To be like God...

I will tell you a pleasant tale which has in it a touch of pathos.

A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate.

The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him."

The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations.

He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him.

Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven.

The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way.

Mark Twain: Letters From The Earth

If you have never read this... You should.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm#8

:popcorn:

I have read most of his stuff (high school English teacher). I think he is only surpassed as a satirist by Burroughs. But I know if I posted that, I would be branded a Christian hater.

And I'm not being facecious. ER had a lot to do with the shaping of early 20th C attitudes and I think he was either very dry or very much a sexist and racist.

(i wouldn't put either up there in the realm of a Twain or Dreisser or Hemmingway as far as American Authors... But your post intigues.

I don't think ER was a satirist, I think he was the sexist/racist option.

I hate Hemmingway, speaking of sexists. W. S. Burroughs was a fabulous satirist. His attack on the death penalty in Naked Lunch is fabulous.

I would also argue that W.S.B. completely changed the face of the American novel with Naked Lunch. Even more than Hemmingway did with his minimalistic, journalistic style. Twain is huge, but I would place him behind WSB just because I don't think Twain changed the face of literature like Burroughs did.

I could talk about this forever. I teach high school English and American lit is my favorite.

Sorry, Angel. I just take what I see.

know where the name came from.

nt

Blessed are the poor... so let's make some more.
Blessed are the meek... so rule with an iron fist.
Blessed are the peacemakers... because they won't fight us.
Blessed are the those who suffer in the name of the Lord and offer up cash to support a twisted view of God... for they will make us rich and powerful.

How funny that things have changed so little from when Twain was around. I assumed this grotesques vision of God was a new phenomenon but history serves to prove how little things change. I wonder if there will always be the struggle between the man that was Saul and the soul that was Paul.