“You stumbled into the briar patch of truth,”
Reilly grinned, reverting to a phrase he had often used
when he taught at Columbia University. He started to relax
as he lapsed into the comfortable role of being a professor
again. “And it is a briar patch full of thorns to
protect the weakness of the stems.”
“The stems being the essence of the beliefs, I
guess.”
“Correct. Religious prohibitions then become the
thorns to protect their essential beliefs, like the
thorns nature designed to prevent animals from eating
the stems,” Reilly said. “Animals, and disbelievers,
can nibble at the flowers but get hurt if they go to
the core of the structure. The thistles of certitude
and self-righteous intolerance perform that function.”
Reilly waved his hand to draw thorns in the air. “Most
claim to be the one true religion and assert that everyone
else has yet to find the true path. That creates an
‘us’ and ‘them’ scenario. When the
‘us’ believers are threatened and become self-righteous,
the ‘them’ wrong-believers transition in the
minds of the “us” believers from prospective
converts to dangerous infidels. Disdaining and even
killing the infidels is then justified because their
lack of the true “us” belief system makes
them second-class people at best; at worst, it makes
them evil incarnate. The religion of Marxism-Leninism
perfected this grotesque distortion in the 20th century,
killing more than 30 million of their own people in
the process and causing an international arms race that
cost the world trillions of dollars.”
“But ‘wrong beliefs’ among religious
believers doesn’t necessitate violence,” Hennessy
argued.
“Not necessarily among individual believers,”
Reilly agreed. “Yet the principal Western religions
were all born in violence.” Reilly took another
large sip of wine and looked at Hennessy to be sure
he was following him. “Consider the brutal torture
and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which Christians
actually celebrate as fulfilling the ordained will of
God. He was killed because the Jews did not accept him
as the messiah. The Christians believe that Jesus had
to be killed so that they could receive remission from
their original sin, with which they are stained from
birth. According to Christian interpretations of the
prophesies in the Old and New Testaments, God the father
sent his son Jesus…a Jew… to earth to suffer
and die—as the last sacrificial lamb in the Hebrew
tradition of slaughtering their first-born sons to appease
their God. In this case the sacrifice was to redeem
mankind because of the ‘original sin’ of Adam
and Eve.”
“So, according to Christian logic, Jesus had to
be killed,” Hennessy said.
“Of course. And that’s one of the things
which makes the entire story illogical,” Reilly
responded. “If Jesus was preordained to die, then
logically the Jews who betrayed him were fulfilling
the will of God and should be heroes to the Christians.
Judas should be the first Catholic saint. If they had
let Jesus live, they would have betrayed the plan and
providence of God for mankind’s redemption. So
instead of being blamed for killing Jesus, the Son of
God, the Jews should be praised for helping the Christians
rid themselves of the consequences of original sin.”
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