still waiting, mate

Dear George
I must say I’m thrilled to find that this modest blog appears as number 3 in a google search when ‘dear george pell’ is typed in. Omnia vanitas est. Spots number 1 and 2 were taken up by a letter addressed to you almost two years ago, and apparently never responded to by you, from a relative of yours, Monica Hingston. I’m sure you remember that one, an impassioned questioning of your church’s attitude to homosexuality, prompted by one of those papal proclamations old John Paul liked to pump out. Monica, as you know, was a Sister of Mercy for twenty-six years (it’s my humble hope that she has finally seen the light), and at the time of her letter, had been in a happy homosexual relationship for nineteen years. I would add my urgings to hers. What have you to say to her and people like her about your church’s prejudice against her kind? Is your silence a matter of arrogance or of moral cowardice? Surely you have a response, even a stock one, since your bureaucracy has been defending its increasingly indefensible position for a long time now?

terrorist atrocity kills 250

Of course there’s more. Take the rebellion of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, poeticised with due disdain by that admirable scourge of your bureaucracy, Thomas Paine. These men seem to have had just and reasonable grievances, and they made them known. That, apparently, was their ‘sin’, for which your god swallowed them alive. Two hundred and fifty of their incense-burning followers were apparently blown to bits by your god disguised as a terrorist bomber, in one of the more chilling verses in your Bible, Numbers 16:35 ‘And fire came out from the Lord and consumed the 250 men who were offering the incense.’

Again, how can you condemn the horrors currently being perpetrated upon innocents around the globe, apparently in the name of Islam, when your very own god perpetrates similar atrocities upon well-meaning, peaceable incense bearers? Please explain, George. I only wish to understand.

Moses and his nasty god

Dear George

It has been some months since I've addressed you. Forgive my long absence. In the meantime many awful things have happened in the world – the bombings in London and Egypt, the famine in Niger, just to mention some of the most recent items to hit the headlines. All of which might make a fellow wonder about the existence of a just god.

I myself have been reading a modernised version of the bible, Testament, based on the text of the Revised English Bible, with the boring bits removed, and I have to say that reading it makes me wonder even more about said god.

How much do you Christians concern yourselves with the inconsistencies involved in taking over, or trying to take over a god who seems to have been invented by a particular group of people, not easily identified from the Bible, but calling themselves Israelites, descendants of Jacob, whom their god renamed Israel? This god, whom you would describe as your god, is described here as coming down to his people in the form of a cloud and saying ‘The Lord, the Lord [he likes to give himself capitalised airs], a God compassionate and gracious, long-suffering, ever faithful and true, remaining faithful to thousands, forgiving iniquity, rebellion and sin but without acquitting the guilty, one who punishes children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for the iniquity of their fathers!’

This self-aggrandising, pitiless god strikes me as having been drawn from the countless fulminating tyrants prevalent at the time, and still prevalent today. A jealous, an unpredictable god, god, a god to fear and placate. At around this time, this same god gets into an argy-bargy with Moses, who manages to dissuade him from entirely wiping out his soi-disant chosen people, because they built a golden calf to worship instead of him. Eventually, the god changes his mind and picks out some Levites to put a ‘mere’ three thousand of the ‘worst offenders’ to the sword. It seems to me that Saddam didn’t need to study Stalin during his apprenticeship in state terror, all he had to do was read certain passages of the Old Testament. I’d love to know how you manage to reconcile this character with the perfect, all-loving being you now claim to be your god. Surely an explanation is in order.