"He kill them with they love", John said. "They love for each other. You see how it was?" I nodded, incapable of speech. He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. "That's how it is every day", he said, "all over the world."

He killed them with their love

Bush said, in a big memorial service the other day, we've come to mourn and grieve and try to make some kind of sense out of this senseless tragedy that makes no sense. Well, wrong, President Bush. It makes perfect sense, to those who believe the Bible. [The victims of the massacre] died for America's sins and persecuting Westboro Baptist Church.

This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.

Who knew love could kill you?

I don't know how it all began, no one does. But I am pretty sure it's not that God had a son. [laughs] You know he's this orb of perfect energy, this powerful beyond imagination, but he's got kids. That would drive him fucking nuts, let me tell you. So you know we don't know the answers but the answer to that is not to make up stories. If you don't know something, just say, I don't know. That's your gospel right there. The gospel of "I don't know." I combined apathy and atheist, and I came up with apatheist. I don't know what happens when I die, and I don't care.

My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?

When you speak in His presence about your past sins, He does not even understand your language. Only the present and the future have any interest for Him. . .I have committed crimes and have blood on my conscience. I told Jesus about it again and again. But because He had long ago washed all this away, there was no possibility of communication between us. He did not understand what I was talking about.

"Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” ...

Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God...

But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them "the gospel" does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting the gospel is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God creates, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that. (excerpts all from chapter 7)"

I too died. But in the depth of my oblivion I heard Him speak and say, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." And His voice sought my drowned spirit and I was brought back to the shore. And I opened my eyes and I saw His white body hanging against the cloud, and His words that I had heard took the shape within me and became a new man. And I sorrowed no more. Who would sorrow for a sea that is unveiling its face, or for a mountain that laughs in the sun? Was it ever in the heart of man, when that heart was pierced, to say such words? What other judge of men has released His judges? And did ever love challenge hate with power more certain of itself? Was ever such a trumpet heard 'twixt heaven and earth? Was it known before that the murdered had compassion on his murderers? Or that the meteor stayed his footsteps for the mole? The seasons shall tire and the years grow old, ere they exhaust these words: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkels and softens the body while it still lives, tots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

It is difficult to understand. It seems brutal, it seems harsh…”
“It is life and it is death. It is the greatest blessing and the greatest curse in the universe. You do not have to understand it, Wakim. Your comprehension or your lack of it, your approval or your disapproval, will in no way alter its operation.

If you love people, they kill you. If you need people, they kill you. They do I tell you!

I mean this is the part that no one ever talks about. If you go to the center of the Bible Belt, and you have a fundamentalist Christian judge and all the lawyers and all the jury are fundamentalist Christians, and they believe completely with their heart (and I'm not doubting them in any way), and someone gets on the witness stand and says "I killed my whole family because God told me to," it's astonishing to me that nobody goes, "Well let's look into that." You know we have guilty; we have not guilty; we have not guilty by reason of insanity; we do not have: not guilty because God told me to. And that's one of the things that I'm obsessed with in this book ["God No"] is the fact that not only do I not believe; but how can that judge read the Bible and see Abraham being willing to kill his son because God told him to, see burning bushes appearing to people, hear people dropping all their worldly possessions and going on to follow... how can they see all that, and then a woman who clearly believes that God told her to do something is completely and utterly dismissed? It's a nutty thing.