Excersus XXVIII: Let Jesus be your Death Beam

We've been spending a half a year now cataloguing the general awfulness of Jehovah and praising with reservation the spirit in which the great Indian epics were written, and now we come to Jesus. The usual line, at least in Christian America, is that "Yes, the Old Testament is gruesome and violent and horrid, but Jesus changes that, and turns monotheism into something beautiful and embracing." The standard retort to that is, "Okay, but you didn't have Hell, a place of eternal torment for those who disagree with you, until you had Jesus."

Now, you can argue that it wasn't Jesus who brought Hell into the picture, but rather the apostles, and especially Paul, who can be generally said to play the roll of Dick Cheney to Jesus's George W. Bush. Now, it is hard to say what Jesus REALLY said, as our only source for his words comes from a set of men who can't even agree among themselves about the words physically written on the cross (go ahead and look it up now - each of the four gospels says it's something different), and whose authority therefore about Jesus's day-to-day speechifying can hardly be relied upon. For that matter, it is an open question whether or not Jesus actually existed, as the main non-Bible source that is quoted to prove said existence, a few sentences in Josephus, is a Christian forgery of later years inserted into the text. But for now, let's assume that he existed, and that his thoughts are at least decently close to what the hapless reporting of the apostles records. Let's even take the whole Book of Revelations out of the equation as the ravings of a deranged death cultist not necessarily reflective of Jesus's thought. That still leaves us with Jesus saying stuff like this:

And if anyone will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorroah than for that town. Matthew 10:14-15.

That is Jesus, meek and mild, saying that, if somebody disagrees with you, my apostles, don't think twice about it, because they, AND THE ENTIRE TOWN THEY LIVE IN, will be consumed in torments worse than those visited upon the most abhorrent of Old Testament cities. This demand for complete mental surrender is not atypical in Christian circles, and highlights, as Nietzsche pointed out, what is truly disturbing about Christianity as opposed to Judaism. Whereas Yahweh will torture you and kill you for DOING the wrong thing, JESUS will torture you and kill you for THINKING the wrong thing, and then CONTINUE to torture you for all of eternity after you're dead.

- Count Dolby von Luckner