Why going to church beats going to a nightclub

It’s nice to be back in good old Helvetia again, but as the holiest of holy days approaches I cannot help but think of my friend Jeremy Clarke and his struggles. Philosophers, starting with the Greeks, have dealt with life’s problems yet not one of them has been able to pin down Man’s ultimate defeat: death.

The one who did manage it was no philosopher. He was a simple carpenter, and his take on death has given more comfort and hope to us mortals than all the eggheads put together. Nowadays we have doubters who see us believers as Dark Ages ignoramuses. You know the kind I’m talking about – smelly, bearded, lefty know-it-alls. But even Charles Darwin believed in God, so who are these modern clowns to doubt Him and His son?

Mind you, who am I, a very fortunate man until today, to talk about pain and death. We’re all hostages to fate or destiny or whatever you want to call it. When religion, now equated with ignorance and superstition, gave way to science, equated with fact and reason, it was the beginning of the end. Has mankind seen a worse century than the 20th? The senseless slaughter of young men during the first world war should have had the generals from both sides lined up against a wall and shot, their bodies given to wild animals for Christmas. Instead, their statues are still with us. Two atomic bombs dropped on innocent Japanese women and children was as great a crime as I can think of, yet Truman’s statue stands proudly near my Athenian home. Add to that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and appropriation of their lands, and that greatest of crimes, committed against the Jews by the Nazis. George W. Bush is a sort of hero to Americans because of his folksy manner and tangled syntax, and the foul neocons who planned the war in Iraq walk around Washington with their ugly heads held high.