Salvation

In the Christian religion, salvation is the process by which God chooses to show a few human souls a real good time while torturing everybody else unmercifully.

In Judaism and Islam, salvation is when the Messiah arrives and makes all pork legal.

History

The prophet Ikiah spoke evocatively of salvation in his Epistle to the Brethren of Hamsterbaath.

13:1 Where lieth salvation? I long for it, but it is far off from me and instead God hath smote me with a nasty disease. My cock looks like a moldy green cucumber and it hurts. Yea, great is the Lord!

13:2 O Lord, fount of procreation, You who bringeth the carp to spawn and the camel to hump, look at that Ba'al-worshipping Hittite next door to me: six wives he has, each sweeter and sexier than the last. Redheads, blondes – you name it he's got it. And me? Thy faithful servant? My wife has the face of a camel and a tongue more wounding than an iron spear. Even before my pecker swelled up and turned greenish-black she wouldn't touch it.

13:3 In Thy Book it is written that the Lord is just and merciful. O Lord, You shall reward Your children according to their righteousness. Come on, Lord, I perform good works in Thy name, I tithe, I observe Thy holy days, and you give me a rotten pecker? Some reward! The clap I could have gotten from Rachel the little whore, nu? But no, on Your advice I stayed away from whores. Now it's too late.

13:4 Where is Thy justice, hmm?

13:5 The priest tells me I gotta die before I get any salvation. Why can't You be merciful and loving in this world, O Lord? Forgive me for asking, O Lord, but since You promise merciful justice and don't deliver it here, why should we believe You when You promise to deliver salvation over there? As far as Thy humble servant can tell, You are working a con game. The dead are dead and stay in Sheol forever. They don't come back and brag on how great Your salvation turned out to be, You know what I mean?

13:6 Yea, O Lord, herein is the nub: Thou art the source of all peace and all calamity – so sayeth Thy prophet Isaiah. Therefore Thou art the root of all truth and all lies. I'm thinking You are lying about the salvation bit, O Lord, like you lie about blessing people who keep Your faith. Look at the sorrow thou hast brought to Job, you eldritch bastard !

13:7 Where is salvation? In a pig's eye, O Lord; yea, I think Thy "salvation" is a fucking joke.

Ikiah's heartfelt cry here summarizes one disconnect between Christian theology and reality: the world contains suffering and agony which afflicts the righteous just as often as the unrighteous despite what the Bible says about God's mercy ... and so we cannot count on God to tell the truth.

The prophet Isaiah knew perfectly well that it's preposterous to suppose that the Lord is completely good; the G-man Himself admitted to him He is a great source of calamity:

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create calamity: I the LORD do all these things. (Isaiah 45-7).

As for God's promise of salvation, while we have abundant evidence of injustice and suffering in the world, we have no evidence at all that anything survives death. There is no evidence that salvation is anything more than a manipulative lie told by the God who creates calamities. Ikiah is probably right when he calls it a joke.

Promise of Jesus the Christ

During his Sermon in the Supermarket Jesus said:

Yea, verily I say unto you that some of you dudes and dolls won't even die before I come back and lift you up to Heaven. Dig it!

Jesus lied. Everybody who ever heard Him in person has been dead as a doorknocker for nearly two thousand years, and He ain't come back yet.

Cowardly, but nobody cares

It would seem that one who slavishly worships a sadist and mass murderer just so the murderer won't torture him would be a moral coward ... but Christians don't care. Christians believe that if they think about how much evil God has created then God will get angry and deny them salvation ... so they don't think about it.

It's similar to being Stalin's houseguest: you really don't want to piss him off and get sent to a Siberia, so you're very very careful to avoid criticizing his regime. Same thing with God: you know He's a cruel bastard – look what He did to King Jehoram, made his intestines fall out of his ass until he died – but you're too scared of the Big Motherfucker to say anything about it.

Or, rather, those who believe in salvation are too scared.

But nobody much cares.

Divinely manipulative

Of course if people believe they get pie in the sky when they die then people are much more likely not to worry much about being shit upon here on Earth. The Dark Ages in Europe were intellectually "dark" precisely because the Church told everyone that God wanted 'em ignorant, poor, and humble – and they'd best stay that way if they wanted salvation.

They best put up with being shit on.

The Bible records many, many wars and war crimes committed under the direct command of God Himself. So it's quite reasonable for people who want salvation to make "righteous war" on other people, and the other people to respond with "righteous war" in return. (Interestingly, the current fundamentalist Christian President of the United States appears to think exactly like that: one of his righteous wars has resulted the murder of sixty thousand innocent people and he figures he's bound for salvation because he's doing his Godly Christian duty. But we digress.)

Everybody wants salvation and, based on the evidence in the Bible, killing seems like a good way to get it. Moses himself came back from Mount Sinus carrying a commandment reading Thou SHALT NOT kill and immediately had thousands of his people killed. God approved. That incident nicely encapsulates God's divine dishonesty, doesn't it?

Salvation is a lie that can be used to motivate anything – voluntary poverty, willful ignorance, and mass murder.

God is a clever little sod in His own way, isn't He?

Huh? This article is questioning its sexuality. You can affirm its life choice by sleeping with it.