A Patriarch's Curse

This just in, on the nightly news: Pat Robertson warns the citizens of Dover, Pa that when calamity befalls their community, don't ask God for help, because they've just turned their backs on him by voting to keep Intelligent Design out of their schools. Don't anyone be confused about the true significance of Robertson's warning. It's a curse. It's a biblical curse, in the same vein as centuries and millennia of spiritual violence that suurounds the dominant religions.

In a similar vein, we learned a few weeks ago that certain rabbis in Israel were putting curses on the heads of people like Arial Sharon and other Israelies who weren't following the fundamentalist line. Oh yes, said one on television. "We pray for their death. "

The truly spiritual can only look upon these violent patriarchs with horror. But they are all around us. In fact, they are the ones who get most of the "spiritual attention" in the media, which loves a good blood fight. Blood, death, guts, fire, brimstone, agonizing death--or better yet, an agonizing eternity in that mythological place called Hell, which the patriarchs invented as "God's Prison," since worldly prisons could never inflict enough pain and suffering upon their fellow man to satisy the patriarchs' insatiable blood thirst. Sic 'em Pat! Send those heathens from Dover straight to Hell.