Please Don’t Feed the Christians

In the more obscure annals of Christian heresy is a little known group of North African fanatics that history calls the Circumcellions. These self-proclaimed ‘Soldiers of Christ’ believed that martyrdom was the highest virtue to which a Christian could aspire, a belief that led them to randomly attack any convenient target that they presumed would respond with lethal force. This, of course, led not only to the martyrdom of individual Circumcellions, but ultimately to the demise of the entire movement. Having fully embraced the victim theology of the Christian religion, this particular group of fanatical morons victimized themselves right out of existence.

To the Roman Church, coming into its own as a power in the empire, the Circumcellions were just another threat, heretics fully deserving to have their wish fulfilled. But at the heart of Catholic theology the ideal of these heretics was very much alive. After all, this was a religion founded on the judicial murder of the Man-God Jesus, a willing victim of Roman crucifixion, whose suffering was ordained by his Sky-God father. Indeed it was the all of the other victims of Roman civilization (the Jews, slaves, women, the poor) who had formed the heart of this religion as it first grew beyond its birthplace in the Levant (although they were to be, ironically, as severely persecuted by the Roman Church as they had been by the Romans). The victim theology that they had started would continue to be the central theology of both the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole.

In recent weeks an incident involving the ‘theft’ of a consecrated communion wafer from a chapel at a Florida college, and the subsequent sarcastic comments made by atheist agitator PZ Myers, have demonstrated how deep victim theology runs in the church. Christ, of course, remains the eternal victim. Somehow able and willing to grant every Catholic priest (even the pederasts) the capacity to transubstantiate a piece of toast into something that is, at once, literally his own body and yet physically indistinguishable from every other piece of toast on earth, the Son of God is then eternally trapped in the bread, unable to escape desecration, bound even in the bodies of believers to the torment of digestion and the indignity of defecation. The slave god of the slave religion continues to embrace his own victimization.

And his followers thrive on it. Circumcellions in their heart, they adore the notion of their own martyrdom. Vocal atheist such as Myers leap beyond merely criticizing their superstitions into threatening the desecration of ‘a cracker’ and it gives them an excuse to wallow in their persecution complex. Being victimized by atheists allows Catholics and other Christians to more fully identify with their victim God. And by becoming, through an excess of noisy belligerence, the persecutors who make these Christians whole, the atheists only enable their continuing delusions. In their own way, all that they are doing is feeding the beast.