Marginalized in the Promised Land

‘Do you ever get the feeling that you, Christian, are a minority? Not a protected one, of course, like an endangered species, a primitive people, or a language group threatened with extinction. As a matter of fact, no one would mind it terribly, if you and your kind went extinct. After all, you’ve been troublemakers right from day one.

‘True, you claim that all the benefits of the modern world—individual and corporate liberty, modern science and medicine, not to mention more than a thousand years’ worth of architectural marvels, art, music, literature, even jurisprudence—are the result of the teachings of your nefarious savior and his followers.

‘But actually, while you sometimes take two steps forward, you then take three steps back, canceling all your stupid self-praise. Yes, one of you keeps saying, ‘we are living amidst the ruins of a great Judaeo-Christian civilisation,’ implying that what we’ve built on top of it is somehow inferior, but experience cannot be fooled.

‘No, modern man is better, has more, and it all owes nothing to your vaunted accomplishments. You fight Islam like a shadow boxer boxes himself. It’s just the flip-side of your centuries-old sociopathy, not a heresy but a transparency revealing your hidden agendas. Just like a mirror has its dark side, front or back you’re all one and the same.

‘So we’re quite justified in ignoring you. You have nothing to offer and you never had. You say your works and your faith have built this country and made it a promised land? In a way, you’re right—it is a promised land, but not the way you think. With your typical, ignominious hypocrisy, you cleared the land of its original inhabitants, by genocide. That’s all.

‘Now, as we see it, it’s your karma to be cleared off in exactly the same way. But we won’t give you the satisfaction of bloody martyrdom. In fact, we don’t have to. You’ve given yourself the very rope by which to hang yourself, all the while smiling and spouting shallow platitudes, seemingly unaware that you’ve readied your own gallows.

‘Marginalized in the promised land! Yes, Christian, we’re talking about you. You’re too deaf and blind even to turn around and see where you’re standing. You’re too wrapped up in yourself to even notice each other, let alone us. Like a blind peddler hawking his wares with a loud voice to a crowd he doesn’t know isn’t even there, you never saw us, never knew us.

‘All you wanted was our souls, for your paradise, our names for your ‘Lamb’s book of life.’ But it wasn’t that easy, was it? We could care less for your cheap dime-store thrills. Miracles. This is your day. Hah! We’ve had a good laugh watching you choke on your own vomit, and we can’t wait till the last of you enters the irreversible jaws of extinction. Finally, your own words will come true:

‘Free at last, free at last, we’re free at last… of you.’