Love and Wrath Part II - The Valley of the Shadow of Death

Part Two – The valley of the shadow of death

The other side – somewhere over the rainbow.

Religion has an inherent interest in death. But then, I suppose, don’t we all? It is something we have all thought about - our own death - at one time or another. We all have a burning desire to find out what, if anything lies beyond death. It is the great unknown… the great unanswerable question. What will become of us when we die…?

Well, the likelihood is – nothing. We will rot into the ground and all of our memories and dreams will die with us.

Death plays a major part in religion in many guises. First, there is the concept of death – the idea of heaven and hell, which is used as either a carrot dangled in front of the believer’s face, or a whip at his back, coercing him into doing what his religion believes is right.

What’s the harm, a religious person may argue, in believing in life after death, even if there is absolutely no evidence to support it? Surely it gives us hope? A reason to live our otherwise seemingly irrelevant life…? To that I would reply that whilst, yes, it may bring hope, it is a false hope – and the damaging part is that it devalues life. Many people have devoted their lives to the religions they follow, adhering to every guideline, upholding every value that faith represents, in the hope that they will be granted a place in paradise - their life’s wages.

The concept of Hell is used expertly in religion as a form of terrorism – terrifying children into following their faith’s moral code. But what, when you think about it, could possibly be the purpose of Hell, aside from installing fear? The bible preaches that God is just and merciful – how, then, can he justify Hell? To begin with, if he is omnipotent and he already knows our fates, why put himself and mankind through the whole terrible rigmarole? It can’t possibly serve any purpose other than perhaps his own enjoyment. Furthermore, a human being has a finite lifetime, and so can only possibly commit a finite number of sins; how then can God justify eternal punishment? The punishment grossly outweighs the sins, even when the sins are committed at their maximum potential. Surely these cannot be the actions of a just God?

And so with a longing for Heaven, or a fear of Hell, a lifetime is wasted - a lifetime that could have been filed with creativity, experience and freedom - not prayer and war and servitude.

"Murder, my dear Watson — refined, cold-blooded murder."

Another prominent way in which death features in religion is murder. For centuries, millennia even, people all over the globe have been slaughtered in the name of religious beliefs. Year after year they kill each other over whose beliefs are correct. Had it not been for the commands of a ‘just’ and ‘loving’ God, there would have been no crusades, there would have been no witch hunts in the middle ages, and there would have been no terrorist attack on New York City on September the eleventh two thousand and one.

All of these atrocities, and thousands upon thousands besides, were all acts of murder committed as a direct result of religion.

And the Winner is… - The biggest killer of all.

JER 13:14 – “And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them.”

But who is the biggest killer in religious history? Well, if, as the Christians profess, the bible is true, then the runaway winner is God himself.

At his blog, ‘Dwindling in Unbelief’, Steve Wells took a total of God’s kill count in the bible, which comes to a whopping 2,476,636. See the full list here.

And this is only the instances where the bible states the specific number of people killed – this figure doesn’t include, for instance, the countless murders committed in the great flood, or the killing of the first born in Egypt. When he took an estimate of the total kill count, it came to a gigantic 25,000,000. God is love.

Okay, I hear you say, but if God doesn’t exist, then what’s the problem, surely these are just stories and have no bearing on reality? Surely it is no more relevant than say, Hannibal Lector’s kill count? Well, perhaps it is just fiction, but God is a role model to millions of people, young and old alike. When he descended as Jesus, he was supposed to be the perfect example, the ‘spotless lamb’ but what kind of role model is a man who has killed 25 million people? God makes Charlie Manson look like Yogi Bear, and it is from this genocidal, vindictive, jealous being that believers are supposed to take their moral guidance from.

As well as being unjust, God is also a hypocrite. He orders in his commandments that his followers should not kill, and yet he permits himself to commit atrocity after atrocity. It’s little wonder the faithful have been killing each other for thousands of years. If a child grows up in a violent household, he is far more likely to be violent himself in his adulthood.

Martyrdom

“The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage”
Chuck Palahniuk

As well as taking the lives of others, for millennia religious believers have been taking their own lives as well, on holy missions with belief in a fast track to heaven. Unfortunately this often involves taking the lives of innocent people along with them, the clearest, most recent examples of this being, of course, the September 11^th attacks in New York, and the 7/7 attacks in London.

What could drive a person to commit such terrible acts, and take their own life in the process? The answer lies, of course, in the profound lack of respect for life taught by religious doctrines. For the entirety of their lives Religious followers are taught that there is something much better yet to come – paradise is awaiting them if only they can shake off the shackles of this crappy life here on earth. It’s little wonder these ‘martyrs’ wanted to die if that’s what they believe. And killing sinners along the way – doing ‘God’s work’, apparently qualifies you instantly for a place in heaven.

Killing in the name of

We now live in a world where it is okay to issue death warrants upon a person for doing the simplest of things like writing a book – Salman Rushdie wrote ‘The Satanic Verses’ in1988 and has been living with a fatwā requiring his execution that was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time ever since.

Some people who have been the subject of religious hatred have not been as lucky as Rushdie, however. In the early morning of November 2^nd 2004, Theo Van Gough, Great grandson of Vincent Van Gough’s brother, was shot eight times and stabbed three times, in his home city of Amsterdam as he cycled to work. His killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Muslim Dutch-Moroccan citizen, had left a five page note attached to one of the blades which was still in his torso, warning others that Van Gough’s crimes would not be tolerated. So what was Theo Van Gough’s crime? What crime could warrant such a despicable act?

Van Gough had been working on a ten minute film entitled ‘Submission’, which took a critical look at the treatment of women in Islam. A film. The sad truth is, if Mohammed Bouyeri had not been indoctrinated as a child to believe that the fourteen hundred year old ramblings he had been taught were divinely inspired, then he most certainly would not have committed the atrocity he committed.

The most infuriating thing about it all is that religion purports to teach love and peace, it even has a widely accepted reputation for teaching love an peace, and yet it has caused more deaths than any other man-made thing in history. One only needs to leaf through the pages of a holy text to see exactly why religion and violence and death are, and forever will be, inextricably linked.

"I will sweep away everything in all your land," says the LORD. "I will sweep away both people and animals alike. Even the birds of the air and the fish in the sea will die. I will reduce the wicked to heaps of rubble, along with the rest of humanity," says the LORD. "I will crush Judah and Jerusalem with my fist and destroy every last trace of their Baal worship. I will put an end to all the idolatrous priests, so that even the memory of them will disappear. For they go up to their roofs and bow to the sun, moon, and stars. They claim to follow the LORD, but then they worship Molech, too. So now I will destroy them! And I will destroy those who used to worship me but now no longer do. They no longer ask for the LORD's guidance or seek my blessings."

(Zephaniah 1:2-6) The Bible (NLT)

“Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them…"

(9:5) The Qur’an

God is love.

Love and Wrath - The Impact of Blind faith. Part One – Won’t somebody think of the children?

Good evening all, I'd like to depart, if I may, from my usual fiction and today try tackling some non-fiction. This is the first of a series of posts called Love and Wrath - The Impact of Blind faith. In these posts I will try to tackle the subject of religion and the impact of blind faith on our society. The first part will deal with the impact of imposed faith on the children of religious families. Enjoy, and as ever, feel free to comment, regardless if you agree or disagree with my comments.

Part One - Wont somebody think of the children?

In two thousand and eight, eleven year old Madeline Kara Neumann died on the floor of her rural home in Weston, Wisconsin as her family just stood around her and watched. For some time, her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann had watched as she grew steadily weaker and weaker, eventually becoming too ill to eat, drink, speak or walk. This was no sudden accident where the child’s parents had been given no time to act– Madeline’s death had been a long time coming, and rather than seek medical help, her parents decided to stand by her side and talk to themselves as their child died a slow, painful death.

They were praying. Rather than attending to their child’s treatable diabetes, they decided to pray – to put their faith in the fact that ‘the Lord will find a way.’ The lord did not, however, ‘find a way’, and Madeline Neumann died that day as a direct result of her parents’ negligence.

So what became of these parents who watched their child die, knowing they could have easily cured her? What should their sentence be? What should the sentence of any parent who allows their child to die due to negligence be? Surely they would be deemed unfit parents by the state? A prison term for murder?

No, instead, Dale and Leilani Neumann were allowed to still care for their other three children, and were sentenced to each serve only one month in jail a year for the next six years. With the judge simply adding, ‘God probably works through other people, some of them doctors’, implying, it seems, that they were right in what they were doing, but simply took it a little too far.

But the real question is why did this pair get off so lightly with such a heinous crime? The answer… they had God on their side. All over the world, religious beliefs are given a free pass to stomp upon the freedom of others. Whether it be Madeline Neumann’s right to readily available, life saving medical treatment, or Muslim children being denied blood transfusions, religion is untouchable. It is a force unlike any other that takes children from birth and leads them blindly through their life, opposing any who challenge their beliefs.

Imagine for a second that Dale and Leilani Neumann had let their child die as they did, only instead of blaming their faith in God in court they had said that they were waiting for E.T. to appear with his magic healing finger. What would have happened then? Would the judge have said, ‘Well, maybe E.T. morphs in to the shape of doctors sometimes, so maybe you should trust them’? The answer is no, of course he wouldn’t, the whole thing is farcical. They would have been locked up in an asylum and their kids would have been put into care. Religion is somehow different to any other strange belief. If you told someone you had seen fairies at the bottom of your garden, or that you had ridden a unicorn through time, I have no doubt that they would call you crazy, but when someone professes to believe in virgin births and talking snakes, it is seen in our society as somehow virtuous.

But why? Why has an idea that is so far removed from reality earned such a respected place in our society? Well, there is as much evidence to prove the existence of god as there is to prove the existence of E.T. and his magic finger, so it sure as hell can’t be based on evidence. (Note: There is almost definitely more evidence to prove the existence of E.T. (Just sayin’…))
The main factor in this appears to be time. If an idea has been around for long enough, it becomes accepted in society, no matter, it seems, how radical.

For some reason, having the idea of God behind you makes you untouchable, even permitting you to neglect the needs of your offspring. This is hardly surprising, of course, given the examples of terrible parenting that have been glorified in the Bible, like the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his own child at his Lords call.
How can a faith system that teaches its followers that it’s okay to kill your children if your God commands it be a healthy thing?

Labelling children - What’s in a name?

The Neumann case is of course only one example of the way religion abuses the rights of children throughout the world. From the instant they are born, the children of religious families have their freedoms imposed upon.

First of all they are labelled with something that they did not choose, something they could not possibly choose. This child’s a Christian… this child’s a Muslim.

How can a new born baby possibly make the choice to follow the Christian or Muslim faith? They have not yet had the time and do not yet have the skills to understand the complexities of faith systems like Christianity or Islam, so Christian parents (or parents from any other religion) who label their child with their religion, are no different to, say, fascist parents labelling their child a fascist.

This is a ridiculous scenario of course; the child has no interest in or knowledge of politics, so to label it a fascist makes no sense these are the beliefs of the parent and not the child – so why then is it acceptable to label a child a Hindu or a Muslim or a Mormon?

Circumcision - If God wants it cut off, why put it there in the first place?

Another frequently carried out imposition on the freedoms of children is the barbaric act of genital mutilation. There is not one single health benefit to the procedure, any yet still thousands and thousands of infants are subjected to it every year, some within days of birth. And why? Because God commanded it.

Why would God create a human and then ask us to alter it? Why would he ask us to cut pieces off our children when they are days old? Surely if he is omnipotent he could have created us right in the first place?

A warped sense of morality – ‘Cos the bible told me so.

One question that is posed frequently by religious apologetics is – where do you get your morals from if not from the Bible? (or Koran, or Torah etc.) What, they ask, is your moral compass?
We shouldn’t need to be told not to kill people! What does it say about our civilisation that we need to be ordered by a supreme creator not to Kill or steal under pain of eternal damnation? Surely if the only reason we are not going about killing each other is because we are afraid of punishment, then these are not true morals. These are rules imposed upon us. As a society, we should not want to go about killing one and other – not because we are afraid of Hell, but because we have a respect for life.

Religion has a long tradition of imposing morals upon its followers using fear. Thou shalt not kill… or you’re going to Hell for eternity. This is clearly not a healthy way to teach children right from wrong – in fact it’s nothing short of terrorism.

Wikipedia describes terrorism as ‘…the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.’ For thousands of years, religions have been coercing their followers to follow their rules using the fear of Hell.

Creationism – making a monkey out of science.

In nineteen-sixty, Stanley Kramer released a movie named ‘Inherit the Wind’, which documented the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’, a court case held in Tennessee in nineteen-twenty-five, which saw Teacher John T. Scopes up against the state of Tennessee for violation the ‘Butler Act.’ The Butler Act forbade the teaching in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.’ Scopes and his lawyer, Clarence Darrow (portrayed wonderfully in the film by Spencer Tracy), lost the case, and Scopes was ordered to pay a fine of one hundred dollars.

Watching ‘Inherit the Wind’ today should be a nostalgic reminder of how backwards our society once was, however, the sad truth is – it is still shockingly relevant. Still in this day in age, in the year two-thousand and eleven, parents are still trying to stop teachers from teaching the tried and tested, evidence-based theory of evolution, asking instead that they tell our children about devils and virgin births and magic apples and a whole range of things that have no basis in fact. To tell a child that something is fact, without any evidence to back it up is a lie, and our children don’t stand a chance at having any morals if they are lied to from the word go.

Some of these parents don’t want evolution completely eradicated from the curriculum; however they do want to see creationism taught alongside it. So if you are going to teach creationism and evolution side by side, why not teach the creation stories from all religions as fact? Why stop at the Christian creation story? Why not the Ancient Greek creation story? Or the Scientology one?

Science classes should only teach science, and religion should remain in the religious education class, where it is taught objectively.

Conclusion – I blame… the parents?

But who is to blame? Who is really to blame for all of these crimes committed against children in the name of God? One’s first thought is to blame the parents – but are they not just a product of what their parents taught them? And are their parents not just a product of their parents? It seems that no one can be held truly accountable.

The most terrifying truth of all, is that the parents who are subjecting their children to things like circumcision, fear of Hell etc. genuinely believe that they are doing the best by their children. To return for a moment to the Madeline Neumann case, I have no doubt that her parents truly believed that they were doing the best thing for their daughter, but at the end of the day that doesn’t excuse what they did. A man may kill his best friend because he believes that his body has been taken over by a shape-shifter from a parallel universe who has come to destroy us all, and he may do it in the best faith and with the best of intentions, but that doesn’t depart from the fact that he’s almost definitely wrong, and in the middle of a psychotic episode.

The Neumanns are probably not bad people, but they were negligent because their faith in a six thousand year old fairy tale was stronger than their desire to protect their daughter – they let their Madeline die and that was not their choice to make.

The Children of Disobedience - Part 2

Hello all, here is part two of a piece that I posted a few weeks back, 'The Children of Disobedience', which follows Thomas on his journey through the depths of Hell. To refresh yourself with the story, please see my post The Children of Disobedience - Part 1.
Enjoy, and as ever, thanks for reading!



The Children of Disobedience - Part Two

II

He clawed his way though the sea of twisted, tormented faces and tried to find a suitable place to stand. There was none, of course. Every inch of the ship’s deck was crammed with wretched, lost souls like himself. As he stood amongst them, he took a deep breath in and smelled the thick, fetid air. Suddenly, through the wailing, he heard a voice beside him.

‘It’s disgusting, isn’t it?’

He turned to see an old man sitting to his right who was looking at him. The man looked exhausted, his face completely colourless.

‘The air,’ continued the man.

‘What is that stench?’ he replied.

The man coughed, before rising to his feet and looking around him. ‘That is the stench of hell. And it never gets better. It keeps changing; every instant it turns in to a new reek, each more vile than the one that preceded it, so no matter how long you are immersed in it, your nose never gets used to it… you are always aware of it.’

‘How long have you been immersed in it, friend?’ he asked.

The old man looked around and coughed again. ‘I cannot say. Such thing as time does not exist in this place. There are no days and nights down here – that is a luxury that was saved for the righteous. I know it cannot be, but I feel like I have been here for eternity all ready. There is no sleep – no respite. Just waiting…’

‘Do you have a name, friend?’ he asked.

‘I did, once,’ replied the old man, ‘but names serve no purpose down here.’

‘And what did your name used to be?’

‘I was James, long ago,’ said the man.

‘I’m Thomas.’

~

Thomas perched as best he could next to James as the ship began to move, slowly but steadily underneath them.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Thomas.

‘Back into the darkness,’ coughed James. ‘Back where this ship has already been a thousand times before. It sails along the crimson river beneath us stopping at various ports on the way as it makes it’s descent into the abyss.’

‘And why do we stop? What happens at these ports?’

James looked at the ground and then back up at the thick grey clouds above him. ‘People come… and go. Those creatures…’ he nodded towards a hooded figure standing at the edge of the deck, ‘...when the ship docks, they walk off into the red mountains and return with more people like you and I. And they bring them here, stripped naked to the deck of this ship to await judgement.’ James looked around at the sea of tormented faces and sighed a long, pained sigh. ‘And some people go. When they have faced judgement, they depart at the chosen dock… where they will find the punishment that is appropriate for their earthly sins.’

‘And that will happen to all of us?’

‘All that was once man will soon be dust. This was the Lords plan all along.’

Thomas’s eyes caught sight of a young girl, a few feet across from him, sitting on the deck. She was weeping and wailing into her hands and repeating over and over some words that he could not understand.

‘Who is that child? Why does she weep so?’ he asked the old man.

‘That child?’ he replied, nodding towards the girl. ‘She took the wrong path. Only one faith can truly follow the word of God… only one faith is the righteous one. She was born into the wrong one.’

The girl repeated the same incoherent sentences again and again.

‘Hour on end she sits there, weeping and repeating the doctrine that her parents taught her so well – she prays that this is a test of faith… that the true God will rescue her from this sinner’s hell.’

‘But she is only a child,’ replied Thomas. ‘How great can her sins be that she has earned a place in this fiery eternity?’

‘She was taught the wrong things by the only people she could trust. That is her only crime.’

‘But what kind of God would make that judgement?’

‘The only God there is.’

Thomas began to push his way through the sea of people towards the girl, his fatherly instincts suddenly bursting to the surface. He wanted to comfort the girl… what sins could she have committed?

As he struggled through the weeping, terrified souls towards the girl, there was suddenly a commotion off to his right and he stopped and turned to see what it was. A man was climbing the railing at the ship’s edge and stood up straight for only a moment before diving off the side in to the blood red river.

Thomas turned around and looked back towards James who had caught sight of the man too. ‘He escaped!’ he shouted. ‘He jumped over the side of the ship!’ He pushed his way back towards his companion. ‘He has escaped… there is hope!’ he shouted. ‘If he can do it, then we all can, James!’

James was not moved by his enthusiasm. ‘Where will he go?’ he said.

‘He will swim to freedom!’ replied Thomas, a feeling of hope creeping through him. ‘He will escape this place. He has escaped!’

‘Where can he go? He will wash up on the riverbank like all the rest. Then they will bring him back. He could jump off the ship a hundred times… a thousand times, and it wouldn’t make any difference. There is no escape from this hell.’ James coughed and looked up through black, exhausted eyes. ‘There is no escape – you can be quite sure of that. Our Lord made it so.’

The Children of Disobedience - The Problem of Hell

Hello all : )

Imagine a world where the biblical concept of Hell is real. When you die, you are damned to a burning pit, cast into a lake of fire for all eternity.
St John told us that 'God is love', that he is compassionate and caring for his creation, but if this is true, how does the concept of Hell fit in to this? Surely if I have led a good life - been kind, charitable and humble I would deserve some reward in heaven? Do I deserve to be punished in the most horrible way possible for all eternity for not taking Sundays off and not accepting a man who lived thousands of years before my birth as my personal Saviour? Even still, if I have committed crimes in my life, surely the punishment is vastly out of proportion? Even if I sinned every minute of every day for my whole life, my life is finite, and so I can only commit a finite number of sins - so how can infinite punishment possibly be the actions of a just God?

So begins The problem of Hell.

This idea was the starting point for my novella 'The Children of Disobedience'. It follows our main character, Thomas, though his death, his journey through the bowels of Hell, and eventually his judgement at the hands of a higher power. This story will form part of a larger collection of stories which deal with the on-going debate about existence of God, which should hopefully be complete by this summer.
Part one of 'The Children of Disobedience' is below - please feel free to comment etc. and keep your eyes on the blog as I will be posting the subsequent parts in the following weeks.
Thanks for reading!




The Children of Disobedience - Part One

‘Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.’

- Ephesians 5:6


I

When he awoke it was dark – complete, all encompassing blackness. The sky (if it was even still there) was black and the sun had withdrawn. He didn’t feel right. He felt incomplete. As he patted himself down, he was certain that his body was there, but he felt somehow disconnected. The darkness enveloped him, suffocating him as he rose to his feet, waving his arms in front of himself, trying to work out the size of his enclosure. With the use of his eyes robbed from him, his other senses began to work overtime. Somewhere far in the distance he heard a low wail, like a wolf howling on a distant hilltop.

Suddenly, through the darkness there was a glint of light that was barely visible in front of him. As he edged closer, he strained to hear a barely audible whisper that was creeping through the black. Then he saw it again – a fleeting flash of sliver teeth through the vast charcoal emptiness.

‘Who is that?’ he asked, a rush of fear building in the pit of his stomach. ‘Who is that, out in the black? What is this place?’

There was no reply. Just the gentle hissing of incoherent whispering rippling through the air.

‘Show yourself, stranger,’ he pressed. ‘I know you’re there. I can feel you by my side. What is this dark prison? Why can’t I see?’

‘You will see once you are ready to open your eyes.’ The voice that replied was deep and shook him to his innards.

‘Who are you, faceless spectre? Why have you brought me here to this place? What do you intend for me?’

‘You brought yourself here.’ The booming voice spoke again. ‘Every decision you made, every road you travelled – they all brought you here.’

‘What is this pitch black eternity?’

‘It is just that – eternity.’

‘Have I died? Have I crossed over to the other place?’ As soon as those words crossed his lips, colours began to swim into view, and he blinked as a thousand shades of red and grey came bursting in to view. ‘I am beginning to see things… colours.’

‘Then you are ready.’

Slowly the colours began to turn into shapes, and as his eyes began to focus, he saw the world around him as he had never seen it before. Long ridges of blood red rock towered up on either side of him, winding down the sides of a long path that led downwards in to a deep dark unknown world. As he turned around, he saw his companion for the first time – a tall, shadowy cloaked figure who stood by his side, his silver teeth only just visible under his hood.

‘What manner of man are you,’ he asked, ‘that dwells in such an unforgiving place?’

‘I am no man.’

‘Then what are you? If you are not man, are you beast? What hides beneath those robes?’

‘I am neither man nor beast, alive nor dead. I am a member of the jury that will judge mankind.’

‘And me?’ he replied timidly. ‘Am I to be judged?’

‘All shall face judgement at the hands of their creator.’ The stranger’s voice shook him again.

As he looked despairingly towards his feet, he noticed something. On the right hand side of his stomach, there was a seeping crimson bloodstain, and he pulled his hand in, running his fingertips across the wound, and inspecting his stained fingers. Even though he could see and smell his own blood, and he could see the wound that cut deep in to his stomach, he felt no pain. He felt nothing. ‘I remember now,’ he said. ‘I was killed. I was shot in the stomach trying to defend my home. I have died – I have died and come to Satan’s lair.’

The cloaked stranger was silent, and he extended a long ash grey finger from the depths of his flowing cloak and pointed it in front of him, towards the man.

‘Shed your clothes,’ he growled in his deep, terrifying voice.

‘My clothes? But why?’

‘They serve no purpose in this place. Are you so ashamed of the man you are when you are stripped of your robes that you will not shed them? That was the sign of the very first disobedience.’

‘No man likes to be stripped of his clothes – exposed for all to see.’

‘Have you anything to hide?’ growled the stranger.

‘We all have our private shames.’

‘And they will be exposed. There will be no more secrets now. All that was hidden will be uncovered – every secret sin will be exposed. No man will hide from the truth in this place.’

And so he began to strip himself of his clothes, leaving them in a pile on the rocks next to where he stood.

‘Now you are unmasked,’ growled the stranger. ‘And all shall see the man that you really are.’

He stood naked and exposed before the stranger, still hiding his shame as best he could with his trembling hands. ‘What now? What is your intention, stranger?’

The cloaked stranger turned and slowly began to walk down the path in to the unknown. ‘Follow me.’

Slowly he began to follow his new companion, timidly trying to see past the long crimson ridges into the place to which they were heading. ‘What lies down that road?’ he piped quietly.

Suddenly the stranger stopped and turned around where he stood.

‘A dark place.’

* * * *

Some way down the path, he began to hear a noise coming from the dark distance. Long, low wails were drifting over the blood red crevasses and echoing through the thick, grey air. ‘Tell me stranger,’ he said, ‘what is that terrifying sound?’

‘That is the sound of darkness.’

‘Are we going into the darkness?’

‘Perhaps. But not now.’

And so they walked on in silence, listening to the hideous wailing that rose up from the distance. They followed the path down through the winding vein that was cut into the rock until they reached an opening, where the path widened and wound downwards towards a blood red river.

‘Is this the place I think it is?’ he asked timidly.

‘Where do you think we are?’ replied the stranger, looking straight ahead and continuing to move steadily.

‘Is this eternal damnation? Is this the place that was foretold in the holy books?’

The stranger stopped suddenly and glanced up for only a moment towards the endless grey clouds that hung overhead. ‘When Venus and his angels fell,’ he said, ‘this pit opened up to receive them.’

‘Have I fallen as they did?’

The stranger began to walk slowly again. ‘The pit isn’t closed. It remains open to beckon any man who does not watch his footsteps.’

‘So the holy texts were true.’

‘What reason have you to doubt the word of god?’

~

Soon they reached the bank of the red river, and as it gushed and swirled at his feet, he noticed something. Someway down the river, moored at its bank, sat a huge ship bobbing up and down with the river’s flow; its lifeless grey sails disappearing into the fog.

‘What is that ship in the distance?’ he asked.

‘That is the vessel that will guide you toward your final destination. Here is where you will wait for an audience with Venus.’

As he walked, two or three feet behind his companion towards the ship, he pointed towards the river. ‘The water,’ he asked, ‘why is it that colour?’

‘Because it isn’t water,’ growled his companion. ‘It is the blood and waste of the lost souls.’

Thirty feet or so from the ship, he noticed something on the riverbank. It was a man; he was gurgling in the black mud, grasping with all of his strength at the rocks by the river’s side, trying to pull himself up. The man was trying to speak – but he uttered only single, broken, incoherent words.

He jumped towards the riverbank and extended his hand towards the man. ‘Take my hand!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll help you out.’ He reached and reached but he could not make contact with the man.

The cloaked stranger watched from his side. ‘You cannot help him.’

‘I nearly have his hand!’

‘No one can save him. Not now; not for the rest of eternity. Only he could have done that. Leave the slothful glutton to his works.’

Still he tried to save the man, but each time he reached out his arm, he seemed to get further away. Finally, he realised that the stranger was right… he could not save him, so he gave up and left the man as he was instructed.

The stranger stopped as they began to walk up the gangplank towards the ship, and looked down at the man on the river bank. ‘He has found his fate,’ he said. ‘And it is a fate worthy of his sins. He decided upon a life of gluttony, now he must lie by the river bank for eternity and feast on rats and toads and snakes. He has found his fate just as you will find yours.’

Soon they reached the top of the gangplank and he looked out to see thousands of faces standing on the deck. They were crammed up as tightly as they could be packed. Thousands of fear stricken faces stared back at him and his companion, and the sound of weeping and wailing hit his ears like the crash of a cymbal.

‘Who are these wretched souls?’ he asked, his eyes and mouth hanging wide.

‘They are lost,’ growled the stranger, straining to be heard over horrifying wails. ‘They are seeking direction – and this is where they will find it.’

‘Tell me stranger… why are they so afraid?’

‘Why are you not?’

The cloaked stranger turned towards him and growled under his breath. ‘This is where we will part ways. You will wait aboard this ship until you are called – then we shall decide your final destination.’

‘But what shall I do until then? How long will it be until I am called? Tomorrow? Next week? In ten years time? You cannot leave me stranger!’

But his hooded companion had already begun to walk back down towards shore.

‘You will be called,’ he growled behind him.

Brothers - An Introduction

Hello all - I just wanted to give you a short introduction to the poem in my previous post (I realise I probably haven't done this in the correct order, but hey ho). I wrote Brothers as a way of exploring an issue that I am hugely interested in just now - the existence of god... or rather the non-existence of god. I just wanted to get down some of my concerns about blind faith and the poisoning effect that I believe comes with religion.

The poem follows two brothers, one theist and one atheist, who die and must weigh up the sins they have committed in their lifetimes. Please feel free to comment (positive or negative!). Let me know what you think about the issue - I'm always up for a debate!

Enjoy


If the poem is not below, you can find a link to it on the right hand side.