Excerpt #79 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
If the “Left Behind” series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left, and toss them into everlasting fire:
“Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.”
These are best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide.
One of the final books in the series is titled “Glorious Appearing”, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet.
It’s disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of “Glorious Appearing” and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit.
We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it’s time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
…Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African- Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah’s son Ham and were intended by God to be enslaved.
In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God’s word—but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people’s religious faith.
In the early 20th century, women were denied voting and other rights because of the ‘social place’ allotted them in scripture.
Other cultures to this day discriminate against women based on religious ideas.
And yet, in time, society realizes and admits the mistakes.
Why is it tolerated?
Today, these same biblical biases (or religious arguments) are used to justify discrimination against homosexual unions.
Traditional marriage, defended using biblical arguments, cause great division within our country.
Why must we wait for time to pass before the inevitable admittance of discrimination?
People have the right to believe in a racist god, or a god who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell.
I don’t think we should ban books that say that.
But we should be embarrassed when our bestselling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
(Excerpt from “Jesus and Jihad” by Nicholas D. Kristoff, New York Times, July 17, 2004)