones being sent off to eternal torture. She said that they needed to make up their minds who they loved more, their damned "loved ones," or their Savior. In any event, she said, they probably simply wouldn't care anymore. They'd have better things to do with their time than sit around worrying about which relative or child wound up in Hell, anyway. If they didn't, they'd be perfect free to join them there burning, and their Judge wouldn't have a single problem sending them along for the ride, nosirree.
Also, for some reason there wouldn't be dogs in Heaven, or in the millennial kingdom. I had dogs.
So, yeah. That was "hope," the hope that you could cut enough emotional ties with the people you love that you no longer cared if they were condemned to Hell.
And let's not forget "joy." Like the joy an eight year old experiences coming home from school only to find no one there, a massive storm blowing up that killed the lights and the phones and kept traffic off the road, after having listened to grandma yammering about the imminent rapture every day for the last month, and jumping to the conclusion that the reason the lights and phones were off and everyone was gone with no one moving on the streets was because the Rapture had hit and he was left behind. The joy of that eight year old child holding his dogs and crying for them because he's been told, repeatedly, they he was going to get to watch them die over the next seven years of the Tribulation, assuming he survived that long. (For the record, he was alone because grandpa had gone to the hospital suddenly and everyone forgot to write a note telling him where they were, and no one could get through afterward to tell him because the phones were out too).
By contrast, I found infinitely more joy and hope in science classes, which helped me to understand something of the world in which I lived, the things that lived in it and where they came from, and that we could improve our own lives and the world around us through that understanding. Science taught me that we fucking MATTERED, in a way that your fucking shitnoodle mythology didn't.
Consider what a great advantage it gives to little boys and girls to learn that African boys are animals at such a young age, so that they can get a head start into evolutionary racism, which is a true truth!
Not a single fucking science class I've ever taken has taught that. On the contrary, every last one of them, and every single teacher and professor I've ever had, has taught that everyone alive is a being human from a common origin, and that we all have innate worth.
By contrast, the most vicious, virulent racists I've ever had the misfortune to meet were religious fundamentalists who rejected science in general and evolutionary theory in particular. Like grandma, who believed that black people and nonwhites were basically apes that could talk, and that people were essentially worthless motes in the hands of an angry God.
I hope the authors enjoy the millstone and the lake of fire.
It's your hell. You burn in it.
