Oh, good morning. Uh, rain here. I wanted to talk today about a slightly different subject. I'm going to talk about Christianity. Yesterday, I was sitting, reclining in a local park, uh, chatting with a friend of mine, and we happened to have been discussing Christianity. They're a Christian, and there were two people who were obviously Christian and happened to pick up what we were talking about and approached us. And the gentleman addressed me by saying, You better listen to her, or you're going to go to hell. And I think he tried to pull that off tongue-in-cheek, but didn't quite come off that way. And I replied, as I will always reply to a comment like that, Do you have any evidence of that? Well, of course, he didn't. And then he proceeded to tell me, to regale me, uh, with the so-called reasoning that I'm so used to having grown up in a Christian town. So, I mean, I marinated in this sort of thing for the first 25 years of my life.

that well at the end of my life I would find out [Applause] and then my Christian friend who tacitly kind of apologized for this kind of behavior which I suppose was quite in keeping with a playground as it was because it's kind of kind of what you'd expect from a five-year-old boy. In other words, uh, believe what I want you to believe or my daddy's going to beat you up. And this is an example of how adults can come to behave in a very unflattering childish kind of way and think that they've attained to some sort of higher level of esteem in the world. And I'm going to make the argument today that Christianity proper, that the confession of faith to Christianity that is essential to actually be a Christian, it's not a nebulous concept being a Christian. People talk about whether someone's a real Christian or not. There's an actual confession of faith. There's a mandate that you have to confess, you have to adopt, you have to

devote your life to otherwise you're not a Christian. It has to do with the murder of Jesus, and I'm going to get into that because I want to use it as a way to get into the complexity of human psychosis and how alluring it can be, but how under examination it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. And in this way, we can come to understand ourselves a bit better because I don't exclude myself or anyone from the kinds of psychological forces that provoke us to want to understand more than we do and to resolve ourselves to the universe or to some god or and so forth and so forth. So, my friend, after apologizing for this admittedly odd display of behavior, began to tell me about how I had what she called a choice, and that is the choice to accept Jesus or to go, you know, and go to heaven or to go to hell. And I immediately asked her if she would consider it a choice if I pointed a gun at her and told her to give me my money.

or I was going to shoot her, and she kept emphasizing that it wasn't the same thing and that I had a choice. Now keep in mind, no one has ever had any evidence of hell other than on the earth, and I said that to these Christians when they were there. I said, You know, because I already knew what they were going to say when I said, 'Do you have any evidence of hell?' They were going to say, as they always do, 'Well, you'll find out one day.' And I said, 'Well, there's quite enough hell on the earth as it is,' and not all the Christianity in the world and not all the Christians seem to have mitigated for that or even seem in great danger of even thinking that they should, which is, I think, more to the point, and not just of Christians but say all of us. And then they proceeded to regale us with the notion that, well, a Christian after they're saved, they have so much to look forward to that it's a hell for them just to stay

here under any conditions just you know let's just take this on board for a second and I simply said well you know there are places in the world that are certainly evidence of hell if you want to describe hell at all you know maybe there's places in the middle east for instance and they at least conceded to this point they had the humility to kind of shut up at that point which is a good sign they haven't completely lost their faculties that's good it's also indicative of a psychosis which allows someone to make a pilgrimage from the realm and the value of storytelling that we all need and enjoy for reasons that we can't possibly explicitly empirically explain into the realm of equating a belief with reality and even so much as to take your monopoly on reality and attempt to coerce or threaten other people to believe what you do irrespective of any due course to logical argument or evidence or facts or even just the etiquette of polite society and we permit this as human beings um in many senses we have to permit this.

if someone comes up to me and yells profanities at me, there's really not much I can do. And if a Christian comes up to me and says, You're going to go to hell, there's not much I can do. I'm not going to change that person's mind. So, I'd like to discuss the enthralling prospect of accepting the blood of Jesus, eating of his flesh, and drinking of his blood, who he is as depicted in the Bible, irrespective of who he may actually be, and why this might be so alluring for people, and why I think it is so dangerous for the world, whatever the merits of a religion may be. Now, right away, a lot of sort of progressive, more liberated Christians will say, I'm not into drinking the blood, and I'm not into eating the flesh. The whole point of the catechism, of the confession of faith, of Christianity, is that the death, the bloodletting, the torture, the public humiliation of a

person in Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nathanism transmits to your blood, into your heart, to your physical and existential being, a value without which you would be consigned to a torturous eternal oblivion. It affects real things. His flesh is not symbolic; it's real flesh. And he himself in the Bible says at the Passover supper, the first Passover supper, Eat this bread, it is my body; drink this wine, it is my blood, right? And this is a man who turned water into wine. It wasn't symbolic wine; it was real wine. And so if he says that the wine is blood, it's not symbolic blood; it's real blood. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if someone's death is transmitting physical and spiritual changes to your being, that that is the same level of effect as if it were transmitted by drinking their blood or eating their flesh. It's not really much of a step beyond their flesh and blood is being incorporated, the value of their flushing.

bed is being incorporated into your physical and spiritual being, and all incorporation of that nature involves the consumption of these things. You are taking them in; you are receiving their value; you are incorporating into the being. So, a Christian has to drink the blood and eat the flesh on more than just a symbolic, if not in the most literal sense of the term, of drinking human blood. Now, this Christian said to me, Well, he's not human, he said. So, I took a couple of attacks, but I'm going to take a few more here. The first was one of the easiest ones: If God is so perfect and sublime by definition, in other words, no matter what you say, God is perfect because that is perfection, is God, and God is perfection, so good and good, good is God, and God is good, then why, if we may ask, would God need to torture somebody to forgive? Couldn't He just forgive you just like that? [Music] And you have to rely upon the definition of God. Well, God decided to do that, and that's just what you need, and then I

could point out every culture in the world at some point has sacrificed something, and whatever they sacrifice has to be the most perfect thing, the most perfect goat, the most virgin child. And so it's not out of step with precedent that Jesus would be the most perfect human. The very nature of a sacrifice, by definition, makes it necessary that he is the most perfect, so perfect that he's perfectly human, and he's superhuman, and he's divine, and the so-called Trinity. So right, so we're operating with precedent. The sacrifice is not as unique as Christians would like to think it is. It's sort of like different cultures drinking different liquids at parties throughout history and then saying your liquid is the only divine liquid, and only by drinking this liquid are you going to get intoxicated. Nothing else is the real intoxication. You can argue that all you want, you can say that all you want, but nobody in their right mind is going to believe you. Unique as it is, it's operating with a precedent. So if you even remotely

consider yourself Christian. You have confessed the necessity demanded by the very first breath of every infant child born since about 30 A.D. to torture, murder, and consume the flesh and blood of arguably the most perfect child, the most perfect human, and the most divine god in order to affect a status to clear a debt, failing which you would be condemned to suffer in this world and any other world forever without cease, and that's the only provisions made by the most wonderful, perfect, intelligent god in the universe for dealing with any mistakes or sins that you or your ancestors may ever have made. So let's just be clear about that. So right away we really don't have to argue anything, just the confession of faith, I think when spelled out and I think in as honest a way as possible, because religions have a way of obfuscating this kind of thing and selling it, because that's what it is, it's selling psychosis. Psychosis always wants to sell itself, it has to, the very nature of psychosis.

brain's ability to protect itself chemically and developmentally from pain has to sell itself, and that selling is predicated upon dismissing certain other what otherwise would be comprehensive or more comprehensive attention to the symbiotic faculties of reason, logic, evidence, and magical abstract thinking that has its place in the world. But psychosis fuels the pilgrimage from the value of stories that lose nothing of their value from being stories to trying to have the more ambitious claims of upon reality, upon what you should do, uh, and what I call kind of insurance fraud. That is, if you don't do this racketeering coercion, if you don't do this, you've got this debt, real or imagined, and you are going to be hurt, your family is going to be hurt. And of course, the impressions can be so overwhelming and in league, I would argue, with a lot of other neglect in the world, Christian or otherwise, that one gains the propensity to find this, to find this kind of equation, this kind of psychology indispensable to other people. So, it only stands to reason then.

under this state of mind, that you should inform people that if they don't believe this, that they have a choice, which is not really true. Um, you don't have a choice when someone points a gun at you, right? But you do have a choice in the sense that you don't have to believe that the gun is real, the gun is loaded, or that the person holding it is in any position to make any great um claims about your future as a person. Um, and so that it's worthwhile threatening people that this is something under all normal circumstances, threatening people but not seem good, but your magical story includes a kind of threat, and that it's magical absolves it of a real threat, you know, that you would call the police about. But at the same time, because it's not, because it's more than magical, it's more than just a threat.

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