The Christian church remonstrates bitterly with those who steal from God - persecuting them up until death, and then blackening their names happily ever after.
God made the universe and all that's in it, say the scriptures, and any refutation of this ancient assertion is tantamount to stealing food from the holy table; inserting a finger into the holy anus.
The Catholic church hounded Galileo to his grave. Even now, in the supposedly civilised 21st century, the theory of evolution is sometimes accepted only tentatively. It might appear that natural selection is blind, but this randomness is perfectly logical when the enormous mind of God appraises it; or it is a celestial trick to trap unbelievers - true followers can see that all creatures are immutable, and only those tainted by the devil infer variation.
What is it that upsets the church so much, specifically? Supporting the view that the earth revolves around the sun, declaring that humans are descended from apes, upholding the random nature of the motion of the quantum, all shunt our species from the centre of the universe to somewhere on its outskirts.
We are just apes, on an unprivileged planet, who are made of imperceptible chunks of matter whose trajectory we couldn't predict even if our eyes could resolve them. Freud hammered another nail into our sensibilites when he argued that even our thought processes have been hijacked - the id is capable of leaking through cracks in the consciousness and swamping us with its primitive desires. Where we come from, where we live, our destiny and our self-control - all ransacked.
But there is one crime worse than any of these solid scientific discoveries. The day human beings invented god sowed the seeds of our doom. If people are made in the image of god then, it stands to reason, we can aspire to be gods.
People with sublime talent, those who achieve highly, so the idea goes - these are the ones who are gods-on-earth. Smaller than god, and without his long reach and pulverising fist, maybe, but his ferocious stamp seared into their flesh is evidence enough.
These people are the ones we have all heard of, whom we talk about in revered tones as we queue up for lunch in the works canteen, whom we read about to pass the time on train journeys. Even those of us who don't own a television, we still can't escape, for aeroplanes write their names on the sky, and tangled lovers draw their likenesses in the sand.
Yet what of these great people? They are not god, and their longing is to be flung back down onto the earth with the rest of us. So they get pissed, show their vulnerability by sleeping with anything that moves, turn their first names into a dimunitive, speak about how much they like going down to the football ground, or how EastEnders is what helps them get away from themselves.
Yes, the worst thing the church ever did was create the church. They have made bastard gods out of people with a grain of talent, and for this there will be no forgiveness.
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