Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  Meanwhile, Julian kept appearing on American TV, commenting on the state of the world in general and the situation back home in particular. He chatted with Jay Leno and David Letterman, he appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and on Real Time with Bill Maher. He hosted Saturday Night Live and performed a new song called Mount Sinai Incorporate Sanyo, which was not only a funny old pun on the Latin proverb mens sana in corpore sano (‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’), but also a scorching criticism of the entanglements of religion, politics and business, and of the New Commandments set forth by the Pope, and after two days it became the fastest selling song in the history of iTunes.

  All the while, the British media were keeping a close eye on Julian. Every morning when I turned on the telly, the news headlines opened with ‘Julian Monk said ...,’ followed by a five-minute segment on whatever he’d said on whichever show he’d been on the night before. It was quite surreal. Just a couple of weeks ago Julian had been that quiet, shy kid who would hardly ever even open his mouth in class, and now he was making headline news every day, commenting on world events and calling the people who deserved it liars and bigots and an eclectic variety of other names. The interesting thing was how the media’s perception had changed since that school anniversary. Back then, most of the media had depicted Julian as some rude, obnoxious grouser with bad manners. But the longer this whole thing went on and the more the media reported on Julian, the more of these prejudices had to go. Soon whole TV programmes were dedicated to the Julian Monk phenomenon, and hordes of experts stood in line to refute any criticism brought against him. There were experts on psychology and education and philosophy and the natural sciences, and they all came to the conclusion that Julian was a tormented soul, and that one could argue about his way of tackling a subject or making a point, but they all agreed that he did indeed have most of the points he was trying to make, and that none of the claims he made about the world and society and human beings were actually wrong. The media that had started out by depicting Julian as some sort of freak had slowly but surely turned him into a national boy hero and role model. But in the end it was Julian himself who turned Julian Monk into a media legend.

  For the final leg of his American tour, Julian was invited to appear on The O’Reilly Factor on the fair and balanced Fox News channel. The interview was off to a rocky start.

  “Why are you such a pain in the ass?” Bill O’Reilly asked.

  “I don’t know, Bill,” Julian said. “Why are you?”

  That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the interview.

  “Look,” O’Reilly said, “I realize you’re young and full of hormones, and you need to be a little rebel and all that nonsense, but I think you don’t realize what’s going to happen to you and all those nonbelievers out there in the end.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You and your kind will end up in hell.”

  “So you believe in hell?” Julian asked. “A literal hell?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you think nonbelievers deserve to go there?”

  “That is not what I said,” O’Reilly said.

  “You said you believe in a literal hell, and that we will go there. Who’s going to send us there? God?”

  “No,” O’Reilly said. “Not God. You are sending yourself there by not accepting Jesus Christ as your Saviour.”

  “I accept Jesus Christ as a great philosopher and as a role model in many ways. Is that not enough?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not enough to just sit there and say, ‘Yeah, you know, that Jesus guy was a cool dude and I like what he said’. That is not enough. You have to accept Jesus as your personal Saviour.”

  “And what is he supposed to save me from?” Julian asked.

  “He is going to save you from eternal damnation. He gave his life for your sins.”

  “That was very nice of him and all, but he didn’t really need to do that, because I’m really not that much of a sinner.”

  “Are you aware of the concept of original sin?” O’Reilly asked.

  “Our album is called Original Sin,” Julian said. “So yes, I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “Yes, your album. I’ve listened to it.”

  “Have you really?”

  “Yes, I just told you so.”

  “Well,” Julian said, “if you listened to it then you should know that I’m aware of the concept of original sin.”

  “It was a rhetorical question. I’m running a show here, all right? Now if you’d just shut up for a moment so I can get to the point.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Original sin means that we are all sinners from birth, and that we need to accept Jesus Christ as our Saviour. Do you understand that?”

  “What I do understand,” Julian said, “is that if you believe in original sin, you have a terrible and appalling idea of man. You think that humans are inherently evil, and one must wonder where that dreadful belief originally came from. I think it originated from a deep-rooted feeling of guilt that the Bronze Age peasants who wrote the Bible felt needed to be alleviated.”

  “And what, in your opinion, were they feeling guilty about?”

  “They were feeling guilty about themselves, and about the poor state of the world that they had created. They needed to find an excuse for all the violence, greed, bigotry and hypocrisy that seemed to be a part of our nature, and, not least, for the way they treated women. So some brilliant mind came up with the concept of original sin which not only seemed to explain the dark side of human nature; it also, very conveniently, gave them an excuse to treat women the way they did, because in the end—or I should say in the beginning, really—it was all Eve’s fault. The first woman tempted the first man, and suddenly we were all doomed. We were thrown out of Eden and forced to live a life of misery. Now if you look at the third chapter of Genesis as an allegory of the dawn of the human race, I think when we ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it was not only not a mistake; it was the only right thing to do. It was a step forward—not back—and it was inevitable.

  “Paradise, as it’s described in Genesis, is a state of ignorance. It’s a place where we didn’t have to worry about anything, because we didn’t know anything. It’s a place where we didn’t have to take responsibility for our actions, because we let only our instincts guide us. And it’s a place where we were oblivious to the fact that one day we all have to die.

  “This is what we have ‘lost’ when Adam and Eve ate from the tree. You call it the fall of man? I call it the rise of man, his emancipation from a state of blissful ignorance to a state of painful wisdom. That is no reason to feel guilty. It’s a reason to be proud. It should make us all want to advance even more, rather than go back. Those who mourn this ‘paradise lost’ don’t realize that it was not an eviction. It was an escape, and if you want to go back to paradise, what you really want is to give up all our achievements that set us apart from the other animals. Because you are scared of the responsibility that comes with knowledge; you are scared of the fact that there is no divine creator who loves you, who looks after you, and who has a plan for you; you are scared of the fact that in the grand scheme of things your life is completely insignificant.”

  O’Reilly raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Look, son,” he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m not scared, because I know that Jesus will save me.”

  “Of course you are scared, and I don’t blame you. You are scared, I am scared, everybody’s scared.”

  “I’m telling you, I’m not scared.”

  “And I’m telling you, you’re scared. You’re scared that you, your life, your whole existence and everything you think you believe in ultimately amounts to nothing. You’re scared that on the grand scale of the universe you are meaningless. But you are. You are, I am, we all are meaningless. Wake up and smell the Kool Aid, Bill. You’re a deer in the headlights of enlightenment, wisdom, and reason; startled and sc
ared. If you’re telling yourself you’re not scared, then you’re whistling in the dark.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” O’Reilly said.

  Julian shrugged. “It only makes sense to sensible people, I suppose.”

  There were hisses from the studio crew upon Julian’s final remark, and a vein on the side of O’Reilly’s head looked like it was ready to burst.

  “Let me move on here so we can finally get somewhere,” O’Reilly said. “In the last few weeks you have—ironically—been preaching against religion in the public space. So what you’re saying is you want to see all churches and nativity scenes and Christmas trees banned, is that it?”

  Julian shook his head. “I never said that or anything remotely like that. Churches and nativity scenes and Christmas trees are not religion. They’re culture, and I don’t have a problem with culture. I have a problem with things being imposed on me. Christmas displays of any kind are a trivial matter; they’re far less annoying and obtrusive than advertisements for burgers or fizzy drinks or breast enlargements. And if I don’t want to see evening mass, I don’t have to go to church. I do, however, have to go to school, and I cannot accept that my right of freedom of religion—which does include freedom from religion—is effectively being undermined by compulsory religious education or school prayer or the teaching of Intelligent Design, because these things are not education, they’re indoctrination. If we are serious about education, we have to tap into the wisdom of as many books as possible and question every single one of them, and not limit ourselves to one supposedly infallible book hat was written by Bronze Age peasants who didn’t know a thing about physics or chemistry or biology or ...”

  “All right,” Bill said. “I’m going to cut you off right there, because I don’t like the way you keep deriding the authors of the Bible like that. These were honest, hardworking people who laid down the foundations of our civilization.”

  “And who also happened to not know a thing about physics or chemistry or biology. Again, I don’t want their worldviews imposed on me 2000 years later.”

  O’Reilly was beginning to lose his temper. He raised his voice at Julian now. “But you are the one who’s imposing himself and his views on everybody!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are! The whole world knows your sissy boy face by now! You’re on billboards and magazine covers, and it’s impossible to turn on the TV without having to listen to your ramblings about everything and anything! You’re a pest!”

  “Excuse me,” Julian said calmly, with an ever so subtle smile on his lips. “Did I come knocking on your door, asking you if you had a few minutes to talk about Jesus? Did I ask to come on your show? Your producer begged me to come on the show, just like the producers of every single show I’ve been on in the last couple of weeks and the editors of every single magazine that ran a story about me. I am not imposing myself or my views on anyone, but if I’m asked a question, I’ll give you an answer.”

  “You have 50 million followers on Twitter!” O’Reilly barked at Julian. “Yesterday you wrote on Twitter, ‘Prayer is bad for you’. How is that not imposing your views on other people?”

  Julian chuckled. “Well, first of all, you don’t seem to understand how Twitter works. Those 50 million are called followers because they follow me, not the other way around. I don’t run after them and try to convert them. They are following me, because they want to hear what I have to say, and if they no longer want to hear it they can hit the unfollow button. If you accuse me of imposing my views on others, I’m going to have to accuse you of the same thing. But I’m not going to do that because it would be ridiculous, because nobody is forced to watch your show. As for my tweet, yes, I think prayer is bad. It’s not only bad for you, it’s bad for us as a species.”

  “So now you want to ban people from praying!”

  “I don’t want to ban anyone from anything,” Julian said. “I’m not an enforcer, I’m an educator. I just want people to use their brains.”

  “Look, prayer is doing a whole lot of good to a whole lot of people. It gives them comfort and a sense of security, it lets them have a personal relationship with the Lord, and it doesn’t harm anyone, and if you’re against that you’re a fascist. A fascist!”

  O’Reilly slammed his hand on the table. He was on the verge now. But Julian kept his calm.

  “My position on praying has evolved somewhat in the last couple of months. I used to think that it’s not a problem. Most people pray at church or in the privacy of their own home, so why would I care? Here’s why I care: praying is not as harmless as you’d like to think, because it’s the result of a certain mindset, and it reinforces that mindset. If you sit in your room, fold your hands and talk to your imaginary friend, then that obviously doesn’t immediately harm anybody. But what it does is that it impairs your ability to make reasonable decisions. Even that would be harmless if you were on your own. But if we have millions or even billions of people who are constantly talking to an invisible man in the sky because they think he listens to them, he cares about them, and he has the power to make good things happen or to prevent bad things from happening, then we as a species are bound to make decisions that will—in the long run—not only harm us but that might even lead to our ultimate demise. It’s not your prayer itself that is harmful, but it’s your mindset that compels you to pray and believe that praying is beneficial, because that very same mindset will lead to decisions that will jeopardize the wellbeing of future generations and endanger the survival of mankind.”

  “That is ridiculous!” O’Reilly shouted.

  “That is the truth. It may be an inconvenient truth, but one day you will have to face it, Bill: your favourite virtues, conservatism and religiosity, enslave and kill people. They have always enslaved and killed people. They are still enslaving and killing people today, and they are bound to enslave and kill people that aren’t even born yet. The one thing that has been a constant ever since single-celled life was first conceived in the Earth’s womb is progress. Its vehicle is constant change, and its fuel is reason. Trying to keep things the way they are and the misguided belief that a divine entity will sort it all out for us in the end is holding us all back on our path to a better, happier future. Conservatism and religious superstition are the antagonists of progress and reason, and it’s a disgrace.

  “It is you, Bill, and people like you, who are holding us back. You are holding the whole of humanity back from moving forward and building a future that works for all of us. Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that you and people like you, with your total lack of compassion for people who are not like you, and your complete lack of love for thy neighbour no matter how different they may be, are claiming to be Christian. Well, and if Jesus still were in his grave, obviously, which he is not because somebody took him out and hid him somewhere else and made idiots like you believe that he went to heaven. Christianity as a philosophy is built on love, kindness, and compassion. Christianity as a religion is built on a lie.”

  It was amazing to see how Julian, who in his very first TV interview on Inside Momoko just a few weeks earlier had been such an awkward, timid little creature, had turned into a media pro. How calm he was, how soft his voice and how adamant his smile. Bill O’Reilly, on the other hand, had become more and more aggravated during the interview, and now he was finally ready to lose his marbles. All of them.

  “You are a pathetic little punk!” he shouted at Julian, his head turning from red to blue. “Your mother is Satan’s whore! Get out of my studio, you dirty little scumbag! Go out and get hit by a car! I hope you die and rot in hell until the end of time!”

  Then he leapt across his desk because Julian was laughing at him, and he tried to punch Julian in the face. That’s when the security people stepped in. They held O’Reilly back, but he kept kicking and screaming and drooling and spewing insults, and there was foam coming out of his mouth. That was the end of the show obviously, but I wa
s later told that police and paramedics were called to the studio. The paramedics sedated Mr O’Reilly, and then the police arrested him. The kicking and screaming Bill O’Reilly was world news the next day, and Fox News announced that The O’Reilly Factor had been cancelled and that Bill O’Reilly had agreed to check into a mental institution.

  And that was the end of that.

  The Gospel According to Michael – 16

  The pale blue light of the TV woke me up at around 4:30 in the morning. That was odd because it hadn’t been running when I went to bed. MINDY had turned it on for me. Disoriented and drunk with sleep, I didn’t immediately realize what was going on or what MINDY was trying to tell me. The channel was MMC News24, but there was no audio commentary, just a shot of a coach that had slid off the M1 just north of Milton Keynes and tumbled down a ravine. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen read: M1 coach crash – several fatalities reported – rescue workers and police on scene – cause of crash yet unknown – coach was en route from Liverpool to London.

  I had a very bad feeling about this. A road accident with fatalities was a terrible tragedy all right, but that kind of thing was not what MINDY was supposed to wake me up for in the middle of the night, not unless it was significant to my own life in one way or another. I grabbed my laptop from the nightstand and fired it up.

  “MINDY, what’s going on? Why are you showing me this?”

  “Because you need to know, Michael.”

  “Know what?”

  MINDY didn’t reply. Instead, my screen exploded with a series of windows that MINDY opened in rapid succession and that I had to click my way through. The first was an article from the Guardian about several cases of industrial action that were currently going on in the U.K. in protest of all the new policies that the government had been trying to push through parliament in recent weeks. What most of these policies had in common was that they were severely opposed by most voters but backed by banks and businesses. Air traffic controllers and airport security personnel were on strike to protest pay cuts as the country was running out of money to pay for the war on terror. Doctors and nurses were on strike, because a new law would make them liable to million pound fines and prison sentences for botched medical treatments and procedures. Cleaners, waiters, and other service personnel were on strike because of a proposed reduction of the minimum wage by a quarter to make British workers more competitive against cheap labour from Africa and Asia. The bloody Premiere League was on strike! That wasn’t entirely the government’s fault, though. MMC controlled media had made proposals to make British football more competitive by implementing a new payment structure for players: a base salary not much higher than that of an average worker, with added bonuses only for games that they a) actually played in, and b) won. The Guardian calculated that this new payment structure wouldn’t make much of a difference for a handful of big players at Manchester United or Arsenal or Chelsea, while for the vast majority of professional footballers in the UK it would mean an effective pay cut by roughly 80%. So yeah, footballers were on strike, which was just as well, because the majority of fans weren’t able to get to the games anyway, because most public transport workers were on strike too, and roads were basically gridlocked up and down the country by people who were still lucky enough to be able to afford the new fuel duty that had increased the price of a litre of unleaded petrol to £2.50, and by those who weren’t directly affected by any of the pay cuts or price hikes but who took to the streets anyway to show their solidarity. The only industries left thriving in Britain were manufacturers of breathing masks and rat poison because, well, the bin men were still on strike, too, and four weeks’ worth of uncollected garbage was piling up in every street in the country.