Michael Malone - Weebly

stones on an electric chair and hang it up over the altar!
What a hideous, slimy, lurid symbol for a religion to
exalt—a machine of public execution! My God! Gibbon
was right, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Marx, who else? Well,
whoever, they were all right.
(Hadn't he heard that Nietzsche had ended up
hugging an overworked cart horse, blubbering tears all
over its scrawny neck? But, wait, hadn't he gone senile
from syphilis by then? Yes!) Yes, they were right. Saar
felt the impulse rise to spring up from his seat, up into
the air, and haul Christ down from that Cross, hurl Him
down to the floor of the church. How dare He hang
there as if it were all that simple! His mere six hours of
suffering to compensate for the slow, wasting agony of
all the ages! His scourging and short walk to death to
make up for it all! Millions had died more mercilessly
mocked, in greater thirst, in greater fear, in greater pain,
unsolaced by faithful tears, not to mention resurrection.
How dare He hang up there and claim He paid the cost
of one child, panicked for breath, dying in a terror of
incomprehension while his parents powerlessly
watched. Oh, naturally it appealed to the blind and the