Creating An Imaginary God, Evangelically

DEMOCRATS have created an imaginary God, recently asserted some sanctimonious spewer of ministerial mythology. It was either Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell Jr., the usual suspects, who are interchangeable. They should both know about imaginary Gods; they create and market an imaginary deity every moment of every day, straight from the most important work of fiction in western lit, the Bible itself. Further, they profit greatly from their imaginative endeavor, dissembling and distorting the message of a purveyor of humility and voluntary poverty whose ministry forms the central theme of the revised covenant. You might think that anyone adequately audacious to label anyone else's perceived God "imaginary" would have some rudimentary concept of nature, and of the sublime, infinitely superior force unarguably responsible for its existence. It is, however, quite evident that neither of the two hustlers of their personal version of the supreme force has anything resembling an actual awareness and veneration of nature. Their religiosity is rigid, perverse dogma, contained in the pages of an ancient collection of manuscripts, written by people ignorant of the subtle workings of the universe, immersed instead in primitive barbarity and cruelty. In American culture, so joined at the hip are extreme political conservatism and extreme Christian dogma that anyone remotely seen as socialist is seen as erecting an alter to a dangerous God who demands that wealth be distributed among the poor rather than hoarded among the wealthy, and that human equality be absolute, universally distributed, rather than the exclusive domain of white male heterosexual believers of the absolute infallibility of Biblical barbarity. The God of Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., and the conservative evangelical Republican Trump supporting community demands human and animal blood sacrifices, consigns to eternal damnation in hell anyone who refuses to accept salvation through torture, and venerates folks like Moses and Paul, the former of whom leads his chosen people in bloody wars of conquest, the latter of whom mercilessly persecutes those of other faiths. The Graham-Falwell-evangelical-Trump God puts to death gay people, children who curse their parents, and anyone who dares to do a lick of work on the sabbath. Meanwhile the God of the Democratic party lobbies and legislates for paid overtime, gay rights, greater economic equality, religious and cultural diversity and tolerance, and all manner of non scriptural revisionism, including popular sovereignty. The right wing christian righteous harbor the delusion that the United States was founded on "Christian " ideals, and must return to them, post haste, or face wrathful judgment. That the truth is quite the opposite is our good fortune. The christian faith is not a democracy, but a harsh dictatorship, and in America, dissent may get you slandered by the righteous right, but there is nothing in the constitution about hell, or for that matter, any God of any sort, who is not mentioned. When asked why not, one of America's more enlightened if flippant founders is said to have said: "we forgot". We are even more fortunate for two things: that the United States is much less governed by the Falwellian God than the Democratic party version, and that the founders had the good sense and basic human decency to make it that way. At the end of the day, as we like to say, all Gods are imaginary, our personal ones, and those long established in human culture. Whatever, however created the universe, what Einstein called "the infinitely superior spirit", is still,and likely always will be, completely behind our feeble powers of comprehension. As Goethe said: "when I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine."