Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, we know you know no shame, yet still you invoke God’s name!  God,                                   I am sick of it all!   What kind of god inspires such devotion? What kind of god has Man made?   Give me no more gods, please; I’ve had enough.   And beware the lean and hungry apostles who have plenty to eat, but don’t.   Steel, concrete, glass, and human bodies fall. What mad man’s heart allowed his mind to plan such death and destruction?    Oh where are the old heathen gods           who were satisfied with lust?   Concrete steel glass and human bodies fall. What merciful god – or loving parent – could find joy in this rubble of glass, steel, concrete, and human bodies?   God of the thousand hatreds: pray,                             leave us in peace!   Where is the life? The joie de vivre that animates the child, that brings such joy to the world as my little daughters? Where is the foundation of this fear of seeing the human body except as blown to pieces?   A child is not an enemy. A fireman is not your enemy. A non-combatant is not your enemy. You have no enemy worse than yourselves – you who find enemies on all sides,         you in whom                             all truth resides.   You whose father and father’s father built giant buildings of adobe brick – some five or six stories high – who were the marvel of the desert kingdoms,                  the geniuses of the outcasts.   What joy you must find in knocking down the towers of others – you who cannot hope to build anything close to Paradise, enjoy the thrill of knocking ours down – dirty little boys, never civilized.   How dangerous the notion of Paradise! How fatally flawed the idea of a Heaven to come, for he/she who longs only for the Afterlife                     must necessarily depreciate life. Better a good, God-fearing atheist, who sees the folly of the invisible, and vows to make this life             as good as possible.   Father of Lies, Lord, Lord of the Flies,             of Death,             of pestilence,             of germ warfare and poison gas, of atomic weapons and sabotaged nuclear reactors – Lord of the Flies, go to your Heaven – go now,             leave us, Oh Lord of the Only Truth,             leave us to be human, with some chance to be good.   Osama: your so-called God is the spirit of Moloch re-emerging from the furnace, Huitzilopochtli, still drooling thirstily for blood, and Kali, she-of-the-thousand-skulls, re-born as a slutty transvestite,    in sickening black dreams.   Dreams? No, nightmares. Osama bin Laden, I am sick of fire, of screams, the falling bodies, the lives taken more horribly than those in the furnaces of Moloch, or on the altars of Tezcatlipoca or Huitzilopochli.   Kali, Kali! Your troops are ready – your Assassins, your Thugs, are religiously well trained, have memorized the Koran, and learned nothing from it, and have been carefully taught to love the invisible and a never-coming Paradise, and to try to kill all the rest of humanity, then die.   God! I am sick of it all!   I’ve had enough of your God, of our God, of everybody’s God who expresses the basest, most murderous instincts of mankind.   Kali!  Moloch!  Tezcatlipoca!  The Christ of the Crusades, and of both Irelands! They live!  They live!  We die, thanks to the visions of those who preach of The Merciful God.   I see a new Huitzilopochtli, a tribal god, limping in from the desert, all-too-ready to skin your daughter, and make your blood run like water.    I see man’s murderous instincts released from the confines of civilization.   Osama bin Laden: sicker than a vomiting dog, go – go with the Aztec Goddess Tlazolteotl, to swallow your own filth – and hasten – yes, hasten – to your Paradise! Osama bin Laden: may your tribe decrease!